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  • The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War by Aaron Sheehan-Dean
  • Daniel E. Sutherland
The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War. By Aaron Sheehan-Dean. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. [x], 465. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-674-98422-6.)

This is an ambitious, complex, and timely book; and it is a frustrating one, too. Aaron Sheehan-Dean seeks to answer several questions that have divided historians of the American Civil War for generations. How did the South justify secession? How did the North and the South defend going to war? How did they define a “just war” (p. 27)? How violent was the war? Did it ever become unrestrained, unlimited, a “total” war? His answer to this last question, and the one most important to him, is both yes and no.

The Union and Confederacy, Sheehan-Dean explains, “balanced the moral, strategic, and political dimensions” of the war through a “calculus of violence” (pp. 8, 7). The central element of that calculus, he believes, was the restraining influence of the state, for both governments wished to wage a “just” war within internationally recognized “legal and moral boundaries” (p. 328). Admittedly, both sides committed atrocities, but if violence was sometimes meted out where unnecessary or unwarranted, those breaches may be blamed on the complex and evolving nature of the war. A “complicated reality” defined the conflict, Sheehan-Dean maintains, “in which local patterns of violence and peace varied across time and space. In some places, the war was more unrestrained in 1861 than 1865, and in other places, the opposite held true. The Civil War was not either restrained or violent; it was both” (p. 2).

It is a reasonable, nearly incontrovertible view. Few scholars would describe the war as a relentless slaughter or suggest that one side or the other consistently ignored the rules of “civilized warfare,” an expression frequently used by the combatants. Sheehan-Dean reminds readers of the contradictory nature of all wars and insists that even the excesses of this particular conflict took place within acceptable bounds of behavior. Much of the violence, he correctly asserts, resulted from the guerrilla war, which had its own rules of engagement. He also introduces at least one novel explanation for the relative lack of violence by stressing the remarkable restraint shown by most emancipated slaves in not retaliating against former masters.

Yet even in such an admirably balanced and meticulously developed narrative, there remain those frustrating bits. Most notable is Sheehan-Dean’s extensive discussions of the “laws of war,” which he acknowledges “existed mostly as philosophical disputes” before Francis Lieber and the General Orders No. 100 (p. 182). Simply put, Sheehan-Dean is generally better at explaining how those laws were articulated, interpreted, and justified, mostly by [End Page 923] northerners, than in proving that soldiers in the field complied with them or that these laws appreciably tempered violence. Similarly, while he emphasizes that “[a]ny useful study of violence in the war must take stock of victims’ attitudes as well as perpetrators,” one yearns to hear more from the victims—namely, southern noncombatants (p. 4). Relying primarily on published sources, Sheehan-Dean has consulted manuscript collections in only two southern archives, at Louisiana State University and the University of Virginia.

Finally, Sheehan-Dean considers several types of violence, but he is most concerned with the number of people who died violent deaths. He acknowledges that many people suffered privation through the destruction or confiscation of property, or by being driven from their homes, but such circumstances are hard to quantify and so count for less in his calculus of violence. Instead, he regards them as “unintended consequences” and assures readers that the perpetrators “behaved according to ethical principles sanctioned by their societies” (p. 353). Union retaliatory policies are most often described as tactical or strategic, rarely as punitive.

Ledgers are hard to balance when dealing with unequal or volatile quantities. The same is true in reaching balanced conclusions about such an irrational subject as violence in wartime, whatever calculus is employed.

Daniel E. Sutherland
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
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