Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War by David Silkenat (review)

David Silkenat’s dazzling new book is the first sustained treatment of surrender, a phenomenon that punctuated the Civil War from Fort Sumter to Appomattox and beyond. “One of every four Civil War soldiers surrendered at some point during the conflict,” Silkenat observes; “In no other American war did surrender happen so frequently” (pp. 2, 3). The historiographical disregard of surrender is not difficult to explain. As the author notes, surrender fit rather uneasily into the reconciliatory paradigm preferred in the late nineteenth century, and modern Americans regard it as unseemly and at variance with the nation’s values. Yet surrender “profoundly shaped both the character and the outcome of the Civil War” (p. 4). Silkenat’s recovery of the logic and grammar of surrender not only yields new insights into the conduct of the Civil War and the course of its military campaigns, but also adds to our understanding of the honor culture—described by Lorien Foote and others—that shaped and constrained common soldiers.

Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War begins with a brief consideration of ideas about surrender before the Civil War. Antebellum Americans scorned as craven and ignoble those who surrendered to political opponents but deemed the practice a “hallmark of modern civilized warfare” on the battlefield (p. 16). Of course, not all surrenders were identical; no less than for War of 1812 or U.S.-Mexican War commanders, it was incumbent upon Civil War officers to understand when and why surrender was appropriate. To lay down one’s sword before it was demanded, or to yield to an officer of an inferior rank, was to hazard charges of cowardice. But if done correctly, after all other alternatives were exhausted, surrender could earn one a hero’s ovation—as the example of Major Robert Anderson, who surrendered the stubborn Federal garrison at Fort Sumter, readily attests.

A surrender demand could also have different aims. While Ulysses S. Grant sought unconditional surrender to “minimize the unnecessary loss of life,” the rebel cavalryman Nathan Bedford Forrest used surrender as a “tactical weapon” (pp. 140, 141). Still, the author marvels at the pervasiveness of Civil War surrenders, concluding that although “the civilizing power of surrender limited fatalities . . . the specter of barbarism often lurked nearby,” especially for “African Americans, Southern Unionists, and guerrillas” (pp. 297, 175). Surrender was certainly more desirable than risking death early in the war, a period marked by routine prisoner exchanges. But when the Dix-Hill cartel, the prisoner exchange agreement, collapsed, fating surrendered men to infamous, overcrowded prisoner-of-war camps, men proved “more willing to fight to the bitter end” (p. 168). Ultimately, Silkenat concludes, the war “was both more civilized and more savage than we thought” (p. 295).

In a chapter on the battle of Gettysburg, the author illustrates how paying attention to surrender can provide new insights into the conflict’s most written about event. “The frequency of Confederate surrenders during Pickett’s Charge,” he writes, “indicates that many rebel soldiers went into the assault believing that allowing themselves to be taken prisoner was preferable to assaulting an ensconced Union line” (p. 130). Paying attention to surrender likewise helps historians situate Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in context. “The war,” Silkenat writes, “ended not with a bang or whimper but with a succession of negotiated settlements, each dependent on particular local circumstances and the idiosyncratic desires and objectives of Confederate and Union officers” (p. 221). Treatments of the surrenders of Joseph Johnston and Richard Taylor, as well as the chapter on the “slow death of the trans-Mississippi Confederacy,” usefully complicate traditional narratives of the war’s end, restoring to view the exigencies that attended a fitful transition to peace (p. 251).

Silkenat concludes by pondering the place of surrender in memory. He points out that “many...