The Calculus Of Violence: How Americans Fought The Civil War, by Aaron Sheehan-Dean

When the author writes of the violence of the Civil War as being a calculus, many people may immediately think that this means some kind of bloodless , rational, and boring mathematical calculation, but that is not what the author has in mind. Instead, the author demonstrates in this book, a gritty and sometimes detailed nature of the complexities of the violence of the American Civil War and the factors that led to both its restraint and its intensification. Over and over again, the author turns to a few related factors and comments how it is that neither the Union nor the Confederacy in the Civil War had anything like a unified or obvious and straightforward approach to violence accepted and rejected, but rather had to feel their way in a deeply charged situation where multiple goals were in tension. It is worth noting that at least some of those goals were fighting a war that would reflect well on the United States and the Confederacy both at home (to often bloodthirsty audiences of embittered civilians) as well as abroad (where there was a rising movement the Civil War helped to codify shared Western ethical and moral views into what has been called international law), while the Union sought both to defeat the Confederacy as a going concern while also encouraging the peaceful reunion of disaffected southern whites with the Union and also the emancipation and elevation of millions of enslaved blacks. It is no surprise, given these complexities, that it was by no means easy to find or to stick to consistent standards of what violence was ordered, which was accepted, and which was condemned. Even among the last category of violence, it was by no means straightforward whether the best response would be merely verbal complaint or if retaliation and payback were the best options, and if so, who should suffer retribution for the savagery committed by some, like Confederate bushwhackers in Missouri or massacres of captured black prisoners on the battlefield in places like Fort Pillow, Saltville, the Petersburg Crater, or Olustee. This book is not an attempt to make this messiness tidy, but to express it in its messiness so that we can better understand the dilemmas and complexities that faced military and political leaderes on both sides of the American Civil War.

This book is a bit more than 350 pages, and it is divided into ten chapters. The book begins with an introduction, where the author discusses the puzzle of the Civil War and its complicated aspects of violence. The first chapter asks the question of who is permitted to make war, which was typically considered to be states alone (1). The second chapter points out, though, that the rise of the people of the North and South made the war more bloody, at least potentially, because the ordinary people lacked the restraint of the professional military (2). This point is continued in the next chapter, which looks at the troubled relationship between soldiers and civilians (3), which was sometimes a difficult relationship, made all the more complicated by the way that blacks rose up for their own freedom not by fighting a race war but by seeking freedom as well as joining the Union army to engage in approved violence, a savvy move (4). Sadly, though, the effort to gain freedom through flight and military service provoked some of the most unnecessary violence of the war (5), the violence against escapees from slavery and black prisoners. The author then comments on the issue of military justice and the preservation of order (6), which worked to counter the violence that soldiers committed against civilians, some of which the author entails as being something that could have been a worse threat had the authorities not taken such matters seriously. The author then notes that the nature of religious belief, especially in the South, led people to be less reflective about their own shortcomings and more convinced of the justice of their own cause (7). The author then notes that the importance of states and the regulation of violence through government codes (commented on throughout the book) and standards that discouraged the violence and kept it from getting unmanageable (8), after which the author concludes with a discussion of the double-edged sword of Civil War violence, along with notes, acknowledgements, illustration credits, and an index.

While there is a lot to appreciate about this book, among the most worthwhile aspects of the book is the way that the author points out to the reader the need to avoid judging the past anachronistically. The author seeks to put the people of the past in context to see that while we might judge the people of the past as being irremediable hypocrites, they saw themselves and their causes as just, even if we cannot (and should not). Of interest is the way that the author notes that Confederates were responsible for several of the most serious obstacles to the restraint that characterized the best of both parties’ approach to the Civil War. Scared about the safety of the home front and seeking to provoke a savage race war that would end Northern white approval of emancipation, Southern whites engaged in violence against blacks who sought to flee slavery as well as take up arms for the Union, provoking retaliation from blacks and the Union. Seeking to overcome the shortage of arms and numbers, the South sought various means of overcoming these problems, but many of them threatened retaliation, including their adoption of landmines and irregular warfare, and in some cases their own people suffered as a result of their support of these methods of warfare, which in turn made it harder for these people to submit to Union rule when the Civil War ended in 1865, as the lawless state of some areas continued beyond that in areas like Missouri and West Virginia. Fortunately, it was not all bad news, as the author notes some factors that diminished violence, and that kept the Civil War from being as bad as it could have been.