The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War by Aaron Sheehan-Dean (review)

Abstract

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 923 BOOK REVIEWS