The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865

ISBN-13: 9780521599412 / Angielski / Miękka / 1997 / 260 str.

Mark Grimsley

Opis

The Hard Hand of War explores the Union army's policy of destructive attacks upon Southern property and civilian morale--how it evolved, what it was like in practice. From an initial policy of deliberate restraint, extending even to the active protection of Southerners' property and constitutional rights, Union armies gradually adopted measures that were expressly intended to demoralize Southern civilians and to ruin the Confederate economy. Yet the ultimate "hard war" policy was far from the indiscriminate fury of legend. Union policy makers promoted a program of directed severity, and Professor Grimsley demonstrates how and why it worked. This volume fits into an emerging interpretation of the Civil War that questions its status as a "total war" and instead emphasizes the survival of political logic and control even in the midst of a sweeping struggle for the nation's future: the primary goal of the Federal government remained the restoration of the Union, not the devastation of the South. Intertwined with a political logic, and sometimes indistinguishable from it, was also a deep sense of moral justice--a belief that, whatever the claims of military necessity, the innocent deserved some pity, and that even the guilty should suffer in rough proportion to the extent of their sins. Through comparisons with earlier European wars and through the testimony of Union soldiers and Southern civilians alike, Grimsley shows that Union soldiers exercised restraint even as they made war against the Confederate civilian population.

Recenzje

"The impact of the war on civilians is often not fully understood or misunderstood or quite deliberately misstated. So those new to the Civil War should read Mark Grimsley's The Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865. It examines the intentional and unintentional effects of the conflict in a balanced, comprehensive manner." Fritz Heinzen, Osprey Military Journal

Spis treści

Introduction; 1. The roots of a policy; 2. Conciliation and its challenges; 3. Early occupations; 4. Conciliation abandoned; 5. War in earnest; 6. Emancipation: touchstone of hard war; 7. From pragmatism to hard war; 8. The limits of hard war; 9. Gestures of mercy, pillars of fire.