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

Rating:
Summary: Hard Hand of War
Review: The thesis of this study of Union military policy toward Southern civilians during the Civil War boils down to "it wasn't all that bad, and here's why." Grimsley sets out to study what the combination of severity (for example, destroying civilian property) and restraint (for example, not shooting civilians on sight) meant, and concludes that it reflected the continued working of political logic and a sense of moral justice. He chronicles an evolution in Union policy toward "hard war". It's an interesting study, apparently valid on a broad scale, though breaking down somewhat when applied to local area studies. Grimsley doesn't really deal well with border areas, and although he could have used parts of the mountain South to compare Confederate with Union policies toward dissenting civilians, he doesn't do so. Some of his arguments seem tendentious: is it necessary to construct an elaborate theory of class conflict to explain the fact that plantation houses were more often robbed than one-room cabins? Surely the fact that the plantation houses had more to steal played a part, as well as any ideology. It also seems to me that Grimsley minimizes the abuse of civilians which did in fact take place, and has little to say about the trauma even of relatively restrained foraging. A rather jingoistic bit of characterization--rampaging Continental soldiers were "brutes", whereas American volunteers were democrats--is used as one more reason for restraint. Use of sources is good, though enforcers of the policies are overrepresented compared to victims of them.

There is definitely useful information here, especially in the portrayal of international legal theory and the evolution of official policy, but I'm not sure how well some of it stands up upon close examination.

Rating:
Summary: For Specialists Only!
Review: This is a conversion of the author's graduate thesis, composed while he was a student at The Ohio State University. The subject of the study is evident in the subtitle of the book: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians 1861-1865. The central theme of the book is that the policy mentioned evolved over time, getting more and more harsh with the civilians that the army encountered. The evolution, however, didn't go nearly as far as some later alleged, and the supposed depredations of the Union army in the various Southern states in the last year of the war are, as far as the author is concerned, mostly exaggerations.

This is a good overview of the subject, and the author goes over things with a good analytical eye. I disagree with the other reviewer, who thinks that he's unfairly easy on the Union soldiers who foraged "liberally" during the latter part of the Civil War. I did notice one shortcoming of the book's central argument: the author went over the motivation for attacking things like houses in retaliation for ambushes and attacks against Union troops, but overlooked the possibility that the troops themselves needed to feel that they were somehow retaliating for being attacked. Burning down a house, even if it had no effect on the Southerners who ambushed them, did serve the purpose of making the Union soldiers think that they were doing *something*.

This is a thesis, reworked as a book. It's sprinkled with footnotes, and written in a scholarly, dry tone. The result is a lot of information, with interesting and well-reasoned arguments stemming from them, written in rather wooden prose that's not very easy to read. I would recommend this book to hard core Civil War buffs who want to know more about the subject, but only to them.