Mark Grimsley

William Tecumseh Sherman may have been too candid for his own good. The red-haired general had a habit of reflecting in unsparing terms on the frights and hardships that war in general, and the Civil War in particular, visited on civilians. Selective quotes from Sherman, combined with southern legends of Yankee atrocities during the general’s 1864-65 campaigns in Georgia and the Carolinas, have bolstered a still-influential narrative that charges Union soldiers with unprecedented severity against civilians.

Modern campaign studies (such as Joseph Glatthaar’s The March to the Sea and Beyond) have done much to undermine traditional comparisons of Yankee invaders with Huns and Goths. Yet even historians who reject the myth of a gallant South overwhelmed by a barbarous North nevertheless often fall into another error, viewing Sherman’s campaigns as a foretaste of twentieth-century “total war,” in which noncombatant status offered no guarantee of safety from enemy attack.

The Hard Hand of War ought to lay these problems to rest for good, while also supplying a useful model for interpreting the evolution of U.S. policy toward enemy civilians over the course of the war. It is among the most essential classics of Civil War military history.

The Union entered the war with a policy of "conciliation," seeking to spare southern noncombatants from the burdens of war as much as possible. This policy, which was never popular with the Union rank and file, evolved by July 1862 into an improvised pragmatism, or “war in earnest,” in which the goal was to keep civilians who might serve the enemy as spies or guerrillas entirely out of the conflict, even if the innocent had to share the burdens of the guilty.

Early in 1864 the policy shifted to “hard war” and a focus on raiding the southern interior to demoralize civilians. Yet even during this closing phase of the war, Northern soldiers consistently maintained a distinction between actively disloyal southerners and those who supported the Union or tried to remain neutral. Grimsley writes that Union soldiers “wanted to see the hard hand of war descend on those who deserved it, and usually only in rough proportion to the extent of their sins.”

Grimsley develops his simple three-stage model — conciliation, pragmatism, “hard war” — with appropriate attention to the complexity of the events the model attempts to describe. Railroads, for instance, were always considered a legitimate military target. In Missouri, Union commanders opted for a hard-line stance from the outset. Moves toward the next, “harder” stage of policy tended to come early in the western theater and more slowly in the East, but there were exceptions.

Grimsley disagrees with scholars who have portrayed conciliatory measures toward the South as founded on a naive inability to appreciate the realities of war. In light of what we now know of internal divisions within the Confederacy, conciliation seems to have been a well-reasoned policy that secured the border states and (until Lee forced McClellan to abandon his ponderous advance on Richmond) nearly sufficed to bring about a Confederate defeat. Yet conciliation was always a fragile policy, challenged by “cold, wet, and famished” Union troops as well as by ardent Confederates unwilling to be conciliated, and who grew in number as Union armies penetrated further south.

Slavery complicated efforts to convey a conciliatory message to southerners, and the drive for emancipation in 1862 clearly signaled the end of conciliation. With the upper South largely secured, and amid growing agreement in the North that slavery was the root cause of the war, civil leaders prepared to wage “war in earnest” on the Confederacy and its civilian supporters. Whole communities were now held responsible for guerrilla activity and punished with fines or destruction of property. Coarsened veterans and undisciplined new recruits continually tested the limits of officers’ authority. But even angry and vengeful soldiers continued to distinguish disloyal southern civilians from others, confining most of their looting and destruction to “sesesh” property.

In perhaps his most significant contribution, Grimsley shows that the move to “hard war” and a strategy of raids on the southern interior was not an innovation but “a rediscovery of older forms of warfare” that proved to be “on the whole, quite well-adapted to the demands of a mid-nineteenth-century American civil war.” Foraging on enemy territory, a procedure disdained at first by Union commanders, was an age-old method for supplying an army while denying supply to the enemy. Sherman’s campaign in Georgia and the Carolinas revived the European chevauchée, a scorched-earth campaign to demoralize civilians and undermine the enemy government’s authority. According to the “law of nations,” and even by the more rigorous standards adopted by the U.S. Army, such actions were well within the confines of “military necessity.” It is another marker of U.S. restraint that, while refusing to recognize the Confederacy as an independent nation, the Union chose to fight according to the “law of nations” rather than by the much harsher standard then permitted for suppressing a rebellion.

Grimsley rightly points out that Sherman’s march through Georgia could not have been further from the minds of twentieth-century innovators of “total war.” Yet thanks to the exceptionalist myth of Yankee ferocity, historians have overlooked what was, in Grimsley’s view, truly innovative about “hard war.” The raids that brought down the Confederacy were a revival of the ancient chevauchée, but in the hands of a politically sensitive “citizen-soldiery capable of discrimination and restraint as well as destruction.” Even in the context of “hard war,” Union commanders demanded restraint from their men, and they usually got it.… (meer)