Whoever said all is fair in love and war obviously never fought in the American Civil War. Yes, it was a war, and as such was not without its fair share of killing, destruction and good old-fashioned hatred. None of its serious students would ever argue that it was somehow sanitized — war never is — or that it was free from incidents of atrocity. But when we step back from the Civil War and look at it in the larger context of world history, it is easy to see how it is often perceived as a more gentlemanly brand of warfare. There were no atomic weapons, crucifixions or mass executions of either combatants or civilians. There was no Rape of Nanking, marauding Mongol horde or Holocaust. Even some of the war's darker incidents have an air of civility about them that makes this conflict a rare case indeed.
Jeff Wert's cover story this month offers a case in point. There is undeniable brutality in the tale of Union prisoners being shot and left to die in a ditch near Berryville, Va., the killing of Southerners in Front Royal soon after — including the cold-blooded murder of a young civilian by a Union trooper in front of the boy's pleading mother — and finally John Mosby's revenge. But hard as it may be to see on the surface, there is some degree of civility in this story by the time it wraps up. Mosby and his Rangers did some shooting and hanging of their own to answer for Front Royal, but as the famous Confederate cavalier himself explained, revenge was not his only, or even his primary, motivation. Mosby found himself in a position where he believed that he had to kill to stop the killing — a strange scenario in most other walks of life, but not so much in the midst of war. Ultimately he was right — an exchange of letters between him and Phil Sheridan after the last round of reprisals put an end to what could have turned into a large-scale bloodbath of bitterness and revenge in the Shenandoah Valley in late 1864.
Ironically we find that when Civil War generals wanted to be uncivil, they often turned on their own kind instead of the enemy — though, except in rare cases, they chose the pen rather than the sword. Joseph Pierro offers two articles this month that leave one wondering whether anyone actually won the Battle of Chancellorsville. Between Joseph Hooker's fascinating — and previously unpublished — 1877 letter in which he lays the blame for the Federal defeat at the doorstep of several other Union generals, and the war of words between Jubal Early and William Barksdale in the Richmond newspapers about the fighting at Fredericksburg on May 3, it's easy to understand why so many Civil War generals said that they never felt the animosity toward the enemy that they did toward some of their compatriots.
Both the body count and the amount of devastation wrought by war on the nation were staggering at the final reckoning in 1865, and difficult years of reconstruction lay ahead. But the fact that the United States healed itself as quickly and as thoroughly as it did — and without further bloodshed — is a living testament to the civility of our Civil War.
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