Volume 55, Number 2 · February 14, 2008
Was It More Restrained Than You Think?
By James M. McPherson
The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction
by Mark E. Neely Jr.
Harvard University Press, 277 pp., $27.95
In 1992 Mark E. Neely Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize in History for his book The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties.[1] In the same year that the book came out he published an influential article in the journal Civil War History titled 'Was the Civil War a Total War?'[2] His answer to that question was no. The concept of 'total war' had arisen as a way of describing the horrifying destruction of lives and resources in World War II. The generation of historians who experienced that cataclysm used this phrase to describe the American Civil War as well. That conflict cost more American lives than World War II, even though the United States in 1861 had less than one quarter the population of 1941, and it left large portions of the South looking like bombed-out cities of Europe and Japan.
Review, 3500 words
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