A More Civil War: How the Union Waged a Just War

By D. H. Dilbeck

During the Civil War, Americans confronted profound moral problems about how to fight in the conflict. In this innovative book, D. H. Dilbeck reveals how the Union sought to wage a just war against the Confederacy. He shows that northerners fought according to a distinct "moral vision of war," an array of ideas about the nature of a truly just and humane military effort. Dilbeck tells how Union commanders crafted rules of conduct to ensure their soldiers defeated the Confederacy as swiftly as possible while also limiting the total destruction unleashed by the fighting. Dilbeck explores how Union soldiers abided by official just-war policies as they battled guerrillas, occupied cities, retaliated against enemy soldiers, and came into contact with Confederate civilians.

In contrast to recent scholarship focused solely on the Civil War's carnage, Dilbeck details how the Union sought both to deal sternly with Confederates and to adhere to certain constraints. The Union's earnest effort to wage a just war ultimately helped give the Civil War its distinct character, a blend of immense destruction and remarkable restraint.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Sep 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9781469630526

D. H. Dilbeck

D. H. Dilbeck is a historian from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and author of A More Civil War.

Book preview

A More Civil War

CIVIL WAR AMERICA

Peter S. Carmichael, Caroline E. Janney, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean, editors

This landmark series interprets broadly the history and culture of the Civil War era through the long nineteenth century and beyond. Drawing on diverse approaches and methods, the series publishes historical works that explore all aspects of the war, biographies of leading commanders, and tactical and campaign studies, along with select editions of primary sources. Together, these books shed new light on an era that remains central to our understanding of American and world history.

D. H. DILBECK

A More Civil War

How the Union Waged a Just War

The University of North Carolina Press   Chapel Hill

© 2016 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Arno by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Dilbeck, D. H., author.

Title: A more civil war : how the Union waged a just war / D. H. Dilbeck.

Other titles: Civil War America (Series)

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2016. | Series: Civil War America | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015049991 | ISBN 9781469630519 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469630526 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Moral and ethical aspects. | United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865. | War—Moral and ethical aspects—United States—History—19th century.

Classification: LCC E468.9 .D55 2016 | DDC 973.7—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015049991

Jacket Illustration: Reg’t. Michigan Engineers & Mechanics destroying R. R. track in Atlanta, ruins of the car shed to right hand (photo by George N. Barnard, ca. 1864). Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-stereo-1s01415.

Portions of Chapter Three were previously published in ‘The Genesis of this Little Tablet with My Name’: Francis Lieber and his Reasons for Drafting General Orders No. 100, Journal of the Civil War Era (June 2015): 231–53. Portions of Chapter Four were previously published in ‘The Sternest Feature of War’: The Moral Dilemma of Retaliation and the Limits of Atrocity in the American Civil War, Fides et Historia 48:1 (Winter/Spring 2016): 32–60. Both are used with permission.

To Mackenzie and Pearl

Contents

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Responsible to One Another and to God: The Union’s Moral Vision of War

CHAPTER ONE

A War of Barbarism or of Comparative Humanity: Combatting Guerrillas

CHAPTER TWO

Not to Destroy but to Make Good: Occupying Cities

CHAPTER THREE

The More Vigorously Wars Are Pursued, the Better It Is for Humanity: Francis Lieber and General Orders No. 100

CHAPTER FOUR

The Sternest Feature of War: Retaliation against Confederate Soldiers

CHAPTER FIVE

Even in the Midst of an Enemy’s Country the Dictates of Humanity Must at Least Be Observed: The Hard yet Humane War against Confederate Civilians

CONCLUSION

Was the American Civil War a Just War?

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

What a pleasure it is to give thanks properly now to the family, friends, mentors, colleagues, and institutions that made this book possible.

While completing the archival research necessary for this project, I benefited immensely from expert assistance offered by the staffs of the Missouri History Museum, the Huntington Library, the U.S. Army Military History Institute, the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at The Johns Hopkins University, and the Manuscript Reading Room at the Library of Congress. I am particularly appreciative to have received a W. M. Keck Foundation Fellowship from the Huntington Library and a Ridgway Research Grant from the U.S. Army Military History Institute, which provided essential financial support for extended research trips

I am pleased this book found a home at the University of North Carolina Press, and I appreciate all that Mark Simpson-Vos did to shepherd me through the publication process. I owe an especially large debt to Aaron Sheehan-Dean and the second anonymous reviewer of my manuscript. Both treated my work like it was their own, and their thoughtful and thorough suggestions have made this an exceedingly better book.

I had the ridiculously good fortune of learning how to be a historian from the best in the country at the University of Virginia. Peter Onuf offered keen advice and persistent encouragement throughout my time at the University of Virginia, even after our amicable divorce and my drift into the Civil War era. Elizabeth Varon’s captivating lectures on nineteenth-century southern history helped set in motion that drift. Gary Gallagher gladly accepted me as one of his students, despite his already sizeable cohort of advisees, and since then he has been gracious beyond measure with his support. He is a perceptive and generous critic as well as a model teacher and scholar. Peter, Elizabeth, and Gary are all fiercely committed to the success of their graduate students. I am honored to count myself as one of the many they have trained.

My parents, Hance and Julie Dilbeck, have persistently affirmed me in my calling as a teacher and historian. I consider it a rich blessing to have begun this vocation by first learning from them how to read in a parsonage in Marshall County, Oklahoma. They are my first and finest teachers, who showed me how to live like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields fruit in its season and whose leaf never withers. I am grateful for that instruction.

More than six years ago now, my wife, Mackenzie, made a great sacrifice in moving from our home in Oklahoma to Charlottesville, Virginia, a foreign place to us where we knew no one. More often than not, especially early on, we felt Jeff Tweedy was right: our love, our love, our love is all we have. For that, I am thankful. Mackenzie is a faithful partner in success and failure, joy and disappointment. This book is a testament to the strength I find in her love.

Our daughter, Pearl Caroline, arrived in April 2014 mere days before my graduation from the University of Virginia and our family’s move back to Oklahoma. Her timing was impeccable! We had longed for her, and she has brought us joy unspeakable. This book is dedicated to Mackenzie and Pearl, in the fond hope that my daughter will inherit her mother’s humor and heart.

A More Civil War

Introduction

Responsible to One Another and to God: The Union’s Moral Vision of War

On New Year’s Eve 1863, an anxious George W. Lennard sought blessed assurance of his eternal fate. Lennard began the American Civil War as a private in an Indiana regiment and was eventually commissioned lieutenant colonel of the Fifty-Seventh Indiana Volunteer Infantry. He survived some of the most gruesome fighting of the Western Theater, from Shiloh to Stones River to Missionary Ridge. As another year of war dawned, Lennard confessed in a letter home that he dreaded nothing more than the thought of what awaited him after death. He longed for a clear and well defined hope that all would be well with me in the world to come. You will say, he wrote his wife, why dont you be a Christian? I say, how can a soldier be a Christian? He continued: "Read all Christs teaching, and then tell me whether one engaged in maiming and butchering men—men made in the express image of God himself—can be saved under the Gospel. Clear my mind on this subject and you will do me a world of good." Lennard was still searching for answers when he was killed in May 1864 as he marched toward Atlanta.¹

George Lennard doubted he could reconcile the gospel of the Prince of Peace with his duties as a soldier, which made him unusual in the Union army. But he was not alone in earnestly contemplating the morality of warfare. Can a soldier be a Christian? Can a self-proclaimed Christian society send more than two million men off to maim and butcher other men? Is killing and destruction acceptable in war if done in service of a sacred cause? Is it possible for a soldier to fight in a just war and himself remain just, or must he inevitably surrender his own righteousness before the brutal demands of war? Can a supposedly civilized people constrain the death and devastation unleashed by their armies? Is it really possible to wage war justly?

One year before George Lennard wrote his forlorn letter home, another man worked to resolve the moral quandaries that plagued Lennard’s mind. Francis Lieber did so not by turning to the New Testament but to international law. Lieber was a scholar, not a soldier, a Berlin-born professor at Columbia College in New York City who taught history and political economy. He was also an acknowledged expert on the laws of war, a component of international law that addressed legitimate justifications for and conduct in warfare. In the winter of 1862, Lieber convinced President Abraham Lincoln’s administration to produce a code of conduct for Union soldiers distilled from the laws of war tradition. Lieber drafted the document and called it Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field. Issued to Federal armies in May 1863 as General Orders No. 100, it soon became known informally as the Lieber code. The code’s 157 articles addressed a wide range of topics. Taken together, they sought to instruct men like George Lennard how to wage a just war.²

While Lieber’s code authorized far-reaching destruction and stern measures to crush Confederate resistance, it also imposed constraints on Union armies. Both were vital components of a just war, Lieber believed. Clearly defining the limits of just warfare remained far more than a mere intellectual exercise for Lieber. His three sons fought in the Civil War. One lost an arm serving the Union at Fort Donelson, Tennessee, in February 1862. Another died fighting for the Confederacy on the Virginia Peninsula later that year. Lieber began work on his code six months after his son’s death, motivated by an unshakeable conviction about morality in warfare: Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another and to God. Lieber hoped to show Union soldiers how they might reconcile their obligations as a warring but still morally responsible people.³

Did Lieber succeed? Anyone inclined to answer yes quickly should pause and remember that as many as 750,000 soldiers died in the war.⁴ The conflict’s death toll can make it easy to scorn Civil War Americans for apparently allowing their self-righteous zeal to lead to near-limitless destruction. Yet the meditations of northerners like George Lennard and Francis Lieber suggest there might be a more complicated and compelling story to tell. I seek to tell that story by answering several questions about the loyal Union citizenry—chiefly about its political and military leaders and enlisted soldiers, but also about certain civilians on the home front such as northern ministers and newspaper editors. What did they think it meant to wage a just war? What were the most significant ideas and assumptions that informed their thinking? How did Federal officials refine these ideas into military policies, and when and where did these policies first appear? To what extent did Union military and political leaders, as well as regular soldiers, abide by these policies and agree with their underlying vision of just warfare?

In answering these questions, I explain why Union armies waged the kind of war they did, because Federals’ ideas about just warfare shaped how they prosecuted the war. My goal is to better explain the strange paradox at the center of the Civil War: It occasioned both great destruction and remarkable restraint. Federals perpetuated once-unthinkable carnage yet also sincerely considered the humane limits to warfare. To understand why, it is necessary to look to the array of legal, religious, and political ideas that informed Union just-war thinking. These ideas both inspired immense violence and imposed restrictions on Union army actions. The Federals I write about who embraced this just-war thinking believed that enormous destruction in war could be just. Yet most of them also sought to abide by certain limits in their treatment of enemy soldiers and civilians. They thought destructiveness and restraint in war were not irreconcilable opposites but complementary and equally vital aspects of a truly just war.

Although historians have written a great deal about the nature of Civil War violence, what is still needed is a thorough consideration of the content of Union just-war thinking and the effect it had on how Federal armies waged war. At present, Civil War scholars have largely ignored these ideas or underappreciated their significance. One camp of historians tends to emphasize the war’s particularly gruesome and remorseless violence. They even sometimes suggest that the scope and scale of the war’s destruction was unprecedented, a grim harbinger of a modern era of total war.⁵ Not surprisingly, these historians typically assume Federals and Confederates gave little to no serious thought to how they might wage war justly.⁶ Another camp of historians has challenged this bleak account of the war’s violence and demonstrated that its destruction was neither total nor unprecedented.⁷ Yet even as they convincingly chronicled restraint in the Union military effort, these historians were less successful in fully explaining why this restraint existed.⁸

Despite their profoundly different depictions of the Civil War’s violence and destruction, both camps of historians have devoted inadequate attention to just-war ideas and policies and their impact on Union army actions. As a result, neither perspective fully captures the nature of the violence committed by Union armies, both its inspirations and limitations. By taking seriously mid-nineteenth-century ideas about just conduct in war and the ongoing process of refining these ideas into military policies to govern Federal behavior, my goal is to provide a better framework for understanding the destruction unleashed by Union armies.

The Federals who populate this book possessed a distinct moral vision of war, a set of ideas and assumptions that informed their thinking on the nature of a justly waged war. This moral vision was ambiguous enough to allow its adherents to disagree in practice on how exactly to wage war. Yet it is still possible to identify core claims that lent coherence to this moral vision. The most important idea was one Francis Lieber succinctly expressed in his code: The more vigorously wars are pursued, the better it is for humanity. Sharp wars are brief. Lieber claimed that the most humane and just wars were usually the ones most vigorous in their prosecution, which he understood to mean a military effort that deployed all possible means (within certain restrictions) to achieve victory as swiftly as possible. While sharp wars might require an army to deliberately target enemy civilians and their property, they presumably also ended more quickly and therefore occasioned less total suffering, destruction, and evil. Not all loyal citizens embraced this moral logic. Many northerners criticized it strongly. But, especially as the Civil War progressed, the prevailing Federal opinion about the justness of the Union military effort agreed with Lieber that the shorter [war] is the better; and the intenser it is carried on, the shorter it will be. Or, as an Indiana infantryman put it bluntly, The only way to stop the war is to fight it out.⁹

In reality, waging a just war against the Confederacy was never that simple, because even as Union armies embraced a vigorous military effort, their war continued. Federals did not wage a sharp and short war but a sharp and protracted one, which always threatened to render absurd the claim that intenser wars were more humane. And if short wars were better for humanity, then why should Federals not temporarily resort to cruel and grotesque tactics if they ended the war more quickly? Maj. Henry Hitchcock, a staff officer for Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, recalled one conversation he had with a Federal captain on precisely this question during the March to the Sea across Georgia in late 1864. Had quite warm discussion with Dayton, Hitchcock wrote in his diary, "I advocating our self-restraint, ‘laws of war’ etc., etc., he contending we should do whatever and as bad as the rebs, even to scalping." The story of the Union’s effort to wage a just war is no simple, orderly tale of moral triumph. It is instead a tension-ridden and morally complex story of the contest between two potentially, but not necessarily, compatible convictions: that vigorously prosecuted wars are humane wars and that Union armies must always adhere to certain restraints in how they wage war.¹⁰

The moral conviction, well stated in the Lieber code, that the more vigorously wars are pursued, the better it is for humanity hardly by itself shaped Union just-war thinking. In fact, Federals relied on a quite vast range of ideas—legal, religious, cultural, and political—when considering how to wage a just war.

The laws of war proved influential to the Union’s military effort largely because of Henry W. Halleck and Francis Lieber, America’s two leading authorities on the subject. Expertise in the laws of war demanded an extensive study that few nineteenth-century Americans undertook, professional army officers included.¹¹ But it so happened that during the Civil War Halleck and Lieber held positions of authority and influence that allowed them to lead the effort to conform the actions of Federal soldiers to the laws of war.

Halleck began the war as a commander in the Western Theater, but in late July 1862, Lincoln promoted him to general-in-chief of all Union armies, an office he held with decidedly mixed success for nearly two years before assuming the more strictly administrative role of chief of staff. In early 1861, Halleck published International Law; or, Rules Regulating the Intercourse of States in Peace and War, which solidified his reputation as a leading expert on international law. The erudite book contained a historical overview of international law, a philosophical discourse on natural law and positive law, and practical guidance on how to wage a just war. Two assumptions ran throughout Halleck’s work. Not only did the laws of war compel belligerents to abide by certain restraints, but wars also sometimes produced immeasurable blessings and unspeakable goods. Halleck explained: Wars have frequently been, in the hands of providence, the means of disseminating civilization, if carried on by a civilized people. The laws of war instructed civilized people how to wage war in a civilized manner, and thereby reap some of war’s immeasurable blessings, Halleck believed.¹² Lieber similarly assumed that war, for all its horrors, sometimes produced blessings and goods. As Lieber put it, Blood is occasionally the rich dew of history.¹³ Lieber and Halleck shared a commitment to distill the laws of war into guidelines that Union officers and soldiers could easily understand and follow. Both men saw in the laws of war robust justification for a vigorous military effort, yet not one entirely devoid of restraint.

The laws of war usually remained the domain of elite and learned men like Halleck and Lieber. Yet the wider literate public sometimes could acquire a working knowledge of key elements of the laws of war. For example, from October 1861 to February 1862, Lieber delivered a series of public lectures at Columbia College on the Laws and Usages of War, attended by as many as one hundred people and later published in New York newspapers in an abbreviated form. Similarly, in late 1861, the Daily Missouri Republican, a city’s leading Democratic paper, ran a four-part editorial on the Laws of Warfare. These four lengthy editorials surveyed the laws of war in a plain but not rudimentary style. The great principles of morals apply to nations as well as to men, and the violation of national duties produces national injury, and may result in national ruin, the newspaper declared. Not surprisingly, given Missouri’s problems with guerrilla warfare, the editorials focused extensively on how the laws of war distinguished legitimate combatants and noncombatants from illegitimate marauders, guerrillas, and murderers—and also sketched out the different punishments and protections each category of persons deserved. The Daily Missouri Republican attempted to educate civilians and convince them men in arms and in rebellion, must submit to the laws of war.¹⁴

It was possible, then, for loyal citizens to acquire a basic understanding of the laws of war, perhaps by reading newspaper editorials or even Lieber’s code, which was widely reprinted in the North. Yet the laws of war remained influential to the Union war effort not because most soldiers and civilians understood this technical body of legal thought in intimate detail. Instead, the laws of war proved significant because of the influence it had on official Union military policies, particularly General Orders No. 100, an influence indebted above all to the efforts of Henry Halleck and Francis Lieber.

In addition to the laws of war, a richly varied set of religious ideas—less technical than ideas drawn from international law but certainly more widely held—also shaped Union just-war thinking. Federals who contemplated how to prosecute a just war often asked themselves, "How should a Christian nation wage war? Some northern ministers turned to Christianity to sanctify seemingly limitless violence in service of the Union war effort. Yet, to a greater extent than historians have recognized, many ministers insisted in their wartime sermons that Federals must wage war in a humane spirit and without vengeful hatred for Confederates. Let us leave indiscriminate slaughter, piracy, and desperate measures to desperate men, proclaimed Henry Bellows, Unitarian divine and president of the United States Sanitary Commission. We can afford to be humane … and we are bound to be so by the standard of our Christian civilization. This was no call to lay down arms and embrace pacifism. We cannot spare them our blows; for we have the holy cause of universal justice, Bellows explained. Yet, he hoped this humane spirit would prompt Federals to rid the contest of vindictiveness and personal hatred and malice. One minister likewise called upon his parishioners in the late summer of 1862 to reject any spirit of malignant vindictiveness in its war against the Confederacy. Another clergyman proclaimed, I would not have now, never have wished to have, any element of vindictiveness in our treatment of [Confederates]."¹⁵ But northern ministers ultimately offered somewhat imprecise guidance for waging war justly. It was not plainly evident how exactly to fight humanely and without vindictiveness, virtues that did not easily translate into military policies. Even so, Federals still turned often to religious ideas to help them define the boundaries of just action in war.

For many loyal citizens, to ask how a Christian people should wage war was more or less the same as to ask how a civilized people should wage war. Federals frequently used Christian and civilized interchangeably when describing their war effort. As one Ohio civilian opposed to retaliation in kind against captured Confederates said, How much nobler it will be to take a Christianized or civilized position in reference to the wrongs the rebels are inflicting upon our gallant soldiers. Behind this talk of civilized warfare were powerful assumptions about the superiority of northern society compared to the Confederacy. If Federals did not always precisely define civilized warfare, they often suggested it was simply the opposite of how Confederates prosecuted the war. Frederick Douglass thought that Confederate armies had become more savage, more fierce and brutal in their modes of warfare, than any recognized barbarians making no pretentions to civilization. The New York Herald affirmed the same idea in even more explicitly racial tones. Confederates did not wage war like civilized (that is, white) people; instead, the Chinese and the Sepoys have become the chosen models of Southern men.¹⁶

By avoiding Confederates’ barbaric tactics, many loyal citizens believed their armies would preserve America’s lofty moral standing in the world. Indiana Republican senator Henry Lane, for one, feared that if Union armies imitated Confederate behavior, they would with impunity trample upon all their obligations to God as Christians and all their obligations to the world to abide by the laws of civilized warfare.¹⁷ If Federal armies resorted to a style of warfare that utterly contradicted the enlightened, civilized values that defined the Union, then, even if victorious over the Confederacy, the loyal citizenry would still in a sense lose their Union by tarnishing its exceptional moral character. Today, words like civilized undoubtedly carry controversial connotations. But I use the term civilized warfare throughout this book precisely because the loyal citizenry used it so frequently (even when disagreeing on its meaning) to describe the nature and importance of just conduct in war.

Distinctly political concerns also influenced the Union citizenry’s just-war thinking, especially on how and why to restrain devastation. Many Federals desired to punish or target white southerners in rough accordance with their disloyalty. The historian Mark Grimsley persuasively argues that Union armies unleashed a directed severity against southern civilians, acting on the belief that patently disloyal civilians should suffer more than loyal or neutral ones. Many Federals also assumed that because a domineering Slave Power aristocracy duped or coerced most white southerners into supporting the Confederacy, a just war effort must hone its devastation upon the elite slaveholders. This assumption revealed itself dramatically when, in 1865, William Tecumseh Sherman’s army marched through South Carolina, especially Columbia, the supposed home of the most meddlesome and culpable members of the slaveocracy. One Iowa private, as he arrived in Columbia, reveled in finally making suffer this hotbed of treason and the foul nest where secession was first hatched. Another Ohio infantryman in Sherman’s army rejoiced that the oligarchic lords of the Mother State of Secession were now severely yet justly reaping the chaos and calamity they sowed with secession.¹⁸ Union armies needed, above all, not to devastate or punish white southerners but disenthrall them from the domineering control of the aristocratic slaveholding elite.

Another equally important political consideration was the goal of ensuring a magnanimous, lasting reunion