The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, & the Americans

While focusing on the deeper causes of the civil war and their play-out on battlefields, Royster rips the lid off one of the most cherished American dogmas: the assumed sacrosanct value of the press. Royster's deep and thorough quotation from newspapers north and south, for decades preceding the war, lays bare a legacy of mutual hate encouraged by newspapers as they whipped their respective constituents up to a frenzy. The horror of "total war" and its major military proponents, in that context, is not only quite explicable but even ordinary -- even tame. The generals are, indeed, seen as essentially loyal ministers to a vast malaise primarily spiritual and psychic, which was hardly original to them, and which has been allowed to fester in this nation for a long time, and which to a degree poisoned populations both north and south before the war. This is therefore one of the few major books on American history either to take up an original thesis, or to forward one so counter to accepted thinking. You can like it or dislike it, curse it or scream "ouch," but the evidence is there, meticulously laid out. The fact is, Royster throws great and uneasy light on our present culture wars which are also now several decades running -- and flamed in a quite similar manner. In the meantime, Royster's descriptions of the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain and the burning of Columbia are matchless. This book leaves all James McPhersons, all Ken Burnses, all Stephen Ambroses, and all similar gurus at the post -- mere babes. No, this is not to say he is some sort of Michael Moore hate America nut, either. He's more on the level of a Tacitus, frankly, or an Isaiah weeping at the gates. Read it and weep.

This is a brilliantly labyrinthine disquisition on the American Civil War. Royster's premise is the examination of the wars' scale of destruction, and the surprising extent of its violence, developed out of biographical sketches of Sherman and Jackson, who Royster believes best personify the Union and the Confederacy. Further, Royster sees the devastation of the Civil War as incipient in the antebellum period. The Destructive War is interpretive as well as critical, literary as well as historical, dealing as much with the idea of war as the facts themselves. Indeed, the author terms his work " a long essay."Royster depicts the Civil War as-primarily-aggresive, anomalous, vicarious, and as the title suggests, destructive. The Confederacy sought aggressive war to achieve quick legitimacy, its viability depending on the ability not only to wage war, but also to take that war north of the Potomac, make the Yankees feel its effects, and thereby convince them that the costs of prolonged combat would be far too dear. Royster argues that the Union pursued aggresive war, ultimately, to bring progress to the South and demonstrate the superiority of free labor over slave labor, by razing the Confederacy to its foundations and then rebuilding it in the North's own image.For Royster no one better epitomizes the Confederacy than Thomas Jonathon Jackson, better known by his sobriquet Stonewall, which Royster asserts, reflected a self-created persona. Jackson's Stonewall was an inelegant fusion of plodding resolve, frustrated (if not checked) ambition, and intense piety, smacking of both Calvinism and Arminianism, all funneled into a zealous devotion to duty. His untimely death at Chancellorsville gave birth to the Stonewall myth-patriotic Christian warrior-providing tantalizing 'what if' grist for the counterfactual mill of post hoc Confederate nation building. An advocate of "the tactical offensive in battle" Jackson is certain the Civil War will be "earnest,massed, and lethal."The essence of the Union, according to Royster, can be found in William Tecumseh Sherman. Alarmed by Confederate strength and resolve, Sherman presciently observed that tactical defensive warfare would be woefully insufficient in what he believed would be a long and costly war. Egged on by newspapers ravenous for victory on the cheap, and deferring to troops already engaged in wanton mayhem, Sherman embraced, then embodied, that which he originally resisted: total war.Royster includes subsidiary characterizations of the war as drastic, Republican, and vigorous. Drastic war knows no limits in the pursuit of emancipation and abolition. Republican war means "Emergency war powers" and "passionate nationalism" which will create "a new republic, purged of antebellum evils and backwardness." Vigorous war is possible because of the "widespread eagerness to be exonerated of the criminality attached to bloodshed." Auxiliary adjectives such as harsh, bitter, ineluctable and causeless are employ

History is written by men whose accounts reflect the times in which, and through which, they've lived. This is certainly true of Charles Royster's _The Destructive War..._, which is one of the most marvelous history books I (a Ph.D. in history) have ever read.Royster is a veteran of Vietnam who became convinced of certain "truths" about America long ago. In this book, he subtly manipulates his evidence into consonance with his truths. Thus, e.g., when General Jackson suggests policies the Union armies (under Sherman and others) actually follow, this makes the C.S.A. morally equivalent to the U.S.A. Never mind that the reason Jackson's suggestions were never implemented is that his superiors in the Confederate government thought them morally repugnant; never mind that Lincoln actually revelled in similar suggestions' success. Does this "moral equivalency" theory remind you of anything more recent than 1865?It is only after deep consideration that I've reached this caveat about this book. It is a literary gem on a par with the greatest histories. Whether you care about the "Civil War" or not (and I use the quotation marks because since the Confederates were not fighting for control of the U.S. Government, it was not really a civil war), this book repays a reading. Or two. Or three. It's marvelous.

Much of Civil War history is repetitive, concerned with retelling the same stories we like to hear. Charles Royster takes two familar figures--Stonewall Jackson and W. T. Sherman--and tells us things about our national character that we don't necessarily like to hear. This is a brilliant, award-winning account on how Americans embraced what Royster calls "destructive war," written by a historian with great literary sensibility. Royster demonstrates that the Civil War can still reveal new truths about ourselves