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"Especially in the heat of combat," Faust writes, soldiers "could seem almost possessed by the urge to kill." Small wonder that historians have used the terms "brutal," "cruel," "merciless," and "ruthless" to characterize the Civil War. But was it really that bad? This is the question Mark E. Neely Jr. asks us to ponder in his interesting yet rather tendentious book. Neely believes that historians, almost without exception, have taken the war out of historical context and sensationalized its human costs, effectively equating battle tolls with the nature of the fighting. Without denying or making light of the casualties and suffering inflicted by civil warfare, he is nonetheless impressed by the relative restraint exercised on both sides: more specifically, by the reluctance of Union and Confederate soldiers and their commanders to engage in wanton destruction or commit atrocities.
To make his case, Neely compares the character of the fighting during the Civil War with other military engagements of the time, while also taking us to episodes during the war itself when the prospects for ruthlessness and brutality seemed most auspicious. He begins with the Mexican-American War, which has been attracting much-needed scholarly attention these days, and shows that American soldiers, especially the volunteers, engaged in such widespread and heinous depredations that their own officers bitterly denounced them. "Our militia & volunteers," General Winfield Scott told the secretary of war in early 1847, "have committed atrocities--horrors--in Mexico, sufficient to make Heaven weep, & make every American of Christian morals blush for his country. Murder, robbery, & rape on mothers & daughters, in the presence of the tied up males of the family, have been common all along the Rio Grande."
