16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the greatest books I've ever read!, January 3, 2003
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 employed to complete the illustration. In the book's chapter on vicarious war the author asks, "How had the naive notions prevalent at the start given way so readily to killing on a scale supposedly unimaginable?" This single question is the essence of Royster's work.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A serious look at the meaning of the American Civil War, July 14, 1997
By A Customer
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
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A new way to examine the destructive war, March 29, 2001
Royster's "The Destructive War" is one of the most important works of Civil War Scholarship in the 1990's. He blends a sweeping narrative with extensive analysis to explain the development of "total war" and its effects on Americans. What will really engage the reader is not so much Royster's examinations of General William Sherman's actions and those of his men, but rather the ideas of Stonewall Jackson and the calls for the destruction of Northern cities that they elicit from the Confederacy, a nation that was supposedly only wanted to fight a defensive war. While Royster's argument is not without some structural flaws, it makes some very interesting points about Confederate war aims and the willingness of populations and troops of both sides to destroy the cities of their former bretheren. I've read this book twice for graduate level classes and each time a lively discussion has been generated. An excellent book.
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