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15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
For Specialists Only!, January 18, 2004
This review is from: The Hard Hand of War (Paperback)
This is a conversion of the author's graduate thesis, composed while he was a student at The Ohio State University. The subject of the study is evident in the subtitle of the book: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians 1861-1865. The central theme of the book is that the policy mentioned evolved over time, getting more and more harsh with the civilians that the army encountered. The evolution, however, didn't go nearly as far as some later alleged, and the supposed depredations of the Union army in the various Southern states in the last year of the war are, as far as the author is concerned, mostly exaggerations. This is a good overview of the subject, and the author goes over things with a good analytical eye. I disagree with the other reviewer, who thinks that he's unfairly easy on the Union soldiers who foraged "liberally" during the latter part of the Civil War. I did notice one shortcoming of the book's central argument: the author went over the motivation for attacking things like houses in retaliation for ambushes and attacks against Union troops, but overlooked the possibility that the troops themselves needed to feel that they were somehow retaliating for being attacked. Burning down a house, even if it had no effect on the Southerners who ambushed them, did serve the purpose of making the Union soldiers think that they were doing *something*. This is a thesis, reworked as a book. It's sprinkled with footnotes, and written in a scholarly, dry tone. The result is a lot of information, with interesting and well-reasoned arguments stemming from them, written in rather wooden prose that's not very easy to read. I would recommend this book to hard core Civil War buffs who want to know more about the subject, but only to them.
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18 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Hard Hand of War, June 3, 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: The Hard Hand of War (Paperback)
The thesis of this study of Union military policy toward Southern civilians during the Civil War boils down to "it wasn't all that bad, and here's why." Grimsley sets out to study what the combination of severity (for example, destroying civilian property) and restraint (for example, not shooting civilians on sight) meant, and concludes that it reflected the continued working of political logic and a sense of moral justice. He chronicles an evolution in Union policy toward "hard war". It's an interesting study, apparently valid on a broad scale, though breaking down somewhat when applied to local area studies. Grimsley doesn't really deal well with border areas, and although he could have used parts of the mountain South to compare Confederate with Union policies toward dissenting civilians, he doesn't do so. Some of his arguments seem tendentious: is it necessary to construct an elaborate theory of class conflict to explain the fact that plantation houses were more often robbed than one-room cabins? Surely the fact that the plantation houses had more to steal played a part, as well as any ideology. It also seems to me that Grimsley minimizes the abuse of civilians which did in fact take place, and has little to say about the trauma even of relatively restrained foraging. A rather jingoistic bit of characterization--rampaging Continental soldiers were "brutes", whereas American volunteers were democrats--is used as one more reason for restraint. Use of sources is good, though enforcers of the policies are overrepresented compared to victims of them. There is definitely useful information here, especially in the portrayal of international legal theory and the evolution of official policy, but I'm not sure how well some of it stands up upon close examination.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting, but requires some slogging, February 16, 2010
This review is from: The Hard Hand of War (Paperback)
This is an expansion of Grimsley's doctoral dissertation and, as such, is written with academics in mind. That does not mean that Civil War or history buffs cannot pick it up and read it, but this book does require some slogging. I managed to read it in a week for a graduate school class, but it wasn't the easiest read in the world. At any rate, I digress...the book itself is very interesting and one of the few books I've seen that tries to figure out when the Union armies turned to a "hard war" policy and why.
The answers are surely not the final word on the subject as one reviewer pointed out some records that Grimsley missed or overlooked. However, Grimsley does have some useful information of the formation of Union military policy toward Southern civilians and how it evolved. Grimsley is smart to point out that there are always exceptions to the rule, but one gets a sense that much of his thesis is proven as to how and why the policy evolved. In short, at the beginning of the war the Union policy was one of conciliation toward Southern civilians, the thinking being that secession was not favored by a majority of the people and if Union armies occupied Southern areas, the people would rise up and want to rejoin the Union, especially if the Union armies treated them civilly. This policy began to shift in 1863 as Grant attempted to take Vicksburg and began to live off the land. Grant, and Sherman, still attempted to keep their men from outright looting, but were more than happy to confiscate supplies, while still leaving enough for the families they took from to eat themselves. By the time Grant comes to command of all Union troops in 1864, the policy has evolved further to the point that Sheridan burns the Shenandoah Valley and Sherman goes on his March to the Sea and Carolinas Campaign. Grimsley argues that the goal was still not to simply ransack, loot, and pillage, but to either seize or destroy anything of military value. However, this did not always happen and the "hard war" of making Southern civilians pay for secession was meant to hit home and force a quicker end to the war. As much as some people may be revolted by it, Grimsley certainly argues that Grant and, even more so, Sherman felt this could save lives by making battles less important by simply leaving no supplies for the Confederacy.
Whether one agrees with Grimsley's interpretation or not, this is still an important book in Civil War historiography because it is one of the few that tackles this issue. I think Grimsley tries to be even-handed and point out when Union troops went overboard, but I could see some thinking he is too lenient at times. However, you also come away learning a lot (especially about Benjamin Butler, which I found fascinating. Butler in reality is a lot different than the "Beast" Butler often remembered). All that aside, though, I still only give the book 3 stars because Grimsley wraps 1864-1865 up pretty quickly after devoting so much time to 1861-1863 and the book is just not an easy, or enjoyable, read. This book is kind of like advanced math--you may learn a lot, but you don't necessarily enjoy it while you are learning it.
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