The Destructive War

Winner of the Bancroft Prize
Winner of the Lincoln Prize
Winner of the Charles Sydnor Award

Through the biographies of two of the Civil War’ s most important generals, Royster explores the massive violence the war unleashed—a violence that went quickly and completely out of control and far beyond the expectations of its perpetrators on both sides. Reconstructing the bloody battles and such events as the burning of Columbia, South Carolina, Royster uncovers the belief, held on both sides, that a direct link existed between destruction and the attainment of political ends. He traces how rhetoric escalated to a willingness to indulge in unrestrained violence and to an obsession with war-making and an exalted faith that war would morally uplift the nation. He analyzes the misconceptions, evasions, illusions, and myths used to explain and promote the destruction. He also treats the postbellum efforts to validate the war as purposeful, intelligible, and right, and as a progressive undertaking that would benefit society. He demonstrates, finally, that the violence was more vast, more devastating, more uncontrolled than anyone had expected or than could ever have been justified in retrospect.

“An exhaustively researched, artistically written, brilliantly argued exposition of the primacy of violence in the American mind.” —The Boston Globe