12 - Atrocities, Retribution, and Laws

Summary

The American Civil War was not a total war. Although the conflict occasioned immense carnage, Union and Confederate armies never systematically disregarded distinctions between combatant and noncombatant, the definitive feature of the total wars of the twentieth century. Nor was the Civil War the first “modern” war, at least if defined by revolutionary innovations in military technologies and tactics, or by a dramatic expansion in the scope and scale of the conflict’s destruction.

Scholarly debates over whether the Civil War was a total or modern war were, at their best, meant to provide a better understanding of the character of the Civil War as a military conflict. If Civil War historians now generally agree that the conflict was neither “total” nor “modern,” the larger task of more precisely comprehending the nature and limits of the war’s violence still remains.