Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians 1861–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Biography: Dr. Mark Grimsley is an Associate Professor at The Ohio State University specializing in American military history. Educated at OSU and Kings College London, The Hard Hand of War is the monograph publication of Grimsley’s PhD dissertation. His primary focus is the American Civil War with additional interests in the intersection of militaries and civilian populations. He has also explored both gender and racial issues in the United States, especially the American Civil Rights Movement and how it potentially fits the category of a insurgency. His other works include Civilians in the Path of War, The Collapse of the Confederacy, and battlefield guides for Gettysburg and Shiloh.
Overview: This book examines how the union shifted from its initial conciliatory strategy to one of hard war by early 1864. It examines Union military policy toward Southern civilians, property, and agriculture throughout the entirety of the war. Seeks to explicitly combat the myth of Sherman’s troops as savages. He explicitly uses the term “hard war” as opposed to “total war” because of total wars implication of complete societal mobilization—something outside the scope of this book.
Central Thesis: The Union Army’s hard war policy was a deliberate strategy borne of military necessity and the contemporary customs of war. Hard war, Grimsley argues, was a deliberate policy characterized by restraint and targeted actions that strictly served a military purpose, not the wanton destruction so often dramatized by the Southern detractors.
Scope of Book:
- Grimsley describes three policy phases during the war: conciliation, pragmatism, and hard-war.
- Hard war, Grimsley describes as actions against southern civilians and property made expressly in order to demoralize civilians and ruin the Confederate economy—especially industries and transportation infrastructure and involved allocation of substantial resources to accomplish this. (p. 3)
- Conciliation—April 1861–June 1862. The initial policy upon outbreak of war. Comes from the idea that there were plentiful unionists throughout the south who could convince a reunion. Setbacks in the war effort convinced the Union to abandon this idea
- Pragmatism—July 1862–about January 1864. Lincoln’s decision to free confederate slaves repudiated the conciliatory policy and signaled that the war would be prosecuted with less regard for its effect on Southern society. Lincoln admin began encouraging commanders to seize Southern property that might be useful to their operations. Nevertheless, union commanders explicitly sought victory on the battlefield and civilians were only regarded as they affected battlefield success. Foraging was only done out of pure necessity.
- Hard War—February 1864–end of the war. Originates from Grant/Sherman’s experience in the Western theater. It became a deliberate policy to fulfill logistical requirements out west while eliminating enemy resources. Hard war came of age in the Eastern theater when Grant became General-in-Chief. The policy works because union commanders understood the logic of restraint and abided by it.
- Through a strategy of raid targeted at Southerners deemed Unionist, passive, or secessionist northern armies demonstrated considerable restraint and deliberate target discrimination.
- Hard war, Grimsley shows, “encompasses the range of operations during the war that had a common element: the erosion of the enemy’s will to resist by deliberately or concomitantly subjecting the civilian population to the pressures of war.” (p. 5)
- The acts against civilians, Grimsley demonstrates, did not degenerate into wanton acts of destruction and savagery as memory might have suggested. Instead, it’s a remarkable testament to the union soldiers—“toughened by war, hungry for creature comforts, and often angry at the civilians in their midst”—that they stuck to it.
- Grimsley uses the interplay between directives and attitudes of everyone from general officers to private and of course civilians to extrapolate how this policy was received and executed.
Easy to read, well-written, and compelling argument that clearly dispels the myth of “northern aggression.”