The Calculus of Violence

Reviewed by: The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War by Aaron Sheehan-Dean Andrew F. Lang (bio) The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War. By Aaron Sheehan-Dean. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. 480. Cloth, $35.00.) Aaron Sheehan-Dean has produced a masterwork of historical scholarship. The Calculus of Violence is a moving and sophisticated, beautiful and haunting interpretation of the U.S. Civil War’s central subject: the purposeful willingness of consenting Americans to kill each other in the name of national and even moral causes. Sheehan-Dean’s book offers a [End Page 416] comprehensive treatment of how the Civil War generation understood and practiced war through overwhelming kinds of destructive violence. In so doing, it recovers a strikingly different world from our own. Indeed, this tome is as much about the past as it is the historical method itself. Sheehan-Dean implores readers not to judge the past according to our standards in the present. He instead re-creates the distant context in which nineteenth-century Americans lived, how they believed their national destinies depended entirely on armed conflict, how the fate of democracy, international legitimacy, and peace hinged on ruinous slaughter. What may appear paradoxical and even grotesque to us was self-evident and consensual to them. Abraham Lincoln’s pragmatic observation in the Second Inaugural Address speaks to Sheehan-Dean’s coverage of the period: “Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war, rather than let it perish. And the war came.” The prospect of modern, mid-nineteenth-century war confronted Americans with a host of problems: Who could and could not make war? Who could be killed in war? Who had to be spared during war? Did war impose any limiting principles? When did war end and how did peace begin? Sheehan-Dean dedicates eight carefully crafted chapters to answering these questions. Along the way, we see how and why “at many points, Northerners and Southerners chose restraint” (1). The theme of restraint informs much of the book’s premise. Sheehan-Dean argues repeatedly— and in my mind correctly—that the Civil War could have been far more destructive than it was. Contemporary civil conflicts across the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century worlds far surpassed the American contest in causalities, unchecked retribution, and limitless escalation. Sheehan-Dean demonstrates how nineteenth-century American institutions and democratic assumptions thus guided the war’s limitation. The era’s martial conduct contained its own embedded moderation, conditioned by the rule of law, the dictates of statecraft, democratic civilian control of the military establishment, and the military establishment itself commanded by professional officers trained in the art of “civilized” warfare. Indeed, notions of “civilization” assumed powerful roles in limiting the war’s violence. A civilized nation waged war with formal state-sanctioned armies, avoided unwarranted destruction of property, and abjured targeting noncivilian combatants. The United States and the Confederacy each possessed profound incentives for hewing to the civilized standard. Each had to prove the legitimacy of its belligerent cause to an enlightened Atlantic world. To exceed one’s respective national purpose, to reject international law [End Page 417] to which civilized belligerents subscribed, would be to undermine and endanger one’s own national purpose, inviting unchecked retribution from the enemy and ensuring international condemnation. To be sure, Sheehan-Dean does not sanitize the Civil War’s shocking destruction, its overwhelming violence, and its distressing human toll. We see modern war in all of its gruesome, impossible detail. The powerful blend of nationalism and the moral righteousness in the respective causes sustained the belligerent populaces in their pursuit of unconditional victories. Sheehan-Dean is at his best when charting the tensions, the contradictions, the paradoxes of the American conflict. The very attributes that limited the war also facilitated the conflict’s violent, transformative character. He thus rejects an older but still powerful historiographical premise that charts a gradual escalation from a limited war to reestablish the antebellum status quo into a “hard war” that sanctioned the complete destruction of national military infrastructures and revolutionized the American

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