What was hard war

Lieber published Guerrilla Parties Considered with Reference to the Laws and Usages of War before working on a full-fledged code of war—the first of its kind in the world—published first as A Code for the Government of Armies , and then revised the same year as Instructions for the Government of the Armies of the United States in the Field , issued by the War Department as General Orders No.

It did not, however, prove adequate for the needs of Union troops in Virginia during the Civil War. Lieber argued for important restraints on armies in the field. In , Union hard-war policies in Virginia focused on the Shenandoah Valley. Union officials hoped to destroy the ability of Confederate forces to use the Valley as a corridor of invasion and a source of food and supplies. Its main target was the railroad junction at Lynchburg , but as the Union troops marched south, they burned whatever lay in their path.

On June 11, Hunter shelled Lexington and, against the objections of his own officers, ordered the Virginia Military Institute burned. His primary goal, after all, was to defeat Early. Believing that local residents, and not Confederate partisans, were responsible for the killing, Sheridan ordered the small village of Dayton, along with every house within a five-mile radius, burned.

The following day, on October 4, Sheridan rescinded the order to burn Dayton, but directed the 5th New York Cavalry to burn the surrounding area as originally instructed. This was the sort of small-scale destruction that tended to accompany guerrilla warfare, and indiscriminate destruction in Virginia never surpassed this scale. By mid-October Sheridan had largely accomplished his mission of destroying the Valley.

He reported the destruction of more than 2, barns, 70 mills, 3 iron furnaces, and several railroad buildings. Union troops had systematically destroyed thousands of bushels of wheat, oats, corn, and various other plantings and had herded away thousands of sheep and cattle.

With the onset of winter weather, Valley residents struggled to survive. Many became refugees, loading themselves and what was left of their belongings onto wagons and riding north from Harrisonburg. Confederate forces found few opportunities to strike at Union civilians and property.

After demonstrating outside of Washington, D. In this case, Early saw hard war not as a specific means to defeat the enemy, but as a kind of just desserts. In the end, Union hard-war policies were far removed from the more conciliatory strategy that began the war.

They were developed as a means to bring the war to Confederates more aggressively by attempting to deny them the products of the land and the benefits of good morale.

McClellan, noted for his blind faith in conciliation, explained the essence of a strategy dedicated to conquering peace through organized warfare. It was neither. In the first two years of the conflict only a few Northerners would have tolerated a destructive war against the South.

Democracies embroiled in military conflict, no matter how professional their armies may be, demand a voice in the ways of war. If McClellan had unleashed a strategy of exhaustion and attrition, the Northern people would have taken to the streets, especially since the press was virtually unified in telling its readers to expect modest casualties, little physical destruction, and a quick capture of Richmond, Virginia. Hopes for a speedy and final victory through easy fighting evaporated with the Seven Days battles fought outside Richmond from June 25 to July 1, , when McClellan's Army of the Potomac, poised to capture the capital of the Confederacy, was driven away by a bloody offensive under Robert E.

Southern success on the battlefield darkened the mood of the North, convincing many at home and in the Federal army that harsher measures must descend on the Confederacy. The resilience of the Southern people, the determination of the common Confederate soldier, and the skill of Confederate generalship had caught Lincoln and other Northerners off guard.

The mere presence of Union troops, as they had expected, did not demoralize the enemy. It had united most white Southerners to fight for independence. The policy of conciliation was doomed.

Almost two weeks after the Seven Days battles ended, Lincoln revealed that he had changed his mind about emancipationforever fixing Union military strategy on a trajectory toward hard war. He explained to members of his cabinet that destroying slavery "was a military necessity absolutely essential for the salvation of the Union, that we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.

Meanwhile, green Union soldiers were quickly turning into tough veterans, weary of the never-ending hard labor at the front while thousands of slaves who could be utilized by Federal armies were allowed to toil in the fields of their masters or dig entrenchments for the Confederacy. No one could ignore this issue because the slaves themselves did not go limp when Union troops entered their neighborhoods. Scores of blacks fled their masters, turning Northern armies into forces of liberation, not just agents for reunion.

But many of these runaways were returned to their owners since the Federal government did not allow the military to free slaves until Congress passed the Confiscation Act of July , allowing Union armies to keep the property of Confederates, including slaves. In the interim it did not take long for even the dullest of Union soldiers to recognize that every runaway escorted back to Confederate lines freed up a Southern white man to kill Union Soldiers on the battlefield.

There were, however, serious reservations about the military necessity argument for emancipation, as many officers feared that throngs of freed African Americans would engulf Union armies, depleting resources, inhibiting mobility, and unleashing a wave of slave uprisings across the Southern countryside.

Against the advice of senior military leadership, Lincoln went public with the Emancipation Proclamation as a declared war aim after the battle of Antietam on September 17, , a monumental act that gave official sanction to the revolutionary forces that had been brewing on the ground since First Manassas.

From the moment that Federal soldiers touched enemy soil, they had been turning up the heat against Southern civilians, ignoring War Department dictates about protecting private property, as they faced pragmatic challenges of surviving in hostile country.

The taking of a farmer's fence rail or the appropriation of a "secesh" pig was a spontaneous act that was routinely but not consistently punished by senior officers. Soon, however, logistical problems besieged Northern armies, forcing commanders to look the other way when the rank-and-file stole from Southern civilians.

A number of Union generals and Republican politicians believed the proper course rested in making continued separation from the Union undesirable, even on a personal level, for Southern civilians. Grimsley finds some substantial evidence to maintain the latter argument on the grounds that because the conflict was a civil war it made the decision to support the war, on the part of all people involved, extremely personal and rigid.

Once a Southerner, even a civilian, chose the side of the Confederacy they had a vested political and individual desire to see the conflict through to the end. Though the actions of the Union Army committed numerous excesses against Southern civilians the author finds the restrain shown by Northern soldiers especially telling. Indeed it is interesting the number of times that Union raids and attacks on civil centers could have degenerated into mob violence and orgies of destruction.

Rather, those occurrences took place only a handful of times and in areas that exhibited extremely hard-line attitudes towards the Confederacy in general and support for Southern guerilla operations in particular. Despite the lore of the South following reconstruction, few examples exist where Union soldiers wantonly destroyed Southern property just for the joy of doing so.

The Hard Hand of War is an important book in the historiography of the American Civil War as well as the study of wartime civil-military relations between the U.

Any serious student of either topic should read this book to help their understanding of the both the effects of war on the civilian population, and also how the civilian population effects the conduct of operations in the field.

Joe Stoltz Texas Christian University. Yet, conciliation depended almost entirely on the shallow commitment of the Southern people to the war; while it seemed effective in western Virginia, this was an isolated pocket of Unionism and the policy did not bear similar fruit elsewhere in the South.

John Pope ordered the Army of Virginia to live off the land and make it clear that communities would be held responsible for acts of insurgency from within their ranks. This dominated military policy from July through early , and was pursued especially vigorously in the Western Theater. Thus, officers like Grant and Rosecrans authorized foraging in the west, but urged their soldiers who, according to Grimsley, self-policed such behavior even outside official doctrines to take first from combatant properties, then from lands of Confederate supporters.

Rarely, if ever, would this policy willingly inflict harm on the properties of Union sympathizers in the South.

Grimsley asserts that Lincoln had long sought emancipation, but by possessed the political capital to do so. This volume fits into an emerging interpretation of the Civil War that questions its status as a "total war" and instead emphasizes the survival of political logic and control even in the midst of a sweeping struggle for the nation's future: the primary goal of the Federal government remained the restoration of the Union, not the devastation of the South.

Intertwined with a political logic, and sometimes indistinguishable from it, was also a deep sense of moral justice--a belief that, whatever the claims of military necessity, the innocent deserved some pity, and that even the guilty should suffer in rough proportion to the extent of their sins.

Through comparisons with earlier European wars and through the testimony of Union soldiers and Southern civilians alike, Grimsley shows that Union soldiers exercised restraint even as they made war against the Confederate civilian population.