Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil WarMichael C. C.Adams. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.

Abstract

Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War Michael C. C. Adams. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.The Civil War was the greatest convulsion in American history. Long acknowledged to be the bloodiest in American history, recent research has plausibly argued that it was even more destructive of life than we had thought, with the estimate of casualties moving from 620,000 to around 750,000. In the late nineteenth century, after a decent interval of years had passed from Appomattox and the most intense passions of the Reconstruction period, there was a concerted effort to bind up the wounds of the conflict and re-imagine it as a heroic war between brothers. A crucial landmark in this work of historical transformation was the publication of the magisterial four volume Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (1887-1888). This bulky compendium of articles by former officers and commanders from both sides translated the into a conventional contest of arms and men, dramatic and stirring, but shorn of the messy passions and politics that had animated the conflict. An era ensued of ritually staged battlefield reunions, where increasingly aged veterans in blue and grey embraced each other, visibly embodying a restored union. The nation was on its way to a twentieth-century world of Civil War chess sets and Kentucky colonels hawking fried chicken. A desire to suppress the nastiness of the Civil War was natural enough and probably necessary in the Gilded Age; a century and a half distant, more is required of historians.In recent years, increased attention has been paid to unearthing the traumatic effects of such a massive bloodletting on the Americans who experienced it and felt its consequences for decades. Exemplifying this trend is Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008). Michael C. C. Adams's Living Hell is a worthy contribution to this growing literature. Adams is the author of several books exploring the intersection of and culture. An early work on the Civil War, Our Masters the Rebels: A Speculation on Union Military Failure in the East, 1861-1865 (1978), investigated the moral ascendency achieved by Robert E. Lee over the Federal Army of the Potomac. In The Best War Ever: America and World War II (1993), Adams did for the Second World War something analogous to what he attempts in his new book; he launched a thoroughgoing critique of the popular belief that World War Two was a good war. …