Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War by David Silkenat

Abstract

Reviewed by: Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War by David Silkenat Lorien Foote Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War. David Silkenat. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1-4696-4972-6. 368 pp., hardcover, $39.95. In the acknowledgments to Raising the White Flag, David Silkenat writes, the "idea for this book came to me in a dream" (299). His subconscious mind did him a big favor, because the book's topic itself makes an original contribution to the literature on the American Civil War. It should be obvious, given that one of every four soldiers became a prisoner at some point (at least 673,000 men), that surrender shaped the contours and outcome of the conflict. Yet no one had thought to analyze what this meant for the military and cultural history of the war. Silkenat fortunately did, and this outstanding study fulfills the dream. Formal surrenders of entire garrisons or units at Fort Sumter, San Antonio, San Augustin Springs, Harper's Ferry, Fort Donelson, and Fort Jackson marked the opening phase of the war, established the rituals, and set the terms for how Americans perceived the difference between honorable and dishonorable surrender. There were contradictory notions of surrender in American society. In the military realm, the ability to surrender exemplified a nation's participation in the civilized rules of war, but in the political and social realms, surrender implied weakness, subordination, and cowardice. Silkenat explores how military commanders included surrender as part of their strategic, operational, and tactical thinking. He contrasts Ulysses S. Grant with Nathan Bedford Forrest, who used "unconditional surrender" as "a tactical weapon, a stratagem designed to engender terror (139)." Campaign and battle histories usually give no more than token nods to prisoners, even when the number of captives exceeded the number of deaths. Silkenat challenges scholars to consider how the surrender of soldiers shaped the contours and outcome of battles, and provides a narrative of the Battle of Gettysburg that exemplifies his point. Although we have a number of excellent studies of Civil [End Page 229] War soldiers, Silkenat fills a gap with his chapter about their decisions and experiences with surrender on the battlefield. Linear formations and differences in a soldier's assignment affected opportunity. Although surrender was an instinctive decision in the heat of the moment, white Civil War soldiers surrendered in such high numbers because they believed that if they threw down their weapons, their enemy would accept their surrender. They were generally right. This stands in contrast to the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian War, the Great War, and World War II, where soldiers were loath to surrender because would-be captors killed would-be prisoners as often as not. Silkenat addresses the recent concern of scholars to characterize and measure the violence of the war. Although historians debate how "hard" or "dark" the Civil War was, Americans at the time cared about whether the war was "civilized" or "savage." Silkenat argues that it was both. Soldiers surrendered "in droves" because most of them believed they fought in a "civilized" war, which ultimately limited the overall death toll of the war (297). There was a noticeable change across time in how soldiers evaluated their fate after surrender, however. After the Dix-Hill Cartel collapsed, and soldiers believed they would face extended time in prison camps with poor chances for survival, they chose to fight to the death rather than surrender. Although the notes do not show clearly how Silkenat made these important calculations, or what the estimated numbers are, he claims that muster reports from 1864 show that the ratio of killed to captured soldiers came to parity. African Americans, white unionists, and Confederate guerrillas experienced a "savage" war shaped by the "absence of surrender" (297). Their enemies did not consider them legitimate combatants and summarily executed them on the battlefields. They did not expect quarter, and, accordingly, they did not always give it. For all participants, combat in 1864 marked the "nadir of surrender's acceptability" (168). Although Silkenat discusses the surrender at Appomattox, his more important contribution is an analysis of the several that...