Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War by Lorien Foote

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War by Lorien Foote Lesley J. Gordon (bio) Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War. Lorien Foote. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. ISBN 978-1-4696-6527-6. 312 pp., paper, $22.95. For the last twenty-five years, there has been an ongoing debate among Civil War historians about the level of violence the conflict unleashed. Was it controlled by political policy makers and military commanders? Or was it unrestrained and chaotic, wreaking destruction in unprecedented ways, not just on soldiers’ bodies and minds but on civilians, enslaved people, and communities? Lorien Foote enters this historiographical discussion with her latest book, Rituals of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War, based on her 2019 Steven and Janice Brose Lectures at Penn State. Foote asserts [End Page 115] that for both Confederates and Federals, the Civil War was a “crisis of civilization” and one that determined which side was truly civilized and which was barbaric (16). She focuses on the federal Department of the South, tracking the raising of black troops, their active campaigning in South Carolina and Florida, and their treatment as POWs. The Department of the South was not central to the conflict’s major engagements, but Foote contends that events there offer a close look at how prominent political and military leaders on both sides were acutely aware that the world was watching and judging them on how they waged war. A good deal of Foote’s focus is on the enlistment of African American men in the Union army and their subsequent treatment as POWs. Their status as legitimate combatants, controversial and hugely significant, Foote maintains, reveals assumptions about civilized warfare at play and how these ideals at times broke down entirely. As Foote notes, most white Americans viewed African Americans as uncivilized—inherently unrestrained and animalistic. Black soldiers were used sparingly as combat units largely due to these racist assumptions, but when they did fight in battle, these troops often suffered higher casualties than white soldiers, due to a variety of factors. Historians have pointed to the Confederacy’s refusal to treat black soldiers as legitimate prisoners of war, instead defining those captured as fugitives and returning them to their owners, or worse, taking no quarter and killing them outright. Foote argues that notions of civilized war explain how and why Confederates justified such wanton murders: Black soldiers were not deemed a legitimate and civilized enemy. Throughout, Foote claims to make several scholarly interventions, including “for the first time,” she attests, demonstrating that in fact Confederates changed their policy toward captured “freeborn Black troops in combat,” when formal POW exchanges resumed near the war’s end (4). Foote insists repeatedly that her interpretations are original and that other historians have either failed to recognize the importance of these rituals or underplayed their significance without much elaboration of just who these scholars are. Yet others have discussed these rituals and the concept of “civilized war.” But perhaps the most damning accusation she makes is in her allegation that scholars of the Civil War and Reconstruction era have neglected recognizing “civilization” as part of nineteenth-century Americans’ world view. She broadly takes scholars to task for focusing exclusively on concepts like race and gender, which she concedes are part of the definition of civilization but should be seen as expressions of it, not vice versa; a confusing and convoluted claim that sounds like an accusation of presentism without calling it as such. Understanding the term civilization in its proper context is important, but as Foote herself admits in these pages, it is limiting. And, in some ways, her definitions are rather narrow in a military sense. For Civil War armies in the field, [End Page 116] such rhetoric had a very pragmatic purpose: to create effective fighting troops. Military discipline helped ensure that soldiers stayed healthy and in the ranks whether marching, in camp, or in the heat of battle. But of course, as Foote documents here, even the best trained troops sometimes failed and faltered and broke “the rules of war.” Lesley...