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 Clayton J. Butler (bio) Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War. By Lorien Foote. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 312. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $22.95.) Adapted lectures often make for great books. Faced with the presence of a very real audience, the author has an added impetus to deliver a compelling story and a convincing argument. Derived from a series of Brose Lectures given at Penn State University in 2019, Lorien Foote’s new monograph certainly achieves both goals. Foote makes a strong case that during the Civil War the development of military policies of retaliation—officially sanctioned penalties imposed by one belligerent on the other for going beyond the brink of what it considered “civilized” warfare—had a marked impact on the nature of combat, the experiences of prisoners, and the outcome of the conflict itself. Foote contends that the Civil War represented a contest in which both sides saw nothing less than civilization itself at stake and that both sides used the threat of retaliation to assert the vision of civilization for which they fought. They were, in effect, setting the rules of the game. Though recent works, such as Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s Calculus of [End Page 258] Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War (2018) and D. H. Dilbeck’s A More Civil War: How the Union Waged a Just War (2016), have investigated the Civil War in the context of international laws of war and just-war philosophy, both engaging incidents of retaliation, Foote’s argument that retaliation served as a legitimate and widely sanctioned method of directly influencing conduct in the field sets her book apart. Foote situates her study in the Department of the South, comprising the coastal areas of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, which became the site of intense controversy over the deployment of Black troops, mis-treatment of prisoners, and the summary execution of combatants during the war. Two starkly divergent visions of civilization and civilized society promptly collided there, visions that cut to the heart of the sectional conflict. Proceeding chronologically, Foote’s narrative benefits from the early introduction of several dynamic and articulate figures, including Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Robert Gould Shaw, Ethan Allen Hitchcock, and David Hunter. Hunter’s unhesitating organization and deployment of Black troops, almost from the outset of his tenure in command of the department, initiated a showdown between seemingly irreconcilable Union and Confederate policies. Confederates saw Hunter’s actions as tantamount to leadership of a slave rebellion, a barbaric act aimed at the destruction of southern civilization. Hunter saw the practice of enslavement, for all intents and purposes the Confederate raison d’être, as itself barbaric and the antithesis of civilized ways. Indeed, these clashing conceptions of civilization hold the key to understanding how nonslaveholding southerners and nonabolitionist northerners found the motivation to fight in the first place. Nonslaveholding Confederates fought to protect southern civilization as they understood it, which they perceived as gravely menaced by the so-called Black Republican administration. Nonabolitionist northerners fought for a civilization of free labor undergirded by the Union, even if that vision paid little to no heed to Black Americans’ rights. Foote rightly notes that once one begins to look for the language of “civilization” in the parlance of the Civil War era, it becomes ubiquitous. The debate over the Union’s use of Black troops offers Foote her best example of how military leadership turned to policies of retaliation to influence the direction of the fighting. Jefferson Davis, she writes, “was convinced he could shape Federal policies through the threat of retaliation” (43). Confederates proposed to reenslave or execute the Black soldiers they encountered in battle. It seemed to them an eminently justifiable position. The only thing that ultimately gave them pause was the prospect of retaliation. The thought that Confederate prisoners might suffer the same fate as Black soldiers forced them to reconsider their policy and generally, though [End Page 259] by no means in every case, stayed their hand. By treating Black soldiers as equals in the...