The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans

by Charles Royster

From the moment the Civil War began, partisans on both sides were calling not just for victory but for extermination. And both sides found leaders who would oblige. In this vivid and fearfully persuasive book, Charles Royster looks at William Tecumseh Sherman and Stonewall Jackson, the men who came to embody the apocalyptic passions of North and South, and re-creates their characters, their strategies, and the feelings they inspired in their countrymen. At once an incisive dual biography, hypnotically engrossing military history, and a cautionary examination of the American penchant for patriotic bloodshed, The Destructive War is a work of enormous power.

Genres: History, Civil War, American Civil War, American History, Nonfiction, War, Biography

560 pages, Paperback

First published January 11, 1991

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Americans have an odd relationship with our civil war. To put it bluntly: we’re quite proud of it. I’m not sure that other nations feel the same way about their internecine conflicts. Familiarity begets resentment, and civil wars are often the most brutal sort. They often end with death squads and executions and resentments that can last generations or more.

But not us! We Americans are an optimistic lot, generally speaking. We like to be the best in everything. So even our civil war – the Civil War – is super!

The roots of our love affair with killing ourselves in massive numbers goes back to the Compromise of 1877, a.k.a. the Great Betrayal. The compromise was born out of the disputed 1876 election between Republican Rutherford B. Hays and Democrat Samuel Tilden. Eventually, the Republicans took the White House with the tacit understanding that Reconstruction in the South would end.

Thus, America got this bargain: the forgotten one-term presidency of Hays and 90 plus years of apartheid in the South.

Heck of a deal.

An unintended consequence of this compromise, though, was the reconciliation of white America. In an unspoken handshake deal, both sides agreed to be okay with the results. Hence the old newsreel footage at the end of Ken Burns’ The Civil War with Union and Confederate veterans with heroically long beards shaking hands over a low stone wall, much like the ones they used to shoot at each other from.

Today, we look at the Civil War and believe that it forged a nation. We look at the Civil War and applaud that it ended slavery.

And we also concede that this was a contest of moral equals.

Charles Royster’s The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans is a helpful reminder of the way things were pre-1877, before we sold black America down the river for Hays’ unsuccessful attempts at civil service reform and his heavy-handed suppression of striking railroad employees.

Royster shows us how much North and South hated each other. The Civil War was not a little league t-ball game, where score isn’t kept and everyone lines up at the end and shakes hands (and then, Pizza Hut!). It was a death grapple between two different conceptions of democracy, liberty, and country. (Which I humbly submit the better side won).

Royster makes this point in an unusual way. This is not a standard Civil War volume packed with maps and battlefield strategy. Rather, it is – in Royster’s own words – one long essay. More specifically, it is a series of essays connected by Royster’s “intent to look as carefully as I could at the paths by which Americans came to seek more destructive war, the diverse results they anticipated from it, and the ways they understood what they had done.”

There are nine different chapters, each one rather self contained. Like a short story collection, some chapters are better than others.

The book gets off to a blazing (pun: premeditated) start with an exceptionally good chapter on Sherman’s torching of the city of Columbia, South Carolina. Known to be the birthplace of secession, Union soldiers felt little tenderness towards South Carolina, and it showed:

The flames leaned eastward under the steady blast of wind, creeping along Washington Street and other parallel cross streets, toward the churches and the academies. Pulsing globes of fire rose from burning buildings, rushed through the air, and seized more structures. Frantic chickens and pigs, caught by the flames, burned alive. Bursting bales of cotton threw masses of crackling fibers into the air. Burning shingles and fiery debris followed the upward draft of black smoke and hot air hundreds of feet above the city, then fell on roofs, in gardens, and among people in the streets. The branches of shade trees, now bare and black, writhed and snaked under the intense pressure of the heat and the wind.

This thorough dissection of a relatively unheralded event neatly demonstrates Royster’s larger point. A later chapter on the battle of Kennesaw Mountain (the only chapter focused solely on one battle) is a little less successful in this regard.

The two titans in Royster’s pages, his avatars of the destructive war, are Sherman and Jackson. Each man gets a biographical chapter that clearly and smartly charts the trajectory of their lives. (The book is well sourced). And each man gets a valedictory chapter (Sherman’s is necessarily longer).

Jackson is as famous as Sherman, but it is interesting to see him bound to Sherman as card-carrying bringer of doom. Old Stonewall is so mythologized that we tend to forget that he openly wished to kill prisoners-of-war, rather than allow them to surrender.

I’ve read enough about Stonewall Jackson to tide me over. Sherman is the far more interesting of the two men. He is known far and wide for his (unoriginal) observation that “war is hell.” Far more fascinating than his seeming paradoxical behavior (bemoaning war’s cost while bringing down the thunder) is his mindset. Sherman was a pessimistic prophet of progress, devoted to ending the war so “we can soon bring order out of chaos, and prosperity out of ruin and destruction.”

Sherman’s definition made war a realm where anything was conceivable – seizing property, deporting the enemy, exterminating a resisting populace…While he argued on one hand that war’s limits consisted only in the victor’s discretion, on the other he ascribed the violence that did occur not to governments’ choices but to war’s imperative.

As I mentioned earlier, this is not a typical Civil War book. It follows no chronology. It has not narrative. It is written and arranged to evoke themes, some of them on the esoteric side. For anyone fatigued from standard battle histories – or even political histories – The Destructive War is a wonderful change of pace.

The Destructive War is about Americans hating each other, fighting each other, killing each other, in ways that seemed unimaginable when the Civil War began. Today, that blood-dimmed tide has receded, and we mostly see only the good that came from war: the end of slavery, the rebinding of the nation.

That process was already well under way when Sherman died in 1891. One of his pallbearers was his confederate adversary Joseph E. Johnson. According to legend, Johnson refused to put on his hat as a sign of respect. One month later he caught a cold and died.

[Eric Byrd · Rating 5 out of 5]

France’s “Late Romantic” agony (or whatever you want to call it) and the North’s victory in the American Civil War are for me the main events of the mid nineteenth century; so, Flaubert and Baudelaire, and Grant and Sherman as memoirists. And no two camps of writers were ever more opposed: on one side the enchantment of decadence, proud melancholy, glorious pessimism, complete alienation from public life, connoisseurship of futility, of ruined civilizations and the holes in whorehouse sheets (always a source of reverie for Flaubert) – and an almost consuming hatred for the hustling bourgeoisie and its religion of Progress and Human Perfectibility; on the other, “Manifest Destiny,” rapturous visions of railroads and manufactories, fanfare for the common man, the escape from private demons into public work, the imperatives of social cohesion and spiritual standardization for a far-flung rootless citizenry ever on the move – America as the “last best hope for Mankind” (Lincoln), its Civil War a millenarian struggle between Aristocracy and Democracy for “a vast future” (Lincoln), for “the coming empire” (Sherman). Nobody hated Yankees more than Baudelaire. Edgar Allan Poe wasn’t a Virginia gentleman but his pretentions in that line recommended him to Baudelaire as a spiritual twin, another proud spirit wandering the nineteenth century’s “gaslit desert of barbarism.”


These writers being so different, I’m always attentive to their weird overlapping and latent affinities. Baudelaire’s captive albatross, “the cripple who can fly,” is an allegory of the poet outside of his poetry, his native element – but it might also be about great soldier demoralized by civilian life, a continental conqueror helpless to run the family farm. In McFeely’s Grant the general seemed as afflicted by le guignon as Baudelaire, as temperamentally unfit for the bourgeois hustle as Baudelaire was, with the difference that Grant was unconscious of - and certainly could make no poetic cult of - his bad luck and unfitness. When it comes to William Tecumseh Sherman, though, the affinities are no longer latent. Sherman’s prose exhibits the same carefully phrased, exquisite harshness that I love in Flaubert’s letters and Baudelaire’s intimate journals. In Sherman you get a writer who blandly endorses “Progress” and pungently describes decay. His fatalism finds cheer in perfection of phrase. He’s one of those eccentric conservative thinkers who fetishize law and order and intelligible hierarchy because anarchy and dissolution and chaos are all they think about. He emerges from his private theater of imagination shaken and pale, insisting that what he has seen must not be so. (During the four-year “carnival of slaughter” Sherman, melancholic and nervous, vibrating with visions of all that could go wrong – the Union broken into weakened and endlessly warring fiefdoms – relied, almost religiously, on Grant’s “majestical phlegm,” Grant’s evangelical certainty of victory.) In his study piled with obscure tomes Flaubert reveled in Carthaginian immolations; on camelback admired Egyptian ruins and funerary debris as trophies of futility; and in his writing matched the bourgeoisie’s cult of Progress with a cult of Decadence. Sherman, touring the Mediterranean in 1872, echoes Flaubert without wanting to:

In treading upon the ashes of dead men in Italy, Egypt - on the banks of the Bosporus, one almost despairs to think how idle are the dreams and toils of this life, and were it not for the intellectual pleasure of knowing and learning, one would almost be damaged by travel in these historic lands.

Royster writes that though late nineteenth century Americans were able to confidently develop and interlink their industrious towns “without encountering mocking ruins,” they could not altogether dodge the “300-year-long admonitory memory of having supplanted the Indians.” With characteristic ambivalence or literary detachment Sherman in the 1870s crushed Indian resistance to westward expansion even as he envisioned the day when “others…will come after and displace us as we have displaced the Indian.” Royster writes of Sherman as a thinker who integrated the Founding Fathers’ “cyclical” history and the “progressive” history cherished by nineteenth century Americas. The eighteenth century view, grounded in Greco-Roman readings, assumed the mortality of political structures – Franklin wondered aloud if the Constitutional Convention was not the twilight of the republican experiment; Washington in his Farewell Address said he “dare not hope” his unity-urging words would alter “the usual current of passions” or “prevent our nation from running the course which has hitherto marked the destiny of nations,” that is the course of fragmentation, dissolution, tyranny – while Lincoln and other Americans of the time reposed their faith in the idea of a transcendentalist nation that could survive the decay of old structures. Sherman is heir both ideas; he found room for his pessimism in the age’s optimism. The arc of Sherman’s universe is progressive, but a nation rides the arc only a short time.


I was surprised by the emotional tortuousness of Sherman’s prospect, like nothing in Grant, as well as by the nature of Sherman’s postwar fame. Though unlike Grant he refused the presidency, Sherman was very much in the public eye. For twenty-five years after the war he crisscrossed the country - riding the rails as soon as they were laid down - one of the customary speakers at veterans’ reunions, corporate and workingmen's picnics, and various boosting civic celebrations. He joked that his speeches lacked substance – they were just “a few generalities” encouraging progress and industriousness and development – and he gruffly told audiences, “I have just made my appearance to satisfy your curiosity.” It was as if Americans in those years couldn’t dedicate a bridge or open an agricultural fair without inviting this rough old eagle, with his scary hunting eye and reptilian talons, embodiment and guarantee of the pitiless force the nation could summon for self-preservation and expansion (nowadays the national anthem plays before sporting events and fighter jets whoosh over the stadia). And Sherman sought as much reassurance as he gave. He was anxious to see that the far-flung citizenry was holding this shit together – as a young officer stationed in Gold Rush California he feared that America’s loose motley of peoples would disintegrate during a westward stampede. And he doubted whether it was all worth the cost in blood. Reminiscing with an old army friend about the days when they were “soldiers battling for the life of a nation,” Sherman wrote, “I sometimes doubt if that nation be worthy of the sacrifices then made, but good or bad I must cling to her fortunes.”



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Have you ever seen Sherman? It is necessary to see him in order to realize the Norse make-up of the man - the hauteur, noble, yet democratic, a hauteur I have always hoped I, too, might possess. (Walt Whitman)

[Spectre · Rating 2 out of 5]

As an amateur “armchair” historian of the Civil War, I tend to enjoy reading nearly most any book or periodical on the topic. The great historians of the US Civil War (Sears, Wert, Foote, McPherson, Winik, Freeman, Catton, Gallagher, etc) provide the reader with a clear and concise picture of the War, its battles, etc. Unfortunately, I found Charles Royster’s book to be tedious and long winded. His writing ranged from actual battles to the occult while using Generals Sherman and Jackson as his “anchor” yet he would still stray from his discussions to topics that didn’t fit. For example, he writes of Jackson’s final hours and then decides to insert a paragraph describing the Chancellorsville battlefield which had nothing to do with Jackson’s bedside drama. I also wondered why, of all battles, he decided to devote an entire chapter to one battle-Kennesaw Mountain. He also spent a great deal of time discussing Sherman’s post war activities and philosophies. For those who enjoy reading about our Civil War, I’d suggest passing on this book and stick with the historians previously mentioned.

[Rick · Rating 2 out of 5]

“The Destructive War” by Charles Royster was only ok, and I hate giving a Bancroft Prize winner such a low grade but it didn’t make the grade for me. The book is a series of nine essays loosely centered on the Civil War tactics and enthusiasm for war of Stonewall Jackson and William Tecumseh Sherman; much is also made of their upbringing. Royster positions these two as the epitome of Destructive War for the Confederates and the Union…how these two represent the effort to exterminate the opposition rather than simply beat them in battle, and how these two also represent bringing the war home to the civilian population making it more than just a series of pitched battles between soldiers. Sherman’s March to the Sea – where his troops burned and ravaged everything in their way – epitomizes these themes.

The essays…which are not presented in a linear fashion…do not focus on individual battles but much more on the personalities and strategies of the two generals. The stories are often entombed in a mass of detail…so much so that I started skimming by Chapter 2. I liked Chapter 1 (The Destruction of Columbia), Chapter 5 (The Death of Stonewall), and Chapter 9 (The Grand Review)…the rest (such as Chapter 6 – The Vicarious War) I found myself speed reading. There are also a few photographs (interesting and helpful) and maps (which aren’t really useful). While exhaustively researched, I thought the narrative was tedious and exhausting...thus my rating of only OK.

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my grad school advisers puts this book in his "top five" Civil War books. Now that's an endorsement! That said, I struggled with this book. I think that reading it as a series of essays/vignettes rather than as a coherent whole may be a more useful exercise than reading it straight through. I felt frustrated by its disjointed structure but really appreciated Royster's writing style. Royster's text is an excellent example for historians to emulate. He embraces theatricality of the Civil War without verging into the macabre or gawking too much at the tragedy.

I can certainly see how the individual chapters would be useful in a classroom environment to read in conjunction with other texts. I have no doubt that I will return to this book in the future, but I don't know that I'd ever read it directly through again.

[Sean Chick · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think it was written on opium, because merged with some brilliance is a lot of rambling and shambling. The chapter on the "Vicarious War" is particularly representative, for while Royster is onto to something he never gets there. He aptly shows that Oliver Wendell Holmes's views on the war as lacking a moral certainty were rare, but he never explains why Holmes's uncommon vision still fascinates people. The best part is Royster's mini biography of "Stonewall" Jackson, a myth busting affair about the man's darker impulses. You can read that chapter and skip the rest without losing much.

[JimC · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well researched and documented, but way too windy. Does a good job explaining the myth surrounding Jackson and the social impact his death had on the people of the Confederacy. He also provides a good deal of insight into the mind of Te cumseh Sherman from a leader paralyzed to inaction by his misconception of the size of the enemy he was facing in the early part of the war, to the man who scourged the South and then at the end of the war would have signed an extremely lenient treaty letting the South go back to it's 1860 structure of government absent slavery.
Interesting book, but be prepared for a slog.

[Jerome Otte · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book attempts to examine an interesting topic, but in the end it’s basically just a dual biography of Sherman and Jackson, and a loosely written one at that. It’s a good book, but the writing is dull. The author seems to want to make an argument about the nature of the Civil War, but he never really defines it in a coherent way. Basically, he attempts to explain the development of total war and its effects on Americans. Of course, he covers such events as Sherman’s March and the Confederates’ raid on Chambersburg, which they burned when it refused to pay ransom (and actually continued burning once ransom was paid, and told a school superintendent they would burn his school because “he had taught Negroes” ). Unlike Atlanta or Columbia, Chambersburg was not a fortified city. The Confederates set a precedent, which they received back from Sherman soon enough.

Royster’s stated aim is to examine the war’s destructive scale. He argues that Sherman and Jackson best represent this part of the war. Royster argues that the Confederacy was by nature a destructive force, seeking aggressive war to accomplish its political aims, and by carrying a war of destruction to the Union in order to achieve its political goals. Royster argues that the Union brought this style of warfare to the South in a kind of reform effort to demonstrate the inferiority of slave labor.

Royster sees Jackson as a perfect representation of the Confederacy: resolute, frustrated, ambitious, and pious. Likewise, he sees Sherman as a perfect representation of the Union: embracing total war after frustration with older methods and pressure from media outlets. Royster, for the most part, succeeds in capturing the ruthlessness of these two generals.

Since the book is more of an argument rather than a history, the book jumps around chronologically quite a bit, meaning the book’s purported subjects (Sherman and Jackson) can be difficult to follow, and the “narrative” is far from smooth.

An interesting and mostly straightforward book ( the author describes it as an “essay”), with a sweeping narrative and careful analysis. Not so much a history as an interpretation.

[Katherine Addison · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really excellent book that's kind of difficult to describe. It's partly about Stonewall Jackson and William Tecumseh Sherman, but it's mostly about how Americans in 1861-1865 understood the war they were fighting. Royster really digs into his primary sources, which I appreciate, and his chapters about how Americans conceptualized the Civil War are fascinating. I think his title does a bad job of explaining what the book is about, although one of his principal arguments is about how and why the Civil War became so destructive---which would be why Sherman is one of his main characters. Although Jackson was also a proponent of destructive war, his place in the book is more a discussion of secular hagiography: why did Thomas J. Jackson of all people become a hero to BOTH South AND North, and what work was that image of him doing?

Royster writes beautifully and engagingly, and I found him very persuasive.

[joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd bought this book years ago. I have read quite a lot about the American Civil War but this book opened so my new avenues and perspectives on what the war truly meant - the parodoxical and violent struggle to preserve American society based upon rule of law - to the extent of killing one another to preserve a self governing union with those victims of that violence who were committed to dissolution of that union.

[Carlos · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that shows how total war was the goal of the Confederates from the very start and of some Union commanders. The confederacy knew that a limited war would doom so devastating the North was the only chance of their rebellion succeeding. Excellent read overall.

[Derrick Lapp · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting. But not Royster's best work. For that, see A Revolutionary People at War.

[Acid Braden · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very unfocused and completely misleading (the sub title that is). If you are interested in either of these figures do not read this book.

[Sandra Oldfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actually 3.5 stars. This was not what I expected it to be. Of course it was well researched but it did not hold my attention. It lost me in the middle.

[Caren · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pure drudgery to read. It’s like a lecture from your worst professor.
Don’t read it.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This well-written book operates on several levels. On one it consists of biographies of Jackson and Sherman. On another it attempts to get at the experience of the American Civil War, everything from its causes and its character to its subsequent interpretative appropriations--and this on all levels: as seen by its proponents and its participants from the lowliest infantryman to its 'leaders', the politicians and generals; from journalists on the scene to editorialists far from the battlefields; from the women at home to those who served as nurses on the front. Finally, it serves as a meditation on modern, which is to say 'total', war.

[John Beeler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal. Using a dazzling array of sources (and no doubt underpaid research assistants), Royster conclusively draws a thick line between the all-out destruction of the Civil War and 20th/21st century warfare. It is impossible, he argues, to have both a limited and modern war. Modern war is a machine that gobbles all; soldier, civilian, nature.

[Straw · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm giving this 3, but it is begrudging. I'm not sure how these disparate chapters were supposed to be linked, but, I did enjoy a few of them tremendously. I would argue that the South, for all its flaws, did not practice the scorched earth policy that the North adopted mid-war. Trying to make Jackson the Southern version of Sherman was reaching.

[Deb Gerrity · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book the research done in this book was wonderful there was some parts that would be a little redundant at times... I can see why others would not like this book because it starts at the end but I liked the approach... I liked how detailed it got about Sherman and Jackson and getting to know them personally...

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

Drawn out and rambling with some good insights. Skipped over the chapter on "The Vicarious War" and was past ready to put the book down by the time Sherman finally died. Probably summed up best by another review I saw: "a series of essays." Lacks clear focus.

[James M. · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book, while rather informative, was also a tremendous waste of my time. I'm not certain what the author was trying to convey but spending at least ten pages on the statue of General Sherman in New York wasn't exactly what I was expecting.