Fighting means killing : Civil War soldiers and the nature of combat /
"War means fighting, and fighting means killing," Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest famously declared. At its core, the Civil War involved Americans killing Americans. Regardless of the moral lens through which one views the conflict, that truth remains. Relying heavily...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Lawrence :
University Press of Kansas,
[2018]
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| Summary: | "War means fighting, and fighting means killing," Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest famously declared. At its core, the Civil War involved Americans killing Americans. Regardless of the moral lens through which one views the conflict, that truth remains. Relying heavily on the wartime letters and diaries and postwar reminiscences of soldiers and veterans, Jonathan Steplyk explores Union and Confederate attitudes about, and experiences of, killing in combat, and contends that the majority of soldiers positively affirmed and accepted killing the enemy as part of their military duty and a necessity for their respective causes to prevail. Steplyk examines the cultural and societal factors that influenced soldiers' attitudes toward killing prior to and during the war, the various ways soldiers experienced killing in battle, the terms and turns of phrase that soldiers used to describe killing in combat, killing that transgressed the laws of war and the impact of race and racial attitudes on killing. Fighting Means Killing is the first book-length treatment of the nature of killing in Civil War combat, and bridges the gap between military and social history. |
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| Physical Description: | x, 294 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780700626281 070062628X |