| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Harry S. Stout. Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the American Civil War. New York: Viking. 2006. Pp. xxii, 552. $29.95.

In this far-reaching study, Harry S. Stout enlists classical just war theory to assess the origins, justifications, outworking, and results of the American Civil War. He finds the criteria for jus ad bellum (reasons for going to war) more difficult to apply than those for jus in bello (conduct during conflict), but in both cases he seeks to strip away mythic romance in favor of hard evidence and careful casuistry. Stout himself seems ambiguous about whether southern efforts to secede peaceably or northern efforts to re-provision Fort Sumter constituted provocations that legitimated the responses that ensued. By contrast, he is not at all ambiguous when criticizing the propaganda that both sides published as "the sacred legitimation necessary to mount a mutually `defensive' war" (p. 37). Nor does he hold back in arguing that the conduct of the war exceeded the bounds of just war proportionality. To sustain this latter judgment, Stout retells the military history of the war battle by battle—and civilian theater by civilian theater—as a demonstration of how far the costs of war exceeded the aim of either preserving the Union or establishing the Confederacy. If the narrative eventually begins to sound repetitious with its multiplied accounts of "carnage," "slaughter," and "moral avoidance," the problem may be more with readers' reluctance to face realistically the war's butcher's bill than with Stout's determination to lay it out in full.

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