| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War. By Harry S. Stout. (New York: Viking, 2006. xxiv, 552 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-670-03470-3.)

Harry S. Stout wants a moral accounting for the Civil War. He uses just war theory to ask at what price was victory if it cost the nation its very soul. To find out, he examines the thinking and practice of civilian and military leaders on both sides of the conflict, measuring their moral compass by their willingness to respect the just war principles of proportionality and discrimination as the war ground on and the casualties mounted. By his reckoning, the war's harvest of death was unconscionably high and even unnecessary because northern and southern leaders grew so morally numb by waging total war that deliberately targeted civilians and demanded too much of soldiers. In the end, even the "good" of emancipation could not wholly compensate for the moral failures of both the victor and the vanquished. Worse, the two sides hardly understood the Faustian bargain of using any means to win in God's name. Northerners deluded themselves, and history, by drawing on the sanctifying blood of Union victory to form a civil religion that anointed the nation as God's chosen land to be defended by any means and at all costs. Southerners likewise created their own myths by casting the defeated Confederacy as a noble cause that fought to keep God's kingdom free from fanaticism.

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