`The Awful Shock and Rage of Battle': Rethinking the Meaning and Consequences of Combat in the American Civil War

Dominated by the New Social History, recent scholarship of the American Civil War has tended to focus on internal social tensions and struggles in the North or South in which the common person (usually defined as women and minorities) is portrayed not as victim or pawn, but as autonomous agent and heroic master of her own fate, engaging in perpetual conflict with social and political elites, usually defined as white males. Where Clausewitz saw war as the continuation of politics by other means, Civil War historians have, in the past several decades, tended to view the Civil War as the continuation of social discourse by other means - leading to the liberation of women and the self-liberation of African Americans.

By superimposing such a self-serving agenda, however, this scholarship tends to overlook and minimize the stark brutality of battle, and its effect on soldiers and their families. In rediscovering Clausewitz's maxim that war is ultimately about violence and battle, we should seek to explore the terror, grief, loss and struggle to readjust which soldiers and their families experienced. We should attempt therein to understand what these people's trials, disappointments and triumphs were, and what this may teach us about war.