Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1151164 in Books
• Published on: 1993-01-11
• Released on: 1993-01-11
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 8.00" h x 1.00" w x 5.10" l, 1.12 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Bancroft, Parkman and Lincoln prize winner Royster (The Destructive War, etc.) shows several of our deservedly revered founding fathers as something else besides the brave defenders of liberty we met in our high school history books. Royster's portraits of George Washington, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson and the two William Byrds show them as very human, sometimes conniving, often foolish and occasionally vulgar businessmen in the midst of an enterprise that, for them at least, ended in failure. Through diligent research, Royster, a professor of history at Louisiana State University, has excavated the tangled tale of a mercurial firm that proposed draining and developing the Dismal Swamp, a wide swath of bogs on the isolated Virginia-North Carolina border. In relating the story of the Dismal Swamp Company, Royster delivers brilliant character sketches and a remarkable window into Virginia society from colonial times to the Revolution and up through the 1830s, when remnants of the enterprise still lingered on, quite unprofitably. There are, of course, contemporary overtones: any tale of shrewd politicians making foolish mistakes in starry-eyed land speculation is bound to propel the word "Whitewater" into readers' minds. In sum, this is first-class work: an elegant, entertaining account of a little-knownAand often ironically hilariousAslice of early American history. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This complex but fascinating exploration of the impact William Tecumseh Sherman and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson had on public thinking about the military conduct of the Civil War is drawn from an exhaustive study of contemporary letters, diaries, and publications. While this work ranges from detailed battle narratives to almost psychoanalytic studies of the two central characters, the author is at his best in showing how Sherman and Jackson personified the kind of war that both Northerners and Southerners came to believe was necessary to achieve victory. Royster's conclusions about the legacy of the Civil War are particularly noteworthy in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm. Recommended for college and university libraries.
- Lawrence E. Ellis, Broward Community Coll. Lib., Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Here, LSU history professor Royster (Light-Horse Harry Lee and the Legacy of the American Revolution, 1981; A Revolutionary People at War, 1980) shows how both the North and South clamored for massive and lethal action against one another in the Civil War, only to find that the violence surpassed their fantasies of mayhem in unexpectedly nasty ways. Largely foregoing discussions of weaponry and strategy in favor of individual and mass motivation, Royster ably illustrates how war was used to resolve deep uncertainties over liberty and federal authority dating back to the American Revolution. Not by accident were the two fiercest warriors of the conflict Jackson and Sherman, who ``epitomized the waging of successful war by drastic measures justified with claims to righteousness.'' For Jackson, with a Calvinist zeal for self-improvement, the war was an attempt to prove, on a national scale, that ``you can be whatever you resolve to be''; for Sherman, the war had to be brought to a swift halt before it undermined the foundations of order he had seen threatened in post-Gold Rush San Francisco and antebellum Louisiana. Royster's blend of brilliantly written descriptive tableaus (e.g., Jackson's mortal wounding at Chancellorsville by friendly fire, Sherman's destruction of Columbia, S.C.) and analysis of both sides' heated rhetoric is not particularly smooth. But he skillfully explains why Jackson and Sherman became such powerful symbols of unrelenting determination--and he demonstrates how Yankees and Rebels yielded successively to illusion, shock, ever-mounting slaughter, and endless postwar efforts to justify the violence. A subtle and elegant attempt to examine the hearts and minds of Unionists and Confederates--and the drastic means both used to give shape to radically different visions of nationality and freedom. (Twenty-two photographs and six maps--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.