ABSTRACT

To experience war is to experience force, and Americans of the Civil War era knew that raw truth better than any other generation in their nation’s history. If the Confederacy was subject to the greater devastation of its physical landscape, and the greater proportionate loss of life, the Union suffered its own grievous human agonies.Victory, the Lincoln administration gradually learned, would come only as the North’s superiority in manpower and material resources expressed itself in the force of bullet, bayonet, and shell, and in the physical destruction of the enemy-and that would mean unprecedented bloodshed on both sides.1