ABSTRACT
The assertion that the United States insisted on unconditional surrender in the Civil War can be quickly proven wrong. Grant's terms at Fort Donelson were not those of Abraham Lincoln in Washington. The attribution of the concept of unconditional surrender to Lincoln has gained prominence only recently in serious historical writing, but the idea in which it is rooted, that of the Civil War as a total war, has been around a long while. Surely any idea about the military conduct of the Civil War that has been championed by Williams, Catton, McPherson, and Paludan, that is embodied in the Oxford History of the United States and in the New American Nation series, can fairly be called accepted wisdom on the subject. The idea of total war embodies a rare quality among interpretations of the American Civil War: it is without sectional bias.
