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244CIVIL WAR HISTORY humiliation, economic and social despair, racial turmoil, and deprivation visited upon the postwar South. The myth "helped Redeemers convince their fellow white Southerners that a terrible wrong had been done them," and "it played well into the myth of a South beaten down by brute force, not defeated by military act"; it also made "it easier to overlook the Confederate government 's tax-in-kind and impressment policies, as well as 'scorched earth' policies carried out by the rebel army" (219). The economic disaster that befell the South after the war was not due to the destruction of various tangible property by Federal troops but rather to the emancipation of the slaves ("which wiped out billions of dollars in Southern wealth") and the worthlessness of the Confederate scrip and notes that so many Southerners had purchased with their life's savings. "Both, of course, could be better traced to the South's decision to secede—and so begin the war—than to anything Union soldiers did" (220). The text of The Hard HandofWar flows with the chronology, precision, and rationale of a well-written legal brief. Though his arguments may be discomforting to some who wish to cling to traditional, even if discredited, ideas about the behavior of U.S. troops in the occupied areas, Mark Grimsley presents an irrefutable argument that the primary goal of the Federal government was at all times the restoration of the Union, not the devastation of the South. The political logic behind the North's war effort grew out of and was indistinguishable from a deep sense of moral justice—that despite the mandates of military necessity, pity should be shown to the innocent, and even the guilty should suffer only to a degree proportionate with their offense. In making his claims, Grimsley draws comparisons to earlier European wars and cites the testimony of numerous Union soldiers and Southern civilians alike. The result is a wellreasoned and elegantly written monograph that will take its place as one of the more important works about the Civil War to appear in years. David E. Long East Carolina University Robert E. Lee, a Biography. By Emory M. Thomas. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. Pp. 417· $30.00.) In the final episode of Ken Burns's epic film series on the Civil War, a segment on the apotheosis of Robert E. Lee asserts that in spite ofhis deification, Robert E. Lee nevertheless managed to keep his inner self hidden from the "picklocks of biographers." At least he did until now. Emory Thomas. Regent's Professor of History at the University of Georgia, has authored a genuine biography—a book that focuses equally on Robert E. Lee the man and Robert E. Lee the general. Sixty years ago, in his massive four-volume R. E. Lee, Douglas Southall Freeman committed four times as many pages (1,600) to Lee's generalship during the Civil War as he did to Lee's BOOK REVIEWS245 life before the war (400). Thomas, by contrast, devotes almost exactly the same number of pages ( 1 80) to the fifty-four years of Lee's life before the war as he does on the four years of war. Of course Freeman's shadow hangs over any study of Lee, including this one. It was due in part to Freeman's uncritical paeon of praise for his subject that Lee became a larger-than-life historical figure, a man who was not quite mortal, indeed, a god among men. So completely did Freeman's judgment dominate Civil War biography that, in a curious historical transmogrification, Thomas's own adviser in graduate school, Frank Vandiver, told his students that "Douglas Freeman is god." Thomas is acutely aware of this weighty legacy, and he is respectful of it. At the very outset of his work he makes a deliberate reference to his boyhood in Richmond, where at 8: 15 every morning his family would listen in rapt silence to Freeman's radio commentary on contemporary issues before starting the day's business. Nevertheless, Thomas approaches his work with the reasonable assumption that Lee was mortal, and he sets out to determine what kind of...

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