Can a total war be a just war?

Faust’s “This Republic of Suffering” is by far the most disturbing and depressing book I have ever read. The limits of horror an individual can conceptualize before it becomes incomprehensible is reached frequently.  I have seen dozens of memorials to the Civil War as I have travelled through America and have assumed this shared burden of lose was a key factor in repairing the union.  The death totals were so great that I assumed that the North could not savour or boost of the victory.  The bitterness of death was shared and made neither side a winner, rather both lost and could commiserate the sacrifices made as noble in their own way.  Honoring the dead and memorializing the cost provided some cohesion to the new union and was seen in the shared burden of soldiering and burying loved ones.  Therefore, I was surprised to see the stories of vandalism of solider cemeteries.  The moving images of Blue/Grey reunions misrepresent the necessities of total warfare and project the honorable and romantic images of the war from a distance.

As Stout points out in his devastating Chapter 31, the cessation of the prisoner exchange led to a deplorable deterioration in camp conditions.  The necessity of halting the “honor” based exchange was the result of southerners’ inability to recognize black soldiers as equal human beings.  However, “the prospects of a quicker victory and fewer lives lost in the field made the breakdown of ‘exchange’ worthwhile and, in Grant’s eyes, even moral” (Stout 299).  A new form of morality replaced the “honor codes”.  A totalitarian equation begins to emerge where massive casualties now are acceptable when held in conflict with even larger hypothetical loses in the future if the war continues.  Once the emancipation proclamation is signed and “total war” is assured does the potential for a “just war” disappear?  Does the absence of an “honor code” insure a totalitarian morality in war?