The U.S. civil war as epoch-defining horror

Faust marshals very compelling evidence in support of her thesis that the work of addressing death on an unspeakable scale profoundly shaped society and government in late-nineteenth-century America. I am thoroughly persuaded by her account of the impact this death had on the mid-nineteenth-century expansion of government. Nevertheless, as Faust's account winds down, Faust must surely have realized that history had put her in a strange place. The Civil War defined a generation, shaped its society and its government. But no sooner did that generation commence dying (of old age, this time) than did America recover its appetite for war. The Spanish-American War erupted in 1898, a war for the sake of having one if ever there were.

In his introduction, Stout discounts any desire to take up the role of Lord Acton, judging the wicked of history for what they were then and remain now; on the contrary, moral history is to be written for the historian's contemporaries, not with some claim to objectivity. For today, then, Stout writes, "At its most elemental, war is evil. War is killing. War is destroying." (Stout, xii) What Stout goes on to describe are numerous wartime decisions and policies that repel me and, I suspect, many other twenty-first century readers. And Stout acknowledges instances (e.g., Grant at Cold Harbor, 348) in which moral judgment flagged by contemporary standards. Stout seems to me to keep his acknowledged, present audience very much in mind throughout those selections we read.

Insofar as I have a question about the readings, it goes to the respective postures of Faust and Stout. Implicitly, of course, both must know that they are writing for a contemporary audience. Does Faust's extensive account of the sheer volume of suffering predispose her contemporary reader to grant that suffering cultural-historical reach beyond what, in fact, it seems to have had in the nineteenth century? Does Stout's explicit acknowledgment of his contemporary interests insulate him from analytical over-reach?