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At all events, it would appear to matter less whether the body counts were as uniquely high as we have thought them to be, or whether the fighting was quite as ruthless as we had imagined, than that Americans, white and black, fought to the death over the future of slavery and, by extension, the future of their country. The "limits of destruction" may in fact have been most consequential not on the fields of war but on the fields of peace, when the federal government exercised restraint and refused to punish Confederate leaders and their supporters as traitors deserved to be.
Although she devotes relatively few pages to it, Faust does not regard the butchering of black troops as marginal to the Civil War fighting or as merely a product of racism. She sees enslavement--its experience, requirements, and political logic--at the very center. Black soldiers, Faust argues, approached the prospects of violence very differently than did most white Americans, not only because of their sense of the war's righteousness but also because of their collective suffering under slavery. As one African American at the time explained, "To suppose that slavery, the accursed thing, could be abolished peacefully and laid aside innocently, after having plundered cradles, separated husbands and wives, parents and children; and after having starved to death, worked to death, whipped to death, run to death ... and grieved to death ... would be the greatest ignorance under the sun." African Americans never imagined that the slavery question could be settled amicably. Most of them relished the opportunity to take up arms against their masters. And as black soldiers learned that the Confederates would give them no quarter, and as they suffered more and more brutality, they necessarily fought with even greater ferocity. "There is," one northern observer reported, "death to the rebel in every black mans [sic] eyes."
