Discarding tidy abstractions about the conduct of war, Aaron Sheehan-Dean shows that the notoriously bloody US Civil War could have been much worse. Despite agonizing debates over Just War and careful differentiation among victims, Americans could not avoid living with the contradictions inherent in a conflict that was both violent and restrained.

Aaron Sheehan-Dean is Fred C. Frey Professor of Southern Studies at Louisiana State University. His previous books include The Civil War: The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It and Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia. He is currently editing the Cambridge History of the American Civil War.