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The Punitive War: Confederate Guerrillas and Union Reprisals. By Clay Mountcastle. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009. x, 202 pp. $29.95, isbn 978-0-7006-1668-8.)
In The Punitive War Clay Mountcastle wades into one of the most important and furious debates in Civil War military history. For more than two decades historians have been asking how harsh was U.S. Army policy toward the Confederate civilian population? and, What sparked the increased destruction against that population during the war? Mountcastle, unlike the historians Mark Neely and Mark Grimsley, who both argue that U.S. military policy toward the Southern population was more restrained, asserts that the Civil War's guerrilla conñict played a key role in the development of the U.S. Army's punitive war against civilians and their property over the course of the conflict. Mountcastle defines...