Fighting Means Killing

Hardcover, 294 pp© 2018 by the University Press of Kansas Proceeds from this book sale go towards the AUSA Scholarship Fund War means fighting, and fighting means killing.” Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest famously declared.The Civil War was fundamentally a matter of Americans killing Americans. This undeniable reality is what Jonathan Steplyk explores in Fighting Means Killing the first book-length study of Union and Confederate soldiers’ attitudes toward, and experiences of, killing in the Civil War.Drawing upon letters, diaries, and postwar reminiscences, Steplyk examines what soldiers and veterans thought about killing before, during, and after the war. How did these soldiers view sharpshooters? How about hand-to-hand combat? What language did they use to describe killing in combat? What cultural and societal factors influenced their attitudes? And what was the impact of race in battlefield atrocities and bitter clashes between white Confederates and black Feder