Fighting Means Killing: Civil War Soldiers and the Nature of Combat

Winner: Richard W. Ulbrich Award

“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, ...