The book concludes with a meditation on the movement to remove statues of Confederate veterans and officers from public spaces throughout the South. This development is seen as an extension of the theory of amputation promulgated throughout the book: that removal is both a reminder of a white supremacist past and a repudiation of it, as well as a hopeful projection of an antiracist future.

Chapter 3 focuses on Anna E. Dickinson, a little-read but in her time central abolitionist and antiracist activist, lecturer, and novelist. A riveting speaker who was a major voice for Radical Republicans, Dickinson toured the country addressing mixed-gender audiences on abolition, women’s suffrage, the right for unions to organize, and antiracism. Dickinson’s first novel, What Answer? (1868), follows an interracial couple, William Surrey and Francesca Ercildoune, from their first meeting in 1861 to their deaths in 1863 at the hands of a New York Draft Riot mob. It ends with a climactic scene in which Francesca’s brother, Robert Ercildoune, accompanied by a white friend. attempts to vote in a local 1865 election and is barred by racist poll-goers. The novel takes on issues raised by the debates around the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment that were raging while Dickinson was writing What Answer? Both the Amendment and the novel take as their central theme Black citizenship, without which the losses of the Civil War, represented by the many amputee characters in the book, would have been in vain.

Chapter 5 studies the “problem of evil.” Violence is a learned behavior; peaceful interventions and de-escalation disrupt the learning cycles of violence. By 1859, Black and White abolitionists had been attempting to bring about peaceful interventions to stop slavery since the nation’s founding. But southern slaveholders were not going to give up their slave property. In the Civil War enslavers refused President Lincoln’s offer of compensated emancipation (being paid market price per slave in exchange for setting slaves free) time and again. This is the problem of evil. How does one disrupt a violent institution when, in this case, slaveholders refused peaceful means of abolishing it? John Brown understood this dynamic and he challenged the greatest enabler of slavery in the United States, the federal government. This chapter explores understandings of Black violence and Black authority (threats to the hostile differences of liberal society), the legal mechanisms used to deploy troops against slave uprisings, and interprets Brown’s interracial Virginia attack as an attempt to fashion a government that backs the enslaved over the slaveholder.

The American Civil War presented an exceptional state of affairs in modern warfare, because strong personalities could embed their own command philosophies into field armies, due to the miniscule size of the prior US military establishment. The effectiveness of the Union Army of the Tennessee stemmed in large part from the strong influence of Ulysses S. Grant, who as early as the fall of 1861 imbued in the organization an aggressive mind-set. However, Grant’s command culture went beyond simple aggressiveness – it included an emphasis on suppressing internal rivalries among sometimes prideful officers for the sake of winning victories. In the winter of 1861 and the spring of 1862, the Army of the Tennessee was organized and consolidated into a single force, and, despite deficits in trained personnel as compared to other Union field armies, Grant established important precedents for both his soldiers and officers that would resonate even after his departure to the east. The capture of Vicksburg the following summer represented the culminating triumph of that army, cementing the self-confident force that would later capture Atlanta and win the war in the western theater.

When Gen. Robert E. Lee assumed command of the Army of Northern Virginia on June 1, 1862, it was essentially an amalgamation of units, not a united force. Lee gave the army a distinctive organizational culture based on his belief that if the Confederacy were to win the war, it would have to do so quickly. This necessitated an operational strategy that emphasized seizing the initiative, even though his army always faced a numerically superior foe. Implementation of this strategy required aggressive leadership at all levels, particularly among Lee’s top subordinates. Lee secured this kind of leadership by systematically ridding himself of senior lieutenants who proved cautious in battle while forgiving mistakes, even expensive ones, on the part of subordinates who showed themselves to be offensive-minded. This “embedding mechanism,” as specialists in management science would call it, sent an unmistakable signal to the rest of the army’s leaders that they were expected to be bold in action. Lee’s aggressive strategy sought to destroy the enemy army, but his ultimate goal was to demoralize Northern public opinion, which he regarded as the Union’s center of gravity. Although he failed to accomplish this, Lee's many battlefield victories made his army the focus of Confederate nationalism, so that his surrender at Appomattox equated with the death of the Confederacy.