After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War by Gregory P. Downs (review)

When did the Civil War end? The answer may seem obvious: the day General Robert E. Lee surrendered what was left of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox. But as Gregory P. Downs’ provocative and path-breaking book After Appomattox shows, the end of battle time, the return to peace, and the restoration of normal legal restraints on the reach of military authority took much longer than one day. Indeed, far from ending in Wilmer McLean’s front parlour in Appomattox Court House on 9 April 1865, the Civil War, Downs argues, continued for at least five years as a full-scale military occupation of the former Confederacy, an occupation without which many of the freedoms and civil rights gained through Reconstruction — including the ending of slavery — may not have happened. It turns out all those bayonets accomplished more than we thought.

For decades, historians have downplayed the importance of a substantial military presence in the South, nearly 100,000 army soldiers through the end of 1865. Responding to the widespread impression cultivated by the Dunning School of the early twentieth century that Reconstruction was a monumental folly foisted upon the South by a tyrannical “Army of Occupation,” historians in the 1960s like John Hope Franklin, Kenneth Stampp, and, later, Eric Foner placed the army on the margins of their histories, emphasizing instead the importance of much smaller government programs like the Freedmen’s Bureau. But by examining the widespread and nearly universal understanding among American politicians, military leaders, and jurists that war time persisted long after Appomattox, Downs demonstrates the historiographical significance of extending the Civil War era beyond 1865. Indeed, the continuation of war and the suspension of key constitutional rights throughout the 1860s empowered the federal government to stamp out slavery and enforce the rights of freedmen by overriding state laws. It enabled the military to force planters to offer fair contracts to former slaves. It allowed military commanders to arrest politicians, judges, and sheriffs who sought to undermine the work of Reconstruction. And, perhaps most importantly, by denying peace to the states of the former Confederacy and dictating the terms by which these reconstructed states would be readmitted to the Union, Congress ensured the adoption of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. Today, after the disappointing fiasco in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is hard to remember that military occupations can sometimes function as liberalizing forces for good.

An example of how military occupation consolidated civil rights is the story of slavery and the establishment of practical freedom for the formerly enslaved. In the spring of 1865, slavery survived. Indeed, while we think of slavery as a weak institution on the verge of dying out, it in fact remained a surprisingly vibrant institution. In the spring of 1865, some 3.5 million people remained effectively enslaved. And for many southerners, they believed and wanted slavery in some form to survive. “Slavery would not simply die,” Downs writes, “it would have to be killed” (42). And it was the army and President Andrew Johnson’s willingness to use his authority to end the war that would force the states of the former Confederacy to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment. This assault on the South’s political economy would, of course, give rise to the passage of Black Codes across the region as well as the formation of paramilitary white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. But, as Downs demonstrates, the army often stood as a bulwark against these repressive forces, wherever the military’s presences were felt.

Location of the army, then, was key. And one of the most impressive aspects of Downs’ book is the exhaustive research he has done in the National Archives to document the expansion of military posts throughout the South over the summer and fall of 1865 and into 1866 (digital maps, datasets, and full citations of which are available online...