Treason Must Be Made Odius: Military Occupation and Wartime Reconstruction in Nashville, Tennessee, 1862-65 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS183 Louisiana before the war and the occupational structure as well as the voting behavior of the 1864 constitutional convention is especially valuable. Professor McCrary's lucid style and careful attention to detail make this book very readable. It represents an important addition to the literature on the subject, and it is doubtful that the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction in Louisiana will soon have to be rewritten. Brooklyn CollegeHans L. Trefousse Treason Must Be Made Odius: Military Occupation and Wartime Reconstruction in Nashville, Tennessee, 1862-65. By Peter Maslowski. (Millwood, New York: KTO Press, 1978. Pp. xiii, 164. $18.95.) Professor Maslowski characterizes his monograph as a case study in local history in which he has provided a microcosm of war-time reconstruction inNashville, Tennessee. Maslowski has producedastudy of Nashville similar to Gerald Capers' monograph, New Orleans Under the Federals, 1862-1865(1065). In accord with Capers, he concludes that the opportunities to experiment with reconstruction at the local level furnished guide-lines for the future reconstruction of the South. Maslowski follows the lead of W.B. Hesseltine (Lincolns's Phn of Reconstruction) by rejecting die position taken by traditional historians of reconstruction, and insisting that the fall of Fort Sumter was not only the beginning of the Civil War but also the beginning of reconstruction. He challenges James Sefton's conclusion (The United States Army and Reconstruction, 1865-1877) that the army did not concern itself with reconstruction until the end of the war. Maslowski's findings reveal that die army "was doing much more than just fighting battles" in Nashville from 1862 to 1865. The army assumed a political and social role that affected many aspects of Southern civilian life that ranged from police protection to health care. The army and Andrew Johnson not only set up a reconstruction government in Nashville in 1862, but Maslowski finds a basic continuity between the social programs initiated by the army of occupation in Nashville during die war and die social and welfare programs undertaken by die Freedmen's Bureau after the war. While Lincoln took a strong hand in the affairs ofNew Orleans during the occupation of that city and even developed a moderate local 10 per cent plan of reconstruction that he later expended into a plan for die whole South, the President gave Johnson a free hand in Nashville. According to Maslowski, Lincoln subverted "his own plan of Reconstruction of December 8, 1863" and permitted Johnson to carry out a program that more closely conformed to theWade-Davis Bill than die President's plan. In his chapter on "The Army and the Black Man", Maslowski incorrectly states that the 100th United States Colored Infantry of 184CIVIL WAR HISTORY Tennessee "contained thefirstblack men openly recruited inKentucky." Maslowski's source was unreliable on this point; Colonel Richard Cunningham openly recruited slaves in Paducah and other western Kentucky communities in January, 1864, for the Army of the District of West Tennessee while the recruiting for the Army of the Cumberland in Middle Tennessee did not take place until June of that year. Maslowski has produced a valuable volume that is occasionally elegant and always interesting. The study should be of interest to die students of urban history as well as scholars of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Morehead State UniversityVictor B. Howard Social Origins of the New South: Ahbama, 1860-1885. By Jonathan M. Wiener (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978. Pp. xiii, 247. $14.95.) In an ambitious, but only partially successful work, Jonathan Wiener reexamines the political economy of post Civil War Alabama in die thematic context of the persistence of ante-bellum planter dominance. He forcefully and clearly argues that the postwar demise of either die planters' economic power or their values has been greatly overstated, especially by C. Vann Woodward in his Origins of the New South. Rather, Wiener shows, die planters retained theirhuge land holdings and survived as a regionally dominant class by surmounting challenges from freedmen, Northern radicals, and Southern merchants and industrialists which threatened both their monopolistic control over the rural labor force and their hegemonic "quasi-aristocratic, antibourgeois ideology." As a result, the postwar South took the "Prussian...