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

In a little over 250 pages of text, Gregory Downs’s After Appomattox questions the past few decades’ accumulated historical wisdom concerning Reconstruction by insisting that the fraught period after the Civil War must be understood, first and foremost, as a military occupation. Although Downs’s approach falls short in some crucial areas, After Appomattox reintroduces aspects of Reconstruction underplayed in the recent canon.

After Appomattox provides a detailed analysis of the contentious persistence of what Downs calls “wartime,” with its concomitant war powers, until civil authority was finally restored after the seating of Georgia’s senators in 1871. As such, it is largely an account of how senators and congressmen conceptualized the extent and debated the extension of extraconstitutional war powers, supplemented by commentary from commanding generals, the Army and Navy Journal, the occasional missive from officers “on the ground,” and data drawn from an assiduous compilation of returns from army units and posts. The various machinations that enabled Congress to continue the military occupation of the South allowed policy makers to “fashion effective civil rights,” which “were by-products of martial law,” according to Downs (2). “Had Reconstruction stayed within constitutional lines,” he argues, “the conditions for black people would have been far worse. . . . Some causes—though perhaps not many and probably not the ones in service of which we have deployed war powers during the last decade—are worth grave risks. Clean hands may simply preserve an unjust world” (251). These broad claims rest upon a detailed analysis of events in 1865 and 1866.

Downs casts Andrew Johnson as something more than an obstacle to the reconstruction of the South. Downs concedes Johnson’s numerous failings but also portrays him as a new president lacking a clear base of support. In an attempt to appeal to Republicans, Johnson steadfastly refused to allow wartime to come to an end when he had the power to do so. Although he may not be entirely persuasive, Downs urges us to interpret Johnson’s policies during Presidential Reconstruction with a little more subtlety.

Downs’s handling of the army reflects a central historiographical challenge for work on Reconstruction: how exactly does one connect the national political story with fine-grained (and complicated) local histories shaped by unique geographies and experiences? Privileging the perspectives of commanders both in Washington and at the divisional and departmental levels obscures the contours of the actual occupation, including the soldiers who carried it out. Readers hoping to learn more about occupation duty in the South will encounter a few teasing details—officers murdered here, detachments run off by white insurgents there—but little else. Thus, the proliferation of maps showing army installations and tables displaying troop strengths are important not merely for their insights, but because Downs substitutes data for a real analysis of the army’s tactics and efficacy. When forced to deal with the practical realities of the occupation, Downs falters; his clunky and sometimes contradictory comparison of Reconstruction to other occupations across space and time, for example, seems an attempt to parry a referee’s criticism rather than deep engagement with the literature on counterinsurgencies.

Additionally, the failure to integrate studies addressing the composition, attitudes, and institutional culture of the army, not to mention the legal framework that undergirded military interventions into civil society, weakens the book’s impact. Might it matter that army demographics suggest that most enlisted men would have voted Democratic? Or that numerous accounts concerning the post–Civil War army point out that many officers regarded Reconstruction duty as onerous and distasteful? Or that detachments serving in the South in the late 1860s were devastated by diseases, particularly cholera? Even Downs’s analysis of returns is suspect to specialists in the post–Civil War army, because the number of troops available for active duty at any given moment ranged anywhere between one-fifth and one-third less than the total strength...