Rebel Salvation: Pardon and Amnesty of Confederates in Tennessee by Kathleen Zebley Liulevicius (review)

On May 29, 1865, Andrew Johnson announced his policy of pardon and amnesty toward former Confederates as one of the first steps in Reconstruction and perhaps, more obviously, reconciliation after the Civil War. Historians have often overlooked this crucial but “improvised and unpredictable process” in Reconstruction, and Kathleen Zebley Liulevicius’s detailed study of pardons in Tennessee works to correct this oversight and demonstrate the importance of reconsidering the role of amnesty in the policies and outcomes of Reconstruction (1).

Focused on the argument that because the “Civil War had been a people’s war” it required “a people’s peace,” Rebel Salvation examines the crucial role local individuals and communities played in establishing and defining peace in Tennessee. Instead of considering Reconstruction as a top-down policy, Liulevicius looks at how reconciliation, particularly in the form of applying for and granting pardons, “began at the community and county stage and percolated up to the state and national level” (46). After Johnson offered his first proclamation of pardon and amnesty in May 1865, the majority of white Southerners found themselves quickly reintegrated into the body politic as long as they took and abided by an oath of allegiance. With this initial offering of amnesty, Johnson specifically excluded fourteen different classes of people and required them to apply directly for a presidential pardon. While he promised “clemency will be liberally extended,” he failed to establish a clear procedure for applications (3). The absence of defined guidelines allowed local communities to “invent and elaborate conventions that spread virally through the entire pardon process, shaping it in unexpected ways” (3). Through a detailed analysis of over 630 pardon applications from Tennessee, Liulevicius demonstrates how individuals, communities, and state officials determined who should be forgiven for their actions during the war and its consequences for federal Reconstruction policies.

Each chapter of Rebel Salvation focuses on the applications related to one of the specific exceptions Johnson listed, including former Confederate office holders, judges who abandoned the bench to join the South, former Confederate military officials of a certain rank and higher, former US congressmen; military men who either resigned their commissions or had been educated at military academies prior to the Civil War; those who mistreated Union prisoners; civilians who moved south from occupied areas; individuals with indictments for treason, conspiracy, or aid and comfort to the enemy; and those with taxable property over $20,000 in 1860. The chapters highlight many of the recurring themes in the Confederates’ pardon applications: claims of reluctant support for the Confederacy, the desire to protect family members and preserve their wealth, the miniscule and largely peaceful role played in the war, and a familiarity or existing relationship with Johnson. Particularly as they repeatedly appear in petitions in very different classes of exceptions, the author explains clearly how and why petitioners relied on these familiar stories in an effort to be granted a pardon. But the most important theme, Liulevicius argues, is the communal nature of the war and, therefore, the pardon process. As friends and acquaintances offered their endorsements of petitioners in letters of recommendation included with pardon applications, they demonstrated how communities grappled with understandings of loyalty and reconciliation. Despite Johnson’s plan for amnesty and pardon not requiring letters of recommendation, “the process organically evolved and broadened to include gathering signatures and testimonials from neighbors” and the application and approval process became one “marked by nonstop communal attentiveness to its development and outcomes” (255). These examples of how “encounters with given realities” in a local context shaped presidential policies reveal how quickly neighbors and communities were ready to reintegrate former Confederates after the war and ultimately, helped doom Reconstruction (24).

The emphasis on the communal nature of the pardon process is not Rebel Salvation’s only contribution to the scholarship on Reconstruction and amnesty. As Liulevicius notes, previous scholarship has offered important insights into the process, but...