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

2016; Southern Historical Association; Volume: 82; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/soh.2016.0117

2325-6893

Elizabeth R. Varon,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Reviewed by: After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War by Gregory P. Downs Elizabeth R. Varon After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War. By Gregory P. Downs. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2015. Pp. [x], 342. $32.95, ISBN 978-0-674-74398-4.) Gregory P. Downs’s provocative book makes a compelling case for the centrality of the Union army in the process of emancipation, and the centrality of the issue of war powers—their use and abuse—to postwar debates over Reconstruction. Downs begins by explaining that the Union government faced a dilemma after General Robert E. Lee’s surrender: it could not declare the war at an end, and victory complete, without forfeiting the extraconstitutional war powers that it needed to realize the promise of emancipation and to protect freedpeople. Congressional Republicans sought to resolve this dilemma, legalistically and rhetorically, by pressing the case that the United States must continue to operate on a war footing, sustaining an occupation of the South in which martial law superseded local civil authorities. Congress’s own war powers allowed it to regulate the military, and it extended to the army the authority to make and void labor contracts, to adjudicate freedpeople’s complaints, to try civilians in courts-martial or military commissions, to monitor newspapers, to ban the sale of liquor and require permits for gun ownership, to arrest and punish outlaws, to override oppressive state laws, and to displace recalcitrant local officials. President Andrew Johnson at first saw the necessity for the extension of martial law, and for a time, a hybrid system of governance prevailed in which Johnson’s provisional governors shared power with the military commanders the army had assigned to each state. Even as it demobilized and the number of Union troops in the South significantly decreased, the army also spread out, “flinging tens of thousands of soldiers into nearly 400 outposts” (p. 89). But by the winter of 1865, Johnson and Congress were at odds. The president was eager to shift the balance of power away from the military and toward the civil governments he had sponsored. Congress’s refusal to seat representatives from the rebel states was a strategy of delay, Downs notes, the purpose of which was to preserve the period of legal limbo in which the U.S. government could exercise war powers in the South, and to buy time until constitutional protections for the freedpeople could be devised and instituted. Johnson fought back, declaring, in April and again in August 1866, that the insurrection was at an end, lifting the suspension of habeas corpus, vetoing bills intended to protect the freedpeople, and drawing down the number of Union troops in the South. However, Republicans coalesced around black voting rights as the centerpiece of their own Reconstruction plans, and the faction led by Thaddeus Stevens insisted that “even after enfranchisement rights would continue to depend upon force” (p. 162). But military Reconstruction did not increase the size of the army: in the fall of 1867, a Union force of 20,000 was policing a 750,000-square-mile region inhabited by 9 million people, with soldiers fanning out in detachments of five to fifteen men to take on insurgent rebels. But the revived occupation did extend the army’s reach “to recreate a geographically expansive sense of national sovereignty” (p. 189). The number of military outposts in the South, which had declined in 1866, climbed again in 1867, providing refuges and resources for blacks and white loyalists. Downs offers a forceful reminder that the occupation was at the heart of the familiar debates and developments of Reconstruction: the military’s [End Page 450] renewed presence both made possible the creation of new state governments that could return representatives to Congress and escalated the paramilitary resistance of white supremacist groups. As southern states were restored to the Union, the tools of occupation frayed, with Congress and the army no longer able to justify or to enforce military rule. The state of Georgia remained a holdout: the persistence of insurrectionary violence there prompted President Ulysses S. Grant to return the state to military supervision in 1869. Congress debated...