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

After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War, by Gregory P. Downs. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2015. ix, 342 pp. $32.95 US (cloth). 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. …