The Army Under Fire - (Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War) by Cecily N Zander (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Cecily Zander's "The Army under Fire" addresses two essential questions about the Civil War and its aftermath. First, what was the extent of anti-militarism in the Civil War era, and who were its proponents? Second, what consequences did political opposition to the professional army have on the war, Reconstruction, and postbellum western expansion? Zander suggests that the principal promotors of an anti-army ideology were the members of the Republican Party-the same men charged with overseeing the Union war effort between 1861 and 1865, as well as the military reconstruction of the nation in the decade that followed the collapse of the Confederacy. While scholars have long appreciated the Republican Party's anti-slavery roots, this study is the first to argue that anti-slavery attitudes developed in concert with a visceral anti-army ideology. Zander's work contains several historiographical interventions in the fields of Civil War history, nineteenth-century political history, and the history of the American West. She suggests that the Republican Party advanced an anti-army political philosophy in tandem with their anti-slavery ideology. Over almost two decades, they stalled legislation supporting the army, cut military funding, and reduced the institution's size. Zander's work counters narratives of accelerated western expansion supported by a more powerful army after the Civil War. She also advances a revised timeline for Reconstruction, suggesting that Republicans rapidly reduced their interest in supporting that policy in the South via military force between 1870 and 1872, which means the party's ideological commitment to the national reunification project ended four years earlier than the traditional date of 1876. Historians interested in the middle decades of the nineteenth century are likely to find "Republicans and Regulars in the Civil War Era" worthy of attention, especially scholars invested in the debates surrounding the chronological and geographic reframing of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Because of the notoriety of many of the work's most important characters-from Jefferson Davis and William Seward to Thaddeus Stevens and Zachariah Chandler, as well as William Tecumseh Sherman, Phillip Sheridan, and Ulysses S. Grant-general readers are also likely to be interested in this study"--

Book Synopsis

Winner of the Wiley-Silver Prize

Cecily N. Zander's The Army under Fire is a pathbreaking study focusing on the fierce political debates over the size and use of military forces in the United States during the Civil War era. It examines how prominent political figures interacted with the professional army and how those same leaders misunderstood the value of regular soldiers fighting to reunify the fractured nation.

Review Quotes

"Cecily N. Zander has written an interesting and engaging book on the political debates surrounding the size, role, and power of the regular army in the Civil War era. . . . The Army Under Fire will be of particular use to scholars studying the Civil War-era regular army, civil-military relations, and the development of federal sovereignty in the South and West after the war, and it should provoke lively debate in graduate seminars."--Journal of Southern History

"Zander here builds a strong case that as the Republican Party grew in the 1850s it became hostile to the regular army, focusing especially on the officers who had graduated from the United State Military Academy at West Point. Recommended."--CHOICE

"The Army under Fire is a timely and important book that will recast how we understand the relationship between the military and politics in nineteenth-century America. Tracing the story from the U.S. war with Mexico through the 1870s, Zander explores Republican Party leaders' hostility toward an expanding professional army--an opposition that profoundly shaped both the parameters of the occupation of the South during Reconstruction and the treatment of Indigenous peoples in the West."--Caroline E. Janney, author of Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee's Army after Appomattox

"The Army under Fire is one of those rare studies that will compel readers to question major assumptions about the mid-nineteenth-century United States. Zander's analysis of the Republican Party's relationship with the U.S. Army bristles with insights about sectional politics, antimilitarist ideology and actions, the contours of Reconstruction, and post-Civil War conflicts with Native peoples."--Gary W. Gallagher, author of The Enduring Civil War: Reflections on the Great American Crisis

"Cecily N. Zander's book is a revelation. Countering the notion that the U.S. Army was the celebrated agent of nineteenth-century American frontier expansion, Zander shows that, in fact, the ascendant Republican Party looked suspiciously upon the nation's military. Deeply researched and wonderfully written, The Army under Fire marks the debut of a most promising scholar working at the intersection of the Civil War and the American West."--Andrew R. Graybill, author of The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West

"Zander accomplishes what often seems impossible in scholarship on the Civil War: she connects traditional military history with broader, deeper, and more nuanced discussions of political economy and culture. Her elegantly written and thoroughly researched book will change the way readers think about the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century."--Ari Kelman, author of A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek

About the Author

Cecily N. Zander is assistant professor of history at Texas Woman's University.