The Army under Fire: The Politics of Antimilitarism in the Civil War Era

by Cecily N. Zander, T. Michael Parrish (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807181409
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	02/14/2024
Series:	Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

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

Editorial Reviews

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

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 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

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

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

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