Book Description

This excellent book by the U.S. Army provide unique insight into the role of the Army in Reconstruction. Within two months of Confederate General Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House on 9 April 1865, the Confederacy had collapsed, and its armed forces had ceased to exist. The systematic destruction of the South's transportation, manufacturing, and industrial facilities during the closing months of the war had ensured the futility of further armed resistance. It also made a swift economic recovery next to impossible, leaving ex-Confederates destitute and bitter over their harsh fate. The bloodiest war in U.S. history--final death toll estimates range from 600,000 to over 800,000 fighting men--had settled the critical issues of secession and slavery but left much else unresolved, above all the former slaves' civil, political, and economic status in the postwar South.In the spring of 1865, the U.S. Army faced the unprecedented task of occupying eleven conquered Southern states during peacetime and administering "Reconstruction" -- the process by which the former rebellious states would be restored to the Union. Two decades earlier, the Army had performed occupation duty in Mexico both during and after the Mexican War, but that was on foreign soil, and Reconstruction was never a part of the Army's mission there. The postwar occupation of California and New Mexico did provide Army officers with some experience in "nation-building," requiring them to draft laws and constitutions for the territories recently annexed from Mexico.During the Civil War, the Army oversaw wartime Reconstruction in areas of Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Arkansas, giving it invaluable experience in the kind of stabilization and peacekeeping missions it would later perform across the entire South. On 24 April 1863, the War Department issued General Orders 100, the Union Army's official code of conduct in the field. Drafted by Francis Lieber, an eminent legal scholar, and a panel of Army officers, "Lieber's Code" induced several European nations to draft similar documents for their armies. For all its virtues, Lieber's Code exerted little influence on the Union Army's conduct during the Civil War, in part because the Army operated under the assumption that such matters should be left to the local commanders' discretion. Given these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the Army entered its postwar occupation duties with neither a plan nor a doctrine to govern its actions.