In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War America by Andrew F. Lang published by LSU Press (2017) $47.50 (Hardcover) $36.30 (Kindle)
If most Civil War soldiers knew only the rudiments of war fighting, they knew nothing of the demands placed upon an army of occupation. Young men enlisting in 1861 envisioned themselves in heroic battles, conquering Confederate armies. Few looked at themselves as garrison troops controlling guerrillas in the hinterlands and administering a conquered city or town. Neither were West Point educated officers any more prepared to act as mayor and judge over the territories and people under their jurisdiction. Yet occupation would form a significant portion of the Civil War service of hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers. This book offers a view of the occupiers experience.
The book begins with an examination of pre-Civil War experiences of garrisoning and occupation. The Regular Army had maintained garrisons for decades and the war with Mexico had presented an example of an army of volunteers occupying a conquered territory. Neither experience was entirely reassuring.
Troops on the move met the expectations of the amateur citizen soldiers of 1861. Men in garrison, on the other hand, looked like prisoners of a stockade to many new recruits. Author Andrew Lang writes:
The regular army came to be associated with the garrisons in which soldiers served. These small, enclosed spaces encapsulated the American public’s imagination of the professional army. Consigned to the frontier, removed from civilian life, and ruled by conformity, garrisons symbolized the antithesis of American republicanism, standing in stark contrast to the citizen-soldier tradition. Private civilians were not subject to the harsh discipline that had to be maintained in such static environments, nor were they forced to succumb to the mind-numbing tedium that permeated garrison life. Officers and enlisted men also considered themselves burdened by garrisons’ impenetrable environments. Troops often used the term “monotony” to describe their daily existence, underscoring the lack of variety and seclusion from society.
Garrison soldiers were severely restricted in their freedom, they were subject to harsh discipline and mind-numbing routine. Regular soldiers in garrison were described as automatons, the opposite of free citizen soldiers.
We forget now that professional soldiers were once regarded with sustain by most Americans. Today we rotely thank soldiers “for their service.” Back in the day, enlisting in the army was something only immigrants did. As usual immigrants took the job Americans did not want to do.
The dress rehearsal for the Civil War and Reconstruction experience of occupation came during the Mexican War. American officers learned through their mistakes about the limitations of volunteer soldiers doing “nation building” (or deconstruction) in enemy territory. The occupation also demonstrated that prejudices learned from birth would influence the occupiers’ actions. Lang writes that “Perceptions of their Mexican enemies as racial inferiors infused American occupiers of this era with a sense that aggressive occupations and ruthless military engagements against and among civilians were justified.”
The centrality of race in occupied territory during the United States War With Mexico was matched during the Civil War:
black soldiers, the majority of whom garrisoned regions conquered by Union armies, embraced the possibilities of service behind the lines as a potential tool for destabilizing the South’s long-standing racial power structure. Rather than viewing garrison service as dishonorable or unpalatable, members of the USCT wielded the power of occupation in a focused effort to reshape society… they viewed the occupying army as the central vehicle by which to alter the South’s entrenched racial hierarchy.
The first large-scale occupation of hostile territory by a United States army occurred during and after the war with Mexico. Lang looks at the experience of occupation in 1847 and 1848 as a factor in the development of army doctrine. Lang says that Zachary Taylor failed to effectively implement policies to control territories that fell to his forces. Reported outrages committed by Taylor’s men only stirred up irregular resistance by Mexicans. It was left to Winfield Scott to figure out what to do as conventional Mexican units were defeated.
Lang writes:
Scott’s vision offered striking precedents for wartime occupation, military government, and the conduct of republican armies. Future generations of American military theorists adopted his formulations, setting standards of comportment for soldiers in the field. A moral army, Scott declared, could not enter a foreign country devoid of upstanding conduct, especially if that army believed it comprised volunteers from an “exceptional” nation. Scott understood that the Mexican-American War represented a proving ground for the United States in terms of demonstrating both national strength and national character. If the citizen-soldier ideal was worth as much as contemporaries claimed, Scott believed that it needed to be confirmed in an untested environment. Military occupation served as the great challenge. Scott linked civil affairs with military strategy, twin prospects that had never before been united in the nation’s military practice.
General Scott was a student of the Napoleonic Wars and he saw the French occupation of Spain as an example to learn from them. He saw that guerrilla resistance to the French followed depredations by Napoleon’s soldiers. Ill-disciplined citizen soldiers looted homes and destroyed crops, driving civilians into the guerrilla forces. Lang describes Scott’s implementation of the insights he gained from history:
The General Orders, issued in February 1847, created military tribunals to try offenses committed by both soldiers and civilians, while establishing working relationships between the army and civil officers, who administered their localities subject to the authority of a military governor. Moreover, Scott did not oblige conquered towns to fund the American occupation; the army paid for the goods that it used and consumed. The General Orders also protected private property, outlawed murder and rape, and demanded a civilized approach to armed conflict. Finally, Scott emphasized the importance of respecting municipal governments, stressing the need for local Mexican authorities, rather than the US military, to direct civil affairs.
Lang writes that the fact that the orders had to be issued highlights the problems American citizen-soldiers were creating in Mexico. He wanted to curtail the sorts of rampages that conquering soldiers sometimes engage in, particularly when many of them consider the conquered people an inferior race. George Gordon Meade, who was also concerned about abuses by the volunteers, believed that Scott’s plan was flawed. He worried that amateur soldiers did not possess the discipline to perform occupation duties. He wrote to his wife that he was not sure when the occupation would end.
Scott also got push-back from many of the citizen soldiers themselves. While both the United States and Mexico were republics, many Americans felt that non-white peoples were incapable of self-government and that Mexican municipal governments could not be governing bodies in areas under army occupation. The hoped that the United States army would throw out the governing structures in Mexico and convert the populace from Catholicism to gringo Protestantism. Lang says:
Although some military governors…succeeded in maintaining order and cooperating with Mexican authorities, the occupiers’ racist views influenced their martial conduct. Occupation thus functioned in a twofold manner. On the one hand, soldiers instigated numerous acts of violent destruction against Mexican civilians, seeing white supremacy and American military might as proper justifications. On the other hand, troops sometimes employed more moderate approaches, guided by a paternalistic belief that occupation lifted Mexicans out of their impoverished condition. In either event, military occupation unfolded as an active process, always working to achieve both racial and national ends. Even regular army officers, who often displayed more self-control than volunteers, were not immune to these conceptions. Writing from Mexico City toward the end of the war, Daniel Harvey Hill, a West Point–trained artillery lieutenant, believed that the conflict had properly cleansed Mexico. “I look upon the present movement as full of promise for Mexico,” he claimed. “May it be the precursor of the down-fall of the present corrupt hierarchy and the [beginning of] universal freedom of conscience,” met by annexation of territory and assimilation into American culture.
The young men in uniform often pursued policies of their own unrelated to Scott’s carefully thought out plans. They justified their actions by describing the Mexicans as racially inferior. Although they were now in the role of the British Army during the Revolution, they saw no parallels because the British had occupied a free people while the Americans were occupying a degraded race.
When American occupation exasperated the guerrilla resistance, Scott ordered that no quarter be offered to captured resistance fighters.
Occupation duties turned some soldiers into murderers. Soldiers became addicted to alcohol and to the servitude of the Mexicans. Occupation changed Mexico for the worse, but it also changed the occupiers.
Although the United States Army had experience with military occupation in 1847 and 1848, the lessons taught were often ignored or misunderstood a little over a decade later. Lang writes that:
the ways in which civil and military leaders in 1861 imagined the policies and processes of wartime occupation revealed the stunning lack of national experience with military government; policy makers had never seriously considered the complex elements required for an extended domestic war of occupation. The Union high command thus had to reconcile two crucial differences between the war with Mexico and the impending crisis against the Confederacy: occupying US territory (rather than foreign territory) and regulating the behavior of white American citizens (rather than the behavior of foreign “others”). Wars of occupation were generally waged against nations and peoples who were noticeably “different.” It seemed much easier to justify a war of invasion, conquest, and occupation when “the other” possessed what were assumed to be striking traits of inferiority. The Civil War, unlike the conflict with Mexico, presented a different set of circumstances.
During the first stage of occupation, when the occupied territory was limited, guerrilla activity was minimal, and substantial Unionist populations could take on some of the responsibilities of administration, the occupiers tended to view the occupied white populations as still belonging to the United States with many of the rights of citizenship intact. By 1862, as the armies moved further into the South they encountered white Southerners who refused to reconcile themselves to reincorporation into the Union. A harder war brought a harder occupation. Local Union forces began to liberate enslaved people as part of the occupation and to impose harsher discipline on occupied whites.
While many students of the Civil War see the conflict as a clash of arms, occupation duties took up a growing portion of the resources of the Union army. Depriving Confederate armies of support from the areas Union armies advanced through became a vital part of the Union strategy of starving the Confederate forces. This could only be done if troops were left behind to keep conquered areas from sending supplies south. Occupation was also important for the protection of Union supply lines. This meant that occupation forces were needed to defend against Confederate raiders and to suppress guerrilla bands.
When emancipation was put on the agenda, occupation forces transformed Southern societies by freeing and protecting the liberated black populations of those Southern territories taken by the Union. A garrisoning strategy evolved in 1862 and 1863 that slowly helped to strangle to Confederacy, contends Lang. Lang describes the effect:
the southern tapestry was dotted with growing islands of blue in a sea of gray violence and chaos. It is crucial to recognize, though, that the Union army did not attempt to unfold its forces permanently across every piece of Confederate territory. Instead, the garrisoning concept worked only when the US forces concentrated within a city, using it as a principal zone of occupation from which to launch temporary raids and campaigns, with the intention of weakening civilian resolve.
Garrisoning had its critics within the professional military. It was seen as expensive, contrary to the citizen-soldier ideal, and wasteful of resources. They worried that detailing regiments to garrison duty would make the armies of maneuver weaker and eventually demoralize the occupiers.
William T. Sherman was one prominent critic of extensive occupation. Lang describes the basis for his concerns:
William T. Sherman approached the concept from a pragmatic standpoint. Sherman sensed, by the midpoint of the war, that Union armies employed far too many troops to garrison the Confederacy. Conquering more and more territory, he worried, necessitated increased numbers of occupation troops, thus depriving campaigning armies of crucial manpower. Although Sherman endorsed the premise of wartime occupation, he believed that garrisoning should take place only in a few select regions.
Sherman’s friend Grant shared many of the same concerns about garrisoning, but he saw it as a necessary element in victory. Lang writes:
Grant closely wedded his strategies to the concepts of occupation and garrisoning, believing that they offered the best means by which to subdue the Confederacy. There simply did not exist, in Grant’s mind, a better alternative. He believed, like Sherman, that too much garrisoning would seriously impede the progress of US armies, also confirming Scott’s fears from 1861. Yet the presence of Union occupation, embodied by formidable, strategically placed outposts, presented a demoralizing picture to the Confederate people while also serving as useful points of concentration for Federal armies. Grant deemed unrealistic the conquest of all rebellious territory. Thus, by late 1863 through the end the war, Grant subtly adjusted the process of occupation to stake out a line, rather than a region. Instead of straining to occupy an entire state, or even large parts thereof, Union forces would concentrate along lines through the states, with outposts often guarded by a river or coastline or secured by close access to a railway. Then, various detachments would leave the garrisons and temporarily raid the countryside, foraging for food, destroying property when necessary, and cleaning out pockets of guerrilla resistance. Grant’s vision of occupation, therefore, did not function merely as the fixed process, against which Scott had warned, in which Union armies remained immobile. Occupation, Grant explained, was also a peripatetic event, driven by transitory expeditions and raids.
Whatever the doubts about the wisdom of garrisoning, by May of 1863 nearly 40% of Union troops were involved in occupation duties, according to Lang. Subsequently the number of occupation troops rarely fell below a third of all Union soldiers. The tens of thousands of men involved in mid-war occupation helped level the manpower disadvantage of the Confederates.
The garrisons were a drain on Union resources, but they helped break occluded Confederate power in the regions the Union Army passed through. The Confederacy did not reemerge after the passing of the main army if an area was properly occupied.
Of course, while the officers issued the orders, it was the ordinary citizen soldiers who carried them out. These soldiers supplied some vocal critics of the occupation policies. They were in direct and constant interaction with black and white Southerners giving them an advanced view on emancipation. For example, while orders in 1861 and 1862 often dictated that slavery not be interfered with, soldiers performing occupation duties often refused to return fugitives to their owners.
On the other hand, men who wanted to serve as combat soldiers as part of their embrace of republican manhood found that confinement to a garrison stole their opportunity from them. Dissatisfaction grew and men demanded to be sent to the front. If they stayed to long in garrison, their friction with their commanders could intensify.
In the next chapter, Lang offers an analysis of the Emancipation Proclamation. While we all know that the Emancipation Proclamation allowed for the recruitment of Black soldiers, many of us don’t realize that recruitment was qualified. Here is what Lincoln proclaimed on January 1, 1863:
And I further declare and make known, that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.
Black soldiers were to be used as garrison troops. Lincoln wanted to place Blacks into the area of military service that was perceived as the most at odds with the democratic citizen soldier ideal. Here is Lang’s take:
Lincoln used garrisoning as a way to establish racial separation within one of the era’s most cherished associations of citizens: volunteer armies. Military service roles, now largely delineated by race, were used to create separate domains within an otherwise “egalitarian” army. Black soldiers would now fill the military roles that white troops scorned as beneath their status as citizen-soldiers. Based on their presumed positions as second-class citizens, the USCT were, according to the president, fit for hard labor, hierarchical discipline, and permanent, seemingly indefinite service, assumptions suggesting that they were incapable of waging war on the same plane as white soldiers. The Emancipation Proclamation, therefore, recognized black citizenship, but limited its claim based on cultural assumptions about volunteer military service, the problem of wartime occupation, and the hazy, fluid question of inclusion in national associations.
Grant, Lang contends, saw the garrisoning of the conquered sections of the Confederacy as racially defined. He welcomed the use of black troops for occupation duties. Some Union officers believed that the use of black soldiers consolidated Union control. USCT were more likely to rally newly freed slaves to the flag and to help enlist them as soldiers and informants. Black soldiers were also a tangible sign to freedmen that they had been liberated and to white secessionists that the bottom rail was on top. A black man with a gun was a virtually unseen sight in parts of the South before 1862. Now white and black Southerners could see the revolution in social and economic relations in the uniforms of the Colored Troops.
A Northern African American in the USCT wrote of his experience in New Orleans that “For once in his life, your humble correspondent walked fearlessly and boldly through the streets of a southern city! And he did this without being required to take off his cap at every step, or give all the side walks to those lordly princes of the sunny south, the planter’s sons! Oh, chivalry! how hast thou lost thy potent power and charms!” The change and challenge posed by Black occupiers made their role in the war more important to those freshly liberated than most modern students of the Civil War recognize.
Lincoln had assumed that Black troops would be in the rear of the armies of maneuver, but by making them the guardians of freedom for the liberated former slaves he placed them in the front;line of emancipation.
The period of African American occupation was, says Lang, on of the:
few periods in human history had witnessed occupying forces of men who came from the very regions they were sent to control. Black soldiers, the majority of whom garrisoned lands conquered by Union armies, used occupation to their advantage, unbalancing traditional southern power dynamics. They defied the status quo and impressed their newfound martial authority on the very society guilty of enslaving them. Reflecting the stunning impact of emancipation, their actions redefined the limited, conservative nature of garrisoning as articulated in Lincoln’s proclamation.
It was a time when Southerners occupied The South.
The encounter with the Black soldier in authority was a revolutionizing experience in human equality for the white Southerner who had once claimed to own other humans. White Union officers saw the encounters as as lessons for white planters. One said of Southern whites, “they shall take one dose of human rights all round & see how it will affect them.” As defeated Confederates struck out violently against unarmed freedpeople, Black occupiers provided an armed counterweight to armed white terrorists.
The surrender of the major Confederate armies was followed almost immediately by a clamor for demobilization. White soldiers insisted that they had signed up to fight a war and that the post-war disposition of the South was beyond the terms of their service. Civilians called for a return to pre-war normalcy, with its distrust of a standing army. The army quickly went from a million men in May 1865 to only 100,000 by December.
Apart from white regulars, the other large group remaining in the army were United States Colored Troops. Unfortunately, their mere presence seemed to destabilize some Southern communities.
Infantrymen were expected to chase after mounted raiders of the Ku Klux Klan on foot because Andrew Johnson thought horses were an unnecessary expense.
By October, 1866, the number of Federal occupation troops stationed in the former Confederacy was down to seventeen thousand men in 85 posts. American mistrust of large standing armies, an unwillingness of whites to pursue an active military course against a gathering white terrorist storm, and a belief by many Northern whites that once the 15th Amendment had been passed that the South should be self-governing. Lang writes of the effect:
Although garrisons still dotted the southern landscape, they resembled tiny islands in a sea of white defiance. The military’s once-formidable presence dwindled throughout the 1870s, evolving into a symbol of diminishing hope for black and white Republicans and inspiring increasing boldness from white southern insurgents.
In the Wake of War is an interesting book about an under-studied subject. Lang, like other authors who have touched on the subject in Reconstruction studies, examines the experiences of white soldiers in terms of the ideological framework of the citizen soldier. This has its merits, but I think that war weariness, a desire to return to suffering families, and a tendency of white Union soldiers to see white Southerners as the natural rulers of the post-war South were equally important motivators for the popular clamor for rapid demobilization at the very early stage of Reconstruction after Appomattox. Political leaders were also concerned about the sheer cost of maintaining a large military force in the South and the loss of labor embedded in keeping farmers and workers in uniform after the armies of the Confederacy had been defeated. Finally, of course, the bankrupt leadership of Andrew Johnson from 1865 to early 1869 was decisive. His antagonism to Black civil rights and his identification with the racism of Southern yeomen was quite important.
On the other hand, I appreciated Lang’s grounding of Civil War and Reconstruction occupation policies in the army’s experience of Reconstruction in and after the Mexican American War. I have rarely considered that 1847-1848 occupation as having much to do with events of the 1860s. The book also does a good job of looking at how policies that evolved over two decades worked and failed.
With roughly a third of the Union tied up in occupation duties after 1861, this is a welcome volume on how garrisons were used to protect army supply lines, repel Confederate raids, “pacify” conquered territory, incorporate liberated slaves into the Union cause, and hasten Reconstruction.
Great book! finished it last week…