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¿Original and revelatory.¿
¿David Blight, author of Frederick DouglassAvery O. Craven Award Finalist
A Civil War Memory/Civil War Monitor Best Book of the YearIn April 1865, Robert E. Lee wrote to Ulysses S. Grant asking for peace. Peace was beyond his authority to negotiate, Grant replied, but surrender terms he would discuss. The distinction proved prophetic.
After Appomattox reveals that the Civil War did not end with Confederate capitulation in 1865. Instead, a second phase of the war began which lasted until 1871¿not the project euphemistically called Reconstruction, but a state of genuine belligerence whose mission was to shape the peace. Using its war powers, the U.S. Army oversaw an ambitious occupation, stationing tens of thousands of troops in outposts across the defeated South. This groundbreaking history shows that the purpose of the occupation was to crush slavery in the face of fierce and violent resistance, but there were limits to its effectiveness: the occupying army never really managed to remake the South.
¿The United States Army has been far too neglected as a player¿a force¿in the history of Reconstruction¿ Downs wants his work to speak to the present, and indeed it should.¿
¿David W. Blight,
The Atlantic¿Striking¿ Downs chronicles¿a military occupation that was indispensable to the uprooting of slavery.¿
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Boston Globe¿Downs makes the case that the final end to slavery, and the establishment of basic civil and voting rights for all Americans, was `born in the face of bayonets.¿ ¿A remarkable, necessary book.¿
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Slate
About the author
Gregory P. Downs is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, and has received the university’s Distinguished Scholarly Public Service Award. He co-wrote the National Park Service’s theme study on the Reconstruction and helped create an interactive digital history of the U.S. Army’s occupation of the South. He is the author of Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South, 1861–1908.
