• In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War America
by Andrew F. Lang (LSU Press, 2017).

"Drawing on firsthand accounts from soldiers in United States occupation forces, Andrew F. Lang shows that many white volunteers equated their martial responsibilities with those of standing armies, which were viewed as corrupting institutions hostile to the republican military ethos." Emancipation and the large-scale use of black troops by the Union Army for garrison duties from the war's middle period onward added another factor into the mix. Those soldiers "embraced occupation as a tool for destabilizing the South’s long-standing racial hierarchy."
The longer military occupation dragged on the more troubling and politically divisive its policy and practice became. "Ultimately, Lang argues, traditional fears about the army’s role in peacetime society, grounded in suspicions of standing military forces and heated by a growing ambivalence about racial equality, governed the trials of Reconstruction."
"Focusing on how U.S. soldiers―white and black, volunteer and regular―enacted and critiqued their unprecedented duties behind the lines during the Civil War era, In the Wake of War reveals the dynamic, often problematic conditions of military occupation." This one is definitely going into the 'to read' stack.
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