Booknotes: The Army under Fire

New Arrival:

• The Army under Fire: The Politics of Antimilitarism in the Civil War Era by Cecily N. Zander (LSU Press, 2024).

Given how often the topic is mentioned in the literature, every Civil War reader possesses at the very least a passing recognition of the pre-20th century American public's mistrust of large standing armies and their questioning of the value (and prudence) of nurturing a professional officer corps through an elite national military academy. Of course, there were also those who saw great merit behind the nation maintaining a core of military professionalism.

Examining both sides of the debate is Cecily Zander's The Army under Fire: The Politics of Antimilitarism in the Civil War Era. It 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."

Questions asked include: "what is the role of a professional army in a democratic republic?" and "to what degree did the United States want to be a militaristic nation?". Zander defines the "antimilitarism" of her title and study to broadly mean an "attitude of opposition toward empowering professionally trained officers with political or economic support." According to Zander, those debates "indelibly shaped the course of the Civil War era" (pp. 1-2, 5).