On Sunday, August 18 at 3 pm Eastern, Cecily N. Zander, Assistant Professor of History at Texas Women’s University, will discuss with us her groundbreaking The Army Under Fire: The Politics of Antimilitarism in the Civil War Era (Louisiana State University Press 2024). Classmate Tex Talmadge, a Texan himself (if you were unable to deduce the same from his nickname) identified her work and secured her participation as a guest conversant.
Even at our (somewhat) advanced age, finding new truths in the challenge to received wisdom can, and should, be exhilarating. This book provides that exhilaration. The received wisdom in this case is that the U.S. Army in pre-Civil War America was a backwater, and relatively unimportant in the debate over the expansion of slavery into the new territories and states. In fact, as Professor Zander shows, Jefferson Davis, as Secretary of War under doughface (and New Hampshire-ite) President Franklin Pierce, employed a reinvigorated regular army to pave the way for slaveholding emigration into the American southwest, as well as intervening in Bloody Kansas on the side of the slavers, and capturing the runaway slave Anthony Burns through the deployment of overwhelming federal power in Boston.
It was against this use of the professional soldiers, that the Republican Party “developed a coherent philosophy of antimilitarism, which began as an attack on the antebellum Slave Power.” This philosophy attacked the regulars, not volunteers, with whom the Union Army was largely populated. It was expressed through a variety of arguments, including that a standing army was a threat to republicanism, and that West Point produced an aristocratic officer corps more attuned to the desires of the slaveholding south than they were to the American Republic. And, as well, as members of Congress asserted during the war, the regular officers were steeped in military conservatism of caution and delay, McClellan as one example.
In fact, as Professor Zander shows, officers from West Point, by approximately a three-to-one margin (73%), remained loyal to the Union. That is not to say that the regular army did not produce general and other officers for the Confederacy. Before the war, Robert E. Lee was second in command of the Second Cavalry, advancing the national project of settler colonialism in the southwest. Four of the eight full Confederate generals came from this unit, as well as other Civil War generals, predominately on the Confederate side.
Abraham Lincoln was a moderate, and the Radical Republicans used their position in Congress to investigate, aggressively, the officers of the regular army during the conduct of the Civil War. Even after the war, the antimilitarism of the Republican Party continued to operate against the staffing and manpower levels of the regular army, resulting in a strange bedfellow relationship with Democrats, and a self-defeating approach to both Reconstruction and the national development project, now centered on the west. Sometimes it pays to face new realities: now its your turn!
Come find out more and bring your questions. Whatever your current knowledge of the Civil War and its pre- and post-periods, you will find a lot new.
Usual rules apply. Let me know if you plan to attend at arthur.fergenson@ansalaw.com by the close of business on Friday, August 16.
See you all then.
Arthur Fergenson