Cecily N. Zander’s The Army under Fire marks an important milestone in the historiographies of the Republican Party and Reconstruction. Zander’s work will be a revelation to historians of the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era in its analysis of the Republican Party’s early opposition to the regular army. The work presents compelling evidence that Republicans held a philosophy of antimilitarism that involved a strong distrust of regular army officers, as two southerners led the War Department throughout most of the eight years before the Civil War. Zander’s book provides an additional reason for the defeat of Reconstruction during the 1870s, arguing that Reconstruction was largely over by 1872. While scholars such as Eric Foner and Andrew Slap have also argued for a terminal decline of Reconstruction beginning even before the Panic of 1873, Zander adds another lens for historians to explore how Reconstruction ended. Her work explains the U.S. government’s lack of interest in military spending throughout the Gilded Age and into the early years of the twentieth century.

The Army under Fire dates the philosophy of antimilitarism in the Republican Party to debates over the expansion of slavery in the federal territories during the tenures of Jefferson Davis of Mississippi and John B. Floyd of Virginia in the War Department from 1853 to 1860. Davis and Floyd focused most of the army in the southwestern United States, openly hoping that the presence of military fortifications would encourage the rise of a white population that could increase the number of slave states in the Union. The army’s role in the dispersal of the free-soil Topeka government in the Kansas Territory in 1856 also heightened concerns among members of the new Republican Party. Antislavery Republicans grew increasingly distrustful of the regular army as they viewed commanders as pawns for southern politicians to expand slavery.

Southern Democrats and Whigs were dominant in the House and Senate military affairs committees from the 1820s until after the 1860 presidential election. Zander finds that congressmen from future Confederate states and in border states outnumbered northerners both in the number of members who served on the military affairs committees and in the chairmen who presided over them. Her intensive study of the membership of military affairs committees provides an important parallel to the work that Leonard Richards did with major officials in the three branches of the federal government in The Slave Power (2000) and to Matthew Karp’s analysis of the power of white southern politicians in U.S. foreign policy in This Vast Southern Empire (2016).

Zander is careful to distinguish Republicans’ rapturous praise of volunteers from their long-standing skepticism of regular army officers. During the Civil War, Republican congressmen frequently lauded volunteers as idealistic citizen-soldiers who were more effective and determined fighters than regular soldiers. Republican congressmen were often dedicated to the quick demobilization of the volunteers after the war. While Republicans supported pensions for veterans and eventually for veterans’ families as well, widespread contempt for regular army members remained potent for decades after the Civil War, animating a bipartisan push for reduced military spending in the 1870s and 1880s.

Indeed, amidst these funding cuts, the regular army struggled to fulfill its goals during the Gilded Age. By 1871, the army formed less of a percentage of the national budget than it had in the late antebellum years. The number of soldiers decreased as a result of cuts and desertions, even as the federal government demanded that soldiers patrol much more of the country against Native Americans in the western territories and against white supremacists in southern states. The army’s failures in the Red Cloud War and the Battle of the Little Bighorn make far more sense in the context of the army’s increased responsibilities and decreased resources. As congressmen became far more concerned with issues such as tariffs and immigration laws, Reconstruction faded as a Republican priority.

The Army under Fire is well-written and has a clear structure. Zander’s inclusion of introductory prefaces to each chapter provides flavor to the text and reveals the motives of men as different as Jefferson Davis, Anthony Burns, John Sherman, and William Tecumseh Sherman. The book is an essential contribution to Reconstruction historiography, demonstrating how Republicans’ disdain for the regular army underlined and undermined their major projects. The book reveals why the Gilded Age saw a rapid decline in the efficiency and prestige of the U.S. military. It will undoubtedly inspire other important works in military and political history monographs about the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century.