The War after the War

Reviewed by: The War after the War: A New History of Reconstruction by John Patrick Daly Andrew F. Lang (bio) The War after the War: A New History of Reconstruction. By John Patrick Daly. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2022. Pp. 200. Cloth, $114.95; paper, $24.95.) In The War after the War, John Patrick Daly seeks to repair an alleged defect in the literature on and the popular memory of the American Civil [End Page 576] War era. In elevating the war to a nationalistic triumph of freedom, he contends, generations have concealed a second, much longer, more devastating war that dismantled the United States' victory long after 1865. According to Daly, the Civil War "ended without a clear peace settlement," and "ex-Confederate extremists" waged a subsequent "Southern Civil War" between 1865 and 1877 (2). They battled a "biracial coalition" desperate but unable to salvage the first war's verdict of emancipation and the promise of racial equality (11). A near nonexistent federal military occupation and feeble national resistance yielded "the complete triumph of white supremacist military forces in 1877" (3). Republicans abandoned freed-people, shattering any hope of building a more perfect union. Proposing "a synthesis of new Reconstruction scholarship" (4), Daly argues that a twelve-year war scorched the postemancipation South with extreme racial violence, the smoldering embers of which linger to this day. He relies mostly on secondary literature, textured with conventional primary sources, to organize the Southern Civil War into three chronological and thematic phases. From 1865 to 1867, white terrorists combated emancipation by massacring freedpeople. Then, between 1868 and 1872, the Ku Klux Klan conducted insurgent guerrilla campaigns against biracial Republicans. And from 1872 to 1877, paramilitary "armies" waged concentrated assaults on state governments, compelling Republicans to surrender the South to former Confederates. Writing from the vantage of the perpetrators and victims of these devastating periods of civil violence, Daly equates Reconstruction "to what would later be called pogroms or ethnic cleansing" (35). As Daly sees it, "Reconstruction and its policies were failures and irrelevant" fantasies overwhelmed by ferocious racial and political terrorism (15). Though scattered with halfhearted constitutional and political reforms, the Southern Civil War eclipsed any noble struggle to reconstruct a region forsaken to white supremacy. Daly bases his hazy definition of war on the era's use of insurgent tactics, deployment of paramilitary institutions, political assassinations, and insurrections against governing legitimacy. There is little doubt that nonstate actors fueled heinous acts of civil violence against innocent targets and legitimate state regimes. But do such episodes rise to the level of nineteenth-century warfare, properly understood? Daly implores readers to imagine an entire era in which "two distinct military conflicts were fought in 1861–1865 and 1865–1877" (127). Doing so, however, compels us to navigate the period divorced from the ways that contemporaries—particularly Republicans and the loyal Union citizenry—comprehended the nature of warfare and the purpose of Reconstruction. [End Page 577] Rather, we are bound by the paradigms and distinctions that Daly himself creates, obligated, though unwittingly, to view the period as did the old Blundering Generation school: a "futile" era with few accomplishments marred by great tragedy (141). Indeed, according to Daly, to regard the preservation of representative self-government and emancipation as righteous accomplishments is an "unsustainable" exercise in delusional "myopia" (19, 22). Such curious conclusions materialize only if we see the Southern Civil War as Daly does: a conflict that operated in a vacuum, itself a faceless character that moved across time and space, engulfing its prey as it barreled toward its inevitable terminus in 1877. In Daly's rendering, incompetent and ill-equipped Republicans simply did not have the prescience to see their moment with the unobstructed clarity bestowed on future observers. That "federal leaders seem never to have contemplated" the overwhelming use of military force during a time of peace consigned the fledgling biracial coalition to certain defeat (12). Rather than waging the so-called second civil war with the kinds of military mobilization, invasion, and occupation akin to those employed in the first civil war, Republicans opted instead for "cheap and convenient" alternatives: the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and the Fourteenth

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