Andrew F. Lang. In the Wake of War

In the introduction of his award-winning book In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War America, Andrew F. Lang tells the reader that “the citizen-soldier ideal was incompatible with invasion and occupation and fears that occupying armies were disquietingly similar to the much-reviled standing armies” (8). He echoes his argument throughout the rest of the book as he examines white Union soldiers across the South during the Civil War. Lang extends his analysis to the experience of African American soldiers as they joined and sometimes replaced their white comrades in the occupation of the rebellious states of the war. Unlike white soldiers who apparently believed occupation corrupted the virtue of a citizen-soldier, for black soldiers, occupation provided an arena in which they could make claims to citizenship by working to eradicate slavery, protecting free people, and remaining vigilant against white southerners who resisted Reconstruction. On the surface, it is easy to see what the Tom Watson Brown Book Award committee liked about In the Wake of War. Lang’s book attempts to balance the conservative approach of “new” military history with many of the themes that are more fashionable in Civil War historiography. Much of the first half of the book follows the methodological path of historians such as Fred Anderson, John Shy, and Earl J. Hess, with similar types of conclusions (i.e., military service shaped understandings of men’s relationship to the state). Lang adds elements to this old approach, however. For instance, he expands the chronological endings and beginnings of the Civil War, in which the war begins in Mexico in 1846 and ends with the death knell of Reconstruction in 1877. Additionally, Lang explores the issue of race. He not only examines the ways in which emancipation and African American participation in the war shaped the lives of black Americans, but he demonstrates that the presence of blacks within the army forced white soldiers to confront assumptions about their whiteness. Scholars and students of military, political, and social history will find something to like about In the Wake of War.

Argument (complex analysis) · Citizenship · Emancipation · Historiography · Military history · Military service · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science) · Watson · White (mutation) · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies