My book project, The Army Under Fire: The Politics of Anti-Militarism in the Civil War Era is currently under contract at Louisiana State University Press.

The project is the first full-length study of anti-militarism in the Civil War era. Looking at national politics though an Army-focused lens reveals how the collapse of the Second Party System created the conditions for a political philosophy of anti-militarism to flourish in the federal government. It also reveals a conundrum, as my work shows that the Republican Party—which dominated national politics throughout the Civil War and Reconstruction—combined its anti-slavery politics with deep suspicion of the army, routinely accusing professional soldiers of being pro-slavery partisans. Yet this is the same Republican Party that oversaw an unimaginably large war effort and then, in the Civil War’s wake, relied once more on the military in its efforts to reconstruct a defeated population and restitch the rent fabric of national unity. This distrust had consequences.  Blinded by ideology, party leaders frequently mismanaged and misapplied military resources. Most specifically, Republican resentment of the army warped and ultimately bungled their opportunity to use the army to achieve both greater safety for newly freed Blacks in the South and reform of the dilapidated bureaucracy that oversaw Native American affairs in the West.