The Army under Fire

“Cecily N. Zander’s book is a revelation. Countering the notion that the U.S. Army was the celebrated agent of nineteenth-century American frontier expansion, Zander shows that, in fact, the ascendant Republican Party looked suspiciously upon the nation’s military. Deeply researched and wonderfully written, The Army under Fire marks the debut of a most promising scholar working at the intersection of the Civil War and the American West.” ~Andrew R. Graybill, author of The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West

“The Army under Fire is one of those rare studies that will compel readers to question major assumptions about the mid-nineteenth-century United States. Zander’s analysis of the Republican Party’s relationship with the U.S. Army bristles with insights about sectional politics, antimilitarist ideology and actions, the contours of Reconstruction, and post–Civil War conflicts with Native peoples.” ~Gary W. Gallagher, author of The Enduring Civil War: Reflections on the Great American Crisis

“The Army under Fire is a timely and important book that will recast how we understand the relationship between the military and politics in nineteenth-century America. Tracing the story from the U.S. war with Mexico through the 1870s, Zander explores Republican Party leaders’ hostility toward an expanding professional army—an opposition that profoundly shaped both the parameters of the occupation of the South during Reconstruction and the treatment of Indigenous peoples in the West.” ~Caroline E. Janney, author of Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox

“Zander accomplishes what often seems impossible in scholarship on the Civil War: she connects traditional military history with broader, deeper, and more nuanced discussions of political economy and culture. Her elegantly written and thoroughly researched book will change the way readers think about the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century.” ~Ari Kelman, author of A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek

“Zander here builds a strong case that as the Republican Party grew in the 1850s it became hostile to the regular army, focusing especially on the officers who had graduated from the United State Military Academy at West Point. Recommended.” ~CHOICE