Between Surrender and Peace When did the Civil War end? The answer mythologized in American memory-and one that might escape the red pen of hasty blue book graders-is April 9, 1865, the date of the famous meeting at Appomattox between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. Not so fast, Gregory Downs cautions in this impressive and wide-ranging book. The difficulty is not merely that other Confederate armies remained in the field, and that Jefferson Davis, though in flight, still claimed the powers of the Confederate presidency. More fundamentally, the problem lies in a distinction that Grant emphasized when he told Lee that their discussions could embrace surrender but not peace-that is, the end of war. According to Downs, understanding the difference between surrender and peace-and the gray area in between-is crucial to understanding the course of Reconstruction. He deftly explores how, for a half dozen years after Appomattox, the federal government held parts of the South in a condition of "postsurrender wartime" and used its war powers to shape Reconstruction from both the top down and the bottom up (2). Looking to Washington, Downs revisits the familiar narrative of national politics to emphasize that differences between President Andrew Johnson and Congress were over more than race and the rights of states and citizens. They clashed too over how and whether to carry out Reconstruction under the war powers exercised before Appomattox, when the federal government, chiefly through the military, overruled civilian laws, replaced local officials, and arrested and tried wrongdoers. Johnson initially embraced those powers as the best means at his disposal to restore order and set up provisional governments in the South.
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