Military Review English Edition July-August 2015 | Page 119

BOOK REVIEWS Reunion. The author does not intend for this New History of Reconstruction to replace other works, especially Eric Foner’s massive study of the period. However, by focusing primarily on the political aspects of reconstruction and placing them in the context of the events of the era, he outlines the key facts, frustrations, and failures of the “post-war” program for the modern officer. Summers begins with wartime reconstruction and the evolving policies toward occupying and governing border and rebellious states. Lincoln ultimately adopted a policy to rapidly return states to civil authority by accepting government based on only a loyal 10 percent of the electorate. His critics rightly observed that this was too narrow of a portion of the electorate to be sustained without military support. This proved all too true by the end of 1865. President Johnson required only a grudging acceptance of the Thirteenth Amendment, and a largely insincere profession of loyalty thus enabled the former rebels to quickly use the courts and legislatures to suppress the freedmen and punish Unionists. Slowly and reluctantly, the Republicans realized the Union victory would be lost if something more drastic were not done. Over the vetoes of the president, Congress passed a series of acts that renewed the military occupation of the South and set requirements for a return to full statehood. The GOP won the fight with Johnson over reconstruction policy and control of the army of occupation but, unfortunately, this did not produce a successful reconstruction of the South nor the acceptance of the civil rights of black Americans. Summers describes how the spirit of white southern resistance never ended. Their acceptance of congressional requirements was never more than tactical or temporary. The southern Democrats were also quite willing to use intimidation and violence to obstruct and overthrow “reconstruction.” Reflecting Gary Gallagher’s argument in The Union War, the author reminds readers that for the Union generation that fought the war, it was not about ending slavery but was about restoring the Union. Thus, most northerners were more concerned with reconstructing the Union than with reconstructing the social and political landscape of the South—much less guaranteeing equal rights for the former slaves . MILITARY REVIEW  July-August 2015 Because the nation sacrificed regional “peace” for racial justice, Summers takes the long view in judging the success of reconstruction. The Union was restored and slavery was ended, but it took nearly a century for the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to be enforced as intended. This American story should remind military officers that stability is often fragile, and it can be temporary, and reconstructing a society is a very long-term effort. Finally, no history can tell the complete story, and Summers’ impressive overview has little room for personal stories of military officers during reconstruction. For the accounts of several largely unsung heroes, such as Adelbert Ames, Lewis Merrill, and even James Longstreet, I also recommend The Bloody Shirt: Terror after the Civil War by Stephen Budiansky. Donald B. Connelly, Ph.D., Fort Leavenworth, Kansas THE GREAT WAR AND THE ORIGINS OF HUMANITARIANISM, 1918-1924 Bruno Cabanes, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2014, 397 pages I n this scholarly monograph, Bruno Cabanes, professor of history at The Ohio State University, argues that the aftermath of the First World War marked “a decisive turning point in the redefinition of humanitarianism” from a form of charity work to an assertion of humanitarian rights. Previously, European and American humanitarians worked to ease suffering and were driven by a Christian-based ethic of empathy. In this effort, the nation-state often played a critical role in delivering aid. But the devastating consequences of World War I—hundreds of thousands of refugees, many veterans suffering from severe psychological or physical distress, famines and epidemics, and the collapse of the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman empires—were so severe that nation-states could no longer solve these problems themselves. Humanitarians addressed these challenges by emphasizing transnational approaches to activism. Beyond practical considerations, Cabanes argues that the postwar assertion of humanitarian rights “became 117