Military Review English Edition November December 2016 | Page 133

BOOK REVIEWS

consolidated its posts into cities and major towns.
Thus, the army ceded control of the countryside to the
rebel insurgents. Major violence sometimes prompted
an increase of military presence, but rebellions were
generally small-scale and short-lived events.
Downs shows that Republicans, in using military
coercion to protect the rights of freedmen and women, were mindful of the threat such use of force meant
for a republican system of government. As the author
observes, “Republicans tried to go beyond the law and
yet not risk destroying the law.” This dilemma shaped
the debates and indecision within the Republican
Party. Moreover, with each election, Democratic
opposition and Northern public apathy eroded lawmakers’ ability to maintain the will and the means to
enforce federal authority.
Reconstruction was a long, bloody, frustrating,
and unsuccessful campaign against continuing rebel
resistance. The conventional war ended slavery, but
rebel insurgencies replaced it with “Jim Crow.” Downs
is skeptical that the Army occupation could have
transformed a large, organized, and violently hostile
population even with more force. The Army could
not remake the South, but it offered some protection
to freedmen as they established greater control over
their families, working conditions, and churches.
Reflecting on the coercion inherent in military occupation, Downs notes that “without reconstruction,
the conditions of black people would have been far
worse.” Reconstruction was a profound tragedy but
not a total failure.
Downs acknowledges that war powers, military
commissions, and martial law continue to present
troubling questions in balancing “dubious means”
against “noble ends.” Yet, he confesses, “Clean hands
may simply preserve an unjust world.” Downs reluctantly concludes, “The story of reconstruction’s
occupation reminds us that the dangerous, coercive
tools of government may also—terribly—be the only
liberating instruments within reach. Reconstruction
serves as a warning that a government without force
means a people without rights.” This superb book
serves as a reminder for military officers of the need
for serious study of “military occupation and the ends
of war.”

Donald B. Connelly, PhD,
Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

MILITARY REVIEW  November-December 2016

HESSIANS

Mercenaries, Rebels, and the War
for British North America
Brady J. Crytzer, Westholme Publishing,
Yardley, Pennsylvania, 2015, 296 pages

I

n 1775, the British Empire was in a crisis. Open
rebellion was occurring in the North American
colonies. Years of conflict with France exhausted the
British treasury and its armed forces, leaving few options
to the Crown in addressing the rebellion. Faced with
a nearly impossible decision, Britain elected to employ
the armies of the Holy Roman Empire to augment its
forces in suppressing the rebellion. Labeled erroneously as
“Hessians,” the soldiers of the Holy Roman Empire came
from six separate German states. By 1776, there would
be approximately eighteen thousand German soldiers
in North America, and by the war’s end, there would be
over thirty thousand.
Author and historian
Brady J. Crytzer explores
the German experience in
the American Revolution
through the lives of three
participants from vastly
different walks of life.
Here are the stories of
a career soldier, Johann
Ewald, captain of a
Field Jager Corps, who
fought from New York
to Yorktown; Frederika Charlotte Louise von Massow,
Baroness von Reidesel, who traveled along with her
children from Europe to Canada to join her husband,
Baron Fredrich von Reidesel; and Philipp Waldeck,
chaplain in the Waldeck Regiment, who served in
Florida and the Caribbean.
Ewald’s observations and experiences provide an interesting and insightful look at the American Revolution
through an outsider’s perspective. While Ewald held
Gen. Charles Cornwallis and other British leaders in
high esteem, his diary entries expressed disappointment
in Britain’s hesitant approach in executing the war.
He expressed belief that the brutal tactics employed
by the British in the Carolinas actually undermined
their Southern strategy to regain the South. He held
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