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On April 8, 1865, after four years of civil war, General Robert E. Lee wrote to General Ulysses S. Grant asking for peace. Peace was beyond his authority to negotiate, Grant replied, but surrender terms he would discuss. As Gregory Downs reveals in this gripping history of post Civil War America, Grant’s distinction proved prophetic, for peace would elude the South for years after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

"After Appomattox" argues that the war did not end with Confederate capitulation in 1865. Instead, a second phase commenced which lasted until 1871. Not the project euphemistically called Reconstruction, but a state of genuine belligerency whose mission was to shape the terms of peace. Using its war powers, the U.S. Army oversaw an ambitious occupation, stationing tens of thousands of troops in hundreds of outposts across the defeated South. This groundbreaking study of the post-surrender occupation makes clear that its purpose was to crush slavery and to create meaningful civil and political rights for freed people in the face of rebels’ bold resistance.

But reliance on military occupation posed its own dilemmas. In areas beyond Army control, the Ku Klux Klan and other violent insurgencies created near-anarchy. Voters in the North also could not stomach an expensive and demoralizing occupation. Under those pressures, by 1871 the Civil War came to its legal end. The wartime after Appomattox disrupted planter power and established important rights, but the dawn of legal peacetime heralded the return of rebel power, not a sustainable peace.

It seems we had a perfect example of the pitfalls of military occupation, yet we ignored that lesson when it came to the wars we would enter in the mid to late 20th century. Especially since, a hundred years later, the South is still trying, and often succeeding, in denying some of its citizens the right to vote.

While the placing of arm forces in the South after the Civil War was not Reconstruction, its presence there allowed the advancement of the ex-slaves’ rights. Once that force was withdrawn, those advancements disappeared almost completely.

Downs gives a in-depth and compelling look at what the North attempted to do after the guns had fallen silent. They would rely on war powers in a desperate attempt to bring a stable government to a violent nation. How well it succeeded, and how much it failed, is still being debated.