| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Ben H. Severance. Tennessee's Radical Army: The State Guard and Its Role in Reconstruction, 1867–1869. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. 2005. Pp. xviii, 327. $35.00.

This is a narrowly focused study with potentially broad implications for our understanding of the Reconstruction era. Ben H. Severance presents a careful, persuasive assessment of the activity and effectiveness of Tennessee's state militia during the brief period of Republican ascendancy in that state in the aftermath of the Civil War. His immediate goal is to challenge longstanding views of Tennessee's short-lived State Guard as either irrelevant and ineffective or as the oppressive tool of Radical Republican despotism. He argues that the Guard was "remarkably effective at enforcing the Reconstruction policies" of Republican Governor William G. Brownlow. Furthermore, it did so within the law and, on the whole, with "a marked degree of discipline and restraint" (p. xvii). More broadly, Severance posits that Tennessee can serve as a case study of "force politics in action" (p. xiii), and in contending that the militia was largely successful there, he hopes to "reopen the question of whether a more forceful military-style Reconstruction" (p. xvi) might have succeeded across the South.

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