Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States ed. by Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States ed. by Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill Michael Frawley Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States. Edited by Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill. ( Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. Pp. 330. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index.) Traditionally, when people discuss the West during the Civil War, they are talking of the Mississippi River Valley or the campaigns in Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Anything that happened across the Mississippi River was nothing more than a sideshow, with little impact on either the war or Reconstruction. That is simply not true according to the collection of essays in Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States, edited by Adam Arenson and Andrew G. Graybill. Broken into three sections, these twelve essays explore the war and its aftermath through the lens of the frontier. Part one deals with the “Borderlands in Conflict.” James Jewell, Megan Kate Nelson, Lance Blyth, and Diane Burke all contributed essays dealing with the multi-faceted conflict in the West. The section begins with a review of the efforts of Confederate sympathizers on Vancouver Island, next moves to the Confederate military campaign in New Mexico, then to campaigns against various Indian tribes by Union forces, and finally wraps up with a study of the forced evacuation of southwest Missouri by [End Page 226] Union officials. Taken altogether, these essays show how far the conflict of the Civil War spread and how varied it could be when compared with the traditional view of the armies and politics generally discussed when studying the war. The second part of the book explores how the war ended in the West and the echoes of the conflict across the region. This section begins with an essay by Nicholas Guyatt on a plan to resettle freed slaves in Mexico. Gregory Downs reviews the problems the federal government had with dealing with the competing interests of life in Texas. Next, William Deverell explores how the West served as an escape from the war for those ravaged by its violence. Finally, the section concludes with a picture, literally, of the last major Indian treaty signed by the federal government, by Martha Sandweiss. Taken altogether, this section shows how the war in the West did not end as neatly and cleanly as it did in the East. The final section deals with the meaning of Reconstruction in the West. Definitions of citizenship changed on the frontier as newly freed slaves, Indians, women, and immigrants all tried to carve out a place in postwar America. Essays by Joshua Paddison, Virginia Scharff, Fay Yarbrough, and Stephen Kantrowitz attempt to show that the conflicts in the West shaped the country as a whole. Reconstruction and the constitutional amendments passed during this time opened the door not just for freedpeople, but for others as well. These essays show the shifting situation on the frontier and dealt with everything from voting rights and citizenship, to women’s suffrage, the place of freedpeople as part of Indian nations, and finally clothing as a symbol of modern America. In reality, a review cannot do justice to a work such as this one. The wide variety of ideas put forward by so many thorough researchers shows us just how important the West is to our understanding of the Civil War and Reconstruction. After the war, the entire country looked to the West as the next great adventure, a West, as these authors explained, that was shaped by the experiences of conflict and Reconstruction. This works helps to reorient our view. As Steven Hahn explains in the epilogue, “We may, that is, be able to look at the unfolding of U.S. history as much from West to East and South to North as from East to West and North to South, interrogating centers and peripheries as well as nations and regions” (272). Michael Frawley University of Texas of the Permian Basin Copyright © 2015 The Texas State Historical Association