Extreme Civil War: Guerrilla Warfare, Environment, and Race on the Trans-Mississippi Frontier

Abstract

In Extreme Civil War the historian Matthew M. Stith offers an insightful new look at the wide-ranging guerrilla conflicts of the western trans-Mississippi, a far corner of the American Civil War where the politically divided states of Arkansas, Missouri, and Kansas, and the Indian Territory met, “a cultural, racial, and environmental borderland” that included over 130,000 people (p. 2). Stith pursues a line of analysis that has emerged as a common theme in the recent guerrilla warfare literature, the concept of a no-man's-land, the constant exchange and reversal of dominant actors in a civilian-centered area. Control of agricultural resources and food, harsh terrain, and difficult weather influenced the war in this region and the pace of war. Stith's strongest analysis comes in his investigation of the cultural boundaries in the region. He pays close attention to clashes of different styles of combat and the importance of examining overlapping areas of settlement between different cultural groups, as one-third of the region's inhabitants were African American or Native American. Native Americans were allied with both Union and Confederate armies. Black soldiers supported the Union army in significant numbers, and many German immigrants did as well, creating a different kind of war from the one being waged in northern Virginia. Stith asserts that this cultural confrontation led to a war of deep racial and political division and hatred. In this region, the extreme conditions and even the creatures of the natural environment became “tools of war.” While he argues that this region became the most devastating theater for civilians by loss of life, he admits this is difficult to calculate and that further investigation is necessary by other scholars (p. 7). Nevertheless, Stith convincingly argues that the area “mirrored the worst pockets of irregular warfare across the South” (p. 4).