Across a career spanning more than four decades, historian Daniel E. Sutherland worked to render more legible the lived complexities of the U.S. Civil War. From a campaign study to a community history, from a pioneering survey of guerrilla warfare to important studies of carpetbaggers and Unionists, Sutherland’s innovative approaches to the Civil War mapped anew the human topography of the conflict. Now, an august roster of Sutherland’s former doctoral students, collaborators, co-authors and colleagues have assembled this festschrift in his honor. Organized around the diverse array of “communities” that animated Sutherland’s scholarship, these essays—individually and collectively—tally important arguments about what it meant to live, feel, and experience the Civil War. Adding to the volume’s significance and appeal, nearly every essay approaches the conflict from a remote or understudied space.
The editors present six pairs of essays. Lesley J. Gordon and Eric P. Totten probe the contours of regimental communities. Gordon spotlights the 126th New York Volunteer Infantry, a unit tarnished by stinging allegations of cowardice after its capture at Harpers Ferry in September 1862. Though the regiment redeemed itself the following summer with a defiant stand along Gettysburg’s Cemetery Ridge, the veterans well maintained the memory of their earlier misfortune. Gordon provocatively speculates these efforts may have functioned as “a sort of coping mechanism for the traumas of war” (21). Totten’s essay takes as its subject the 4th New Hampshire, harvested from a half dozen “politically divided” counties in the Granite State. Teeming with men who espoused “constitutionally conservative, antiabolitionist, and nativist beliefs,” the unit stoked fresh controversy when it came face to face with enslaved refugees during its occupation of Saint Augustine (29).
Taking its cue from Sutherland’s 1990 brief on behalf of community studies, Madeleine C. Forrest’s essay studies the experience of war in Fauquier County, Virginia, where white civilian women opened another front beyond the conventional battlefield (52). Matthew M. Stith, meanwhile, considers how the local community and natural environment became entwined in the experience of prisoners at Camp Ford in Tyler, Texas. Although the “largest prisoner-of-war (POW) camp west of the Mississippi River,” Camp Ford’s history has been largely neglected, even amid a recent resurgence of Civil War prison studies (63).
Two essays on the internecine conflicts intrinsic to border communities demonstrate how the war annexed everyday life beyond the mobilization of men and supplies. “In many parts of the United States,” observes contributor Christopher Phillips, “communities went to war. On the middle border, the Civil War came to communities” (84). Like a military historian charting the movement of embattled brigades, Phillips maps the fault lines of communities that, “rent by partisan divisions,” went to war with themselves as the nation tore itself apart (89). If the rebellion reanimated “old feuds” in middle border communities, then an enduring allegiance to the Whig Party and the spirit of compromise likewise informed how “reluctant Yankees” responded to secession and war in Kentucky’s Lower Green River Country. This is the region at the heart of Scott A. Tarnowieckyi’s essay (90).
In one of the volume’s standout chapters, Lorien Foote further collapses the fictive divide between the home front and battle front. Building on concepts pioneered by the military historians John A. Lynn and Holly A. Mayer, Foote’s essay turns to the Sea Islands in the U.S. Department of the South, where “unplanned cooperation between local African Americans and U.S. forces” created “hybrid communities” (121). The “social networks” and mutual aid supplied by white and Black women, federal agents, and northern educators ensured that “no one living on Port Royal or Saint Helena could be categorized strictly as a civilian” (125-127). Such community building is also evident in G. David Schieffler’s essay on the Black refugees who sought the uncertain sanctuary of the Yankees who occupied Helena, Arkansas, starting in the summer of 1862. In Helena, Black refugees faced withheld pay, scant rations, sexual violence at the hands of Union soldiers. They were also made to confront the whims of federal commanders; those who embraced emancipation as a “military necessity” too often regarded freedom-seekers as unnecessary encumbrances.
Next, Barton Myers and Terry Beckenbaugh probe the irregular war, a dimension of the conflict whose chronological and geographical pervasiveness Sutherland made clear. Through short biographical sketches of key partisan rangers, Myers posits the “porosity of the line between regular and irregular service,” demonstrating how men facing “desperate ends” moved “back and forth between a regular conventional war and an irregular war of raids, ambushes, and guerrilla tactics” (157, 167). Beckenbaugh illustrates that the Partisan Ranger Act was no Confederate panacea; to the contrary, rebel irregulars “turned on the civilian population” once they could no longer provision themselves, inviting “anarchy” and, in turn, “harsher Federal retaliation” (187).
The final two essays are suggestive of a welcome, transnational turn in Civil War studies. In an exploratory piece contrasting Vienna during the Revolution of 1848 and Confederate Richmond, Niels Eichhorn wonders what insights a “transnational, comparative community study of the Civil War era” might yield (196), while Michael Shane Powers examines a lesser-known community of Confederate exiles in Honduras.
Hundreds of Little Wars is a fitting tribute to the splendid career of Daniel E. Sutherland. Scholarly anthologies are notoriously uneven, but the dozen essays that editors G. David Schieffler and Matthew M. Stith have collected here are of uniformly high quality, and, like the work of the historian they honor, should appeal to scholarly and popular readerships alike.
Brian Matthew Jordan is the author or co-editor of six books on the Civil War era.
Interesting subject concept for a book. Pretty well done review considering the various stories within.