Standing Firmly by the Flag: Nebraska Territory and the Civil War, 1861–1867 by James E. Potter (review)

The motto on the Great Seal of Nebraska, adopted when the thirteen-year-old organized territory became a state in 1867, is taught to Nebraska fourth graders: “Equality Before the Law.” In his book, Standing Firmly by the Flag: Nebraska Territory and the Civil War, 1861–1867, historian James Potter weaves a story that provides the scaffolding on which the state’s motto is based.

Potter, a senior research historian at the Nebraska State Historical Society, presents Nebraska Territory’s contributions of blood and treasure toward winning the Civil War and how the great national conflict affected the territory’s progress toward statehood. This includes the writing of a constitution recognizing black male suffrage and citizenship. He suggests that “the Civil War years had a significant effect on Nebraska’s political, social, and economic development,” as well as its “transition from territory to state.”

The author makes a good effort to remind readers just how unsettled and remote—even peripheral—the territory was in 1861, with fewer than thirty thousand non-Indian residents and its two largest towns—Nebraska City (1,922) and Omaha (1,833)—mere urban pygmies and Lincoln little more than a “ramshackle prairie village.” To many back east, Nebraska represented little more than a road west.

Yet Potter argues that Nebraskans did play their part during the war, extolling the martial contributions of the First and Second Nebraska Regiments of Volunteers, as well as other home-recruited units.

The First Nebraska’s story (the unit fought Indians in western Nebraska as well as in the battles of Forts Donelson, Henry, and Shiloh) is not a new one for Potter. In 2007 he published, along with Edith Robbins, the diary and letters of Private August Scherneckau, a German immigrant who served in the First Nebraska Volunteers from 1862 to 1865. But here, in his latest work, the tale is expanded to present the First Nebraska from its inception in 1861 through its wartime service to its final disbanding in 1866, more than a year following the stillness at Appomattox.

In a bow to chronological neatness, Potter’s book includes seven chapters, each spanning one year’s events, beginning in 1861 and ending in 1867 with Nebraska statehood. An epilogue follows, which in its singular details is not only summative but also the most engaging section of the book.

Throughout, Potter spins a complex story of politics, economic change, martial efforts, and multicultural clashes. The author makes constant reference to a multitude of partisan newspapers, even as he cites sources that include personal journals, diaries, and letters, as well as valuable secondary sources. The book is well researched.

Yet Potter’s is a fairly flat narrative. His story of Nebraska’s contributions to the Civil War provides the backdrop for the passage of the Homestead Act and early construction on the transcontinental railroad across its treeless plains. While it could have included exciting exploits and flag-waving fights, his tale of the Blue, the Gray, and the indigenous red man remains largely colorless.

One exception is the story of Private Francis Lohnes, the First Nebraska Regiment’s only Medal of Honor recipient. Potter relates Lohnes’s spirited fight during a May 1865 engagement with Native Americans near present-day Cozad, during which he took an arrow wound to the hip. Months later, the bemedaled Lohnes deserted the ranks of the First Nebraska when the War Department refused to discharge the unit’s “volunteers.” In 1889, unaware that Congress had granted amnesty to such end-of-war Union deserters, Lohnes died tragically, scalded in a steam tractor mishap. A few more such details would have served Potter’s narrative well.

Still, Potter has written a well-researched work, one that helps carve a wider niche for Nebraska’s role in the Civil War while providing context for the development of...