Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States ed. by Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill, and: Empire and Liberty: The Civil War and the West ed. by Virginia Scharff (review)

Every summer I receive a fresh crop of textbook review copies from presses eager to have me sell their product to my already debt-burdened students. It is a tiresome ritual, and a costly one. But before depositing these volumes in the recycling bin, I take their pulse by applying my litmus test: I check to see how they treat the Civil War and the conquest of the American West. To my relief, no textbook has left out these familiar subjects yet; to my frustration, none has bound them together. If the authors in these two exceptional collections of essays have their way, however, that may soon change.

Released concurrently by the University of California Press, Empire and Liberty: The Civil War and the West, edited by Virginia Scharff, and Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States, edited by Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill, when read together, make a powerful argument for why historians of the Civil War and Reconstruction era must rethink the North-South sectional axis around which they have organized their historical scholarship. It also makes clear that historians of the American West must stop imagining themselves as a field apart and instead should strive to incorporate the trans-Mississippi West into the history of the Civil War to avoid parochialism. Indeed, as Adam Arenson argues in his useful introduction to Civil War Wests, conceptualizing these events as connected results in “a richer, truer, and more provocative vision of mid-nineteenth-century U.S. history, one that reaches beyond North and South” to understand the larger period as “a sustained test of the limits of U.S. governmental authority and that government’s ability to shape land, labor, and rights” (8).

Born out of a joint symposium sponsored by the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies and the Institute for the Study of the American West at the Autry National Center, Civil War Wests is the more historiographical minded of these two volumes. It also makes powerful and concrete connections between the story of western imperial expansion and consolidation and the tensions over the limits of federal authority, the nature and extent of Indigenous and state sovereignties, and the meaning of citizenship in the newly reconstructed nation.

The collection begins with the diplomatic and military history of the West in the lead-up to the Civil War. Touching on familiar topics, the essays nonetheless bring fresh perspectives. James Robbins Jewell, for instance, reveals the importance of the West to the international diplomatic dimensions of the conflict by telling the unexpected story of a murdered pig and a thwarted Confederate plot devised on Vancouver Island. Megan Kate Nelson discusses the failure of Confederate imperial expansion into the Southwest because of an inability to adapt to the region’s landscape and environmental conditions, while Lance R. Blyth investigates the importance of the region’s borderland political economy to the wartime experiences of Indigenous nations there. Finally, Diane Mutti Burke explains how forced successive removals along the Kansas-Missouri border unite the region’s antebellum and wartime histories.

Arenson and Graybill’s edited collection next considers the Civil War and its uncertain endings to explain how the military, political, and economic demands of the war extended far beyond Appomattox. Of particular note in this section is Nicholas Guyatt’s insightful piece on the various Republican plans to settle former slaves in Mexico and Texas in variations on the old efforts of the American Colonization Society. These little-known schemes, Guyatt argues, reveal that “the lure of a geographical partitioning of the races comfortably survived both emancipation and the Union...