Civil Wars and Their Soldiers in the Southwest Borderlands

For many historians of the U.S. Civil War, the causes of the conflict are straightforward: the war was a struggle between the North and South over secession and especially slavery. The war's geography is, if anything, even clearer: the fighting began at Fort Sumter and ended at Appomattox, and the major battles took place almost entirely to the east of the Mississippi River, at locations such as Antietam, Chancellorsville, Manassas, and the Wilderness. In this traditional view, represented by scholars such as James McPherson and especially Gary Gallagher, the war's "western theater" refers to Arkansas and Tennessee, with perhaps a passing mention of skirmishing between Union and Confederate forces in the New Mexico and Colorado territories. In sum, the message advanced by these historians is simple enough: the consequential action unfolded in the East, and everything else was a colorful—if distracting—sideshow.

The pair of books under review here offers a much-needed corrective to this blinkered vision, extending the chronology, landscape, and cast of characters typically associated with the American Civil War era. Both volumes focus on the multicultural and transnational Southwest, where key battles did, actually, take place, which in turn exacerbated preexisting tensions among and between the region's diverse populations, producing new clashes. In this way, Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands and Soldiers in the Southwest Borderlands are in conversation with much of the best recent scholarship on the Civil War, which seeks to integrate the West into the larger narrative about the conflict, demonstrating that many key events happening simultaneously along the frontier were not coincidental, and that the U.S. incorporation of the region marks an early thrust of U.S. imperialist ambitions.

As he explains in his acknowledgments, Andrew Masich was raised in the East but graduated from high school in Arizona; though presently working in Pennsylvania, his scholarship has focused on the Southwest, including a co-authored biography of George Bent (1843–1918), whose life encapsulates many of the themes in Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands. The author, in other words, is no stranger to the idea of the Civil War as a truly national struggle, and in this study he seeks to offer a definitive account of its "least understood theater." He has succeeded, focusing on the period between the eruption of the fighting in South Carolina and the mustering out, in 1867, of the last Civil War troops in the region. To tell this story, Masich has consulted archival collections in Mexico and the United States, with particular attention to the Indian Depredation Claims within the U.S. Court of Claims records, seven hundred of which pertain to Arizona and New Mexico between 1861–67, and "contain depositions, testimony, cross-examinations, and other evidence detailing the nature of raids and warfare in the Southwest" (p. 10). This is to say nothing of his wide reading in the relevant secondary literature, which makes the bibliography alone an extraordinary research tool.

Masich's key insight—one advanced by other scholars, but rarely in such a persistent and comprehensive fashion—is that the advent of the Civil War exacerbated old conflicts in the Southwest while inaugurating new ones. In his telling, "The American Civil War was not the root cause of the multiple civil wars of the Southwest Borderlands, but it did fan the smoldering embers of cultural and economic insecurity into flames of war" (p. 286). As it happens, Union and Confederate forces squared off in the Southwest, most famously at the battles of Valverde and Glorieta Pass in New Mexico in early 1862, when Union troops ultimately repulsed the Confederate attempt to secure a route to the Pacific. But of greater interest to Masich are the multiple campaigns in this trans-border region...