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The Civil War in the West

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Adam Arenson and Virginia Scharff, who was my dissertation advisor, on the end of the Civil War in the West:

But looking at the war from the West is an important perspective. From the West, the Civil War appeared as merely the greatest in a series of conflicts that shaped the United States in the 19th century, conflicts over how to square liberty and slavery, empire and democracy — crises of authority that tested what the proper limits of the United States would be. The Civil War caused brawls among American miners in Victoria, British Columbia, and it launched multiple schemes for Americans — black and white, Union and Confederate — to colonize Mexico, or Central America, or islands in the Caribbean. The Civil War contributed to the rise and then the fall of Emperor Maximilian in Mexico, as well as the Confederation of Canada from disparate provinces.

As Reconstruction moved forward in the South, it encountered questions of race and citizenship, occupation and voting rights that were familiar from the states and territories of the West. Republicans in California twisted themselves into knots to explain why African African-Americans should receive citizenship and voting rights, but Chinese immigrants should not; the Wyoming Territory granted woman’s suffrage in 1869 as part of a strategy to resist perceived equality among races.

Put simply, one cannot understand the Civil War without addressing the significance of the West in American history before, during, and after the traditional chronology of the war. And likewise you cannot understand the West without taking into account changes wrought by the nation’s cataclysmic Civil War. Though often held apart, the histories of the Civil War, Reconstruction and the American West compose a larger, unified history of conflict over land, labor, rights, citizenship and the limits of governmental authority in the United States.

The nation’s defining debates and battles over freedom, race, land, and the rights of individuals, took place amid, and because of, the territorial expansion of the United States, at the hands of men and women who welcomed an American empire. This was nothing new in 1848: Thomas Jefferson, the slaveholding son of a westering slaveholder, embraced territorial expansion as the engine of an “empire for liberty” — though Jefferson’s fellow slaveholders more often envisioned an empire for slavery. In the West as much as in the slave South, elites demonstrated how little regard they had for the life, liberty or pursuit of happiness of the American Indian nations they encountered, or of the Spanish-speaking peoples who had for generations lived in the newly American West.

This is really where I think Civil War scholarship is going. There’s been a major uptick in books on the Civil War in the West (see here and here) and its long-term impacts and I think integrating these perspectives into the North-South narratives that dominate the historiography of the War is going to significantly expand our understanding of the period.

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