OUT WEST

The West has achieved new prominence in recent literature on the Civil War and Reconstruction. The war, post-Appomattox events, and the West must be brought together, observe some authors, to expand a traditional narrative dominated by the axes of North versus South, slaveholding versus nonslaveholding, and United States versus Confederacy. What is needed, they believe, is a more comprehensive analytical framing that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, includes Native Americans as well as black and white residents, encompasses borderlands with Canada and Mexico, and erases the usual chronological limits.11

Some definitions are necessary. “The West” as understood during the mid-nineteenth century could be expansive. Abraham Lincoln and U. S. Grant were known as “western” men, and during the Grand Review in May 1865, many observers drew distinctions between the western soldiers in Sherman’s armies, most of whom hailed from what we call the Midwest, and eastern men in the Army of the Potomac. Similarly, the Iron Brigade, with regiments from Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin, proudly embraced its reputation as the only all-western brigade in the Army of the Potomac. The Western Theater extended from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River and from the Ohio River to the Gulf of Mexico. The Trans-Mississippi Theater, like the Western Theater a subset of the larger West, took in everything from the Mississippi River to the Pacific and from Canada to Mexico.

What most modern Americans imagine as “the West” would include the Civil War–era territories beyond the 100th meridian—everything from eastern Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas to the Pacific coast. Thanks in significant measure to Hollywood’s influence, this is the West associated in popular memory with gold rushes in California and Colorado, the final episodes of the long conflict between Native Americans and the U.S. Army, the building of transcontinental railroads, outlaws and lawmen in frontier towns, sodbusters and cattlemen, and the massive migration of white emigrants from eastern to western areas.

How should these various Wests fit into the history of the Civil War era? No one can dispute the West’s centrality to secession and the coming of conflict in 1860 and 1861. Debates about whether to permit slavery in federal territories provoked crises from the Missouri controversy of 1820 through the Wilmot Proviso of 1846, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas–Nebraska explosion of the mid-1850s, and the Democratic Party’s meltdowns in Charleston and Baltimore in 1860. Indeed, without friction relating to slavery in the western territories, it is difficult to imagine a secession movement that went beyond rhetorical bluster and posturing.

The war’s Western Theater must be an essential part of any discussion of the war. Fighting in that region began in Kentucky, ended in North Carolina, featured storied military campaigns such as Shiloh and Atlanta, and produced the commanders who won Union victory, reelected the Republicans in 1864 (and thereby kept emancipation on the table), and headed the postwar army well into the 1880s. Whether it was as important as the Eastern Theater—in terms of morale in the Confederacy and the United States or attention in European capitals—is another question. Participants in the war, as well as later generations of Americans and a number of historians, have argued both for and against the supremacy of the Eastern Theater.12

The Trans-Mississippi Theater, which included noteworthy military and political action primarily in Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana, lagged far behind the Western and Eastern Theaters in significance. Neither the United States nor the Confederacy made it a priority when allocating material, troops, or leading generals. And events on the margins of the theater, such as Henry Hopkins Sibley’s quixotic foray into New Mexico in 1862, scarcely rise to the level of inconsequential.

What about the trans-hundredth-meridian West? It remained peripheral to the fundamental issues of both the Civil War and Reconstruction. Two great goals dominated the war years: the vast majority of U.S. citizens and soldiers sought to restore the Union, while those in the Confederacy sought to establish a new slaveholding republic. Although people on both sides sometimes thought about this West (a number of Confederates hoped to find a window to the Pacific in Baja California, for example), their attention almost always displayed a more eastward interest.

The Republican agenda did feature legislation that affected later western development, most obviously the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railway Acts, and the Morrill Act, all passed in 1862. But each of these had antebellum roots, and both their wartime passage and their postwar impact can be considered part of a developmental arc that likely would have played out in some fashion absent the war.

Similarly, as I argue in the next essay,13 the relocation of the Dakota Sioux from Minnesota after 1862, forced resettlement of the Navajo by U.S. forces under Kit Carson in 1864, and slaughter of approximately 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho at Sand Creek in 1864 were not really Civil War events—though they occurred during the war. Ample testimony underscores the degree to which people at the time separated the war over secession from clashes with Indians.

As for Reconstruction, it had a very specific meaning in the nineteenth century that had almost nothing to do with the West. The key Reconstruction documents, among them Lincoln’s proclamation of amnesty and Reconstruction, the Wade-Davis Bill, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Reconstruction Acts of 1867/68, address the problem of bringing former Confederate states back into Union and dealing with the long-term consequences of emancipation. Negotiations and treaties between the U.S. government and what Americans in the nineteenth century called the “Five Civilized Tribes” in Oklahoma also could be considered part of Reconstruction, which ended, at the latest, with the removal of token Federal forces that remained in the former Confederacy in 1877. But Reconstruction should not be conflated with the larger history of the United States between Appomattox and 1876. In the West, that larger history included, among other things, Indian wars and growth of the reservation system, accelerating white settlement, and construction of the transcontinental railroads.

It is always interesting to contemplate what an accurate survey of opinion in the past might reveal. I suspect that Americans polled in 1861 to 1865, or in 1876, would not have placed the trans-hundredth-meridian West anywhere near the center of either the war or Reconstruction.