Booknotes: Hundreds of Little Wars

New Arrival:

• Hundreds of Little Wars: Community, Conflict, and the Real Civil War edited by G. David Schieffler & Matthew M. Stith (LSU Press, 2025).

In a body of major scholarship encompassed by the 1995 publication of his now classic study Seasons of War: The Ordeal of the Confederate Community, 1861-1865 and the 2009 release of A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War, historian Daniel Sutherland established himself as a towering influence in the modern examination and understanding of the Civil War's local impact beyond the conventional battlefield. Across several works, Sutherland powerfully argued that, in many ways, the irregular war on the domestic front was the war as experienced by the majority of the southern and Border State populations. Using Sutherland's pioneering contributions as a springboard, the essays collected in the new anthology Hundreds of Little Wars: Community, Conflict, and the Real Civil War "reveal how viewing the war from the vantage point of singular communities allows us to better understand the larger conflict." Those 'singular communities' include "towns, regions, counties, regiments, prisons, and even refugee camps" across the country. Together, they "played a significant role in shaping the contours of the Civil War."

Volume editors G. David Schieffler and Matthew Stith invited their contributors to define the term 'community' in a manner that reaches expansively beyond more traditional labels. The result is twelve essays organized into six themed sections (with a pair of essays attached to each): (1) Regimental Communities, (2) County and Environmental Communities, (3) Border Communities, (4) Hybrid (in terms of race and demography) Communities, (5) Irregular Communities, and (6) Transnational and Comparative Communities. In summary, "Lesley J. Gordon and Eric P. Totten examine military outfits, namely the 126th New York Regiment and the 4th New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry. Madeleine C. Forrest provides an analysis of Fauquier County, Virginia, in 1862, and Matthew M. Stith evaluates a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp in East Texas. Christopher Phillips and Scott A. Tarnowieckyi investigate the middle border region spanning the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri rivers. Lorien Foote and G. David Schieffler assess the demographically diverse Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, as well as Helena, Arkansas. Barton A. Myers and Terry L. Beckenbaugh employ Sutherland’s framing while considering irregular war, first with an examination of partisan officers and then with a survey of the White River Valley in Arkansas. Finally, Niels Eichhorn and Michael Shane Powers assume a transnational viewpoint, comparing Richmond with Vienna, Austria, and analyzing a community of Confederate veterans in Central America."

The cumulative effect produced by the essays in this volume is to "show that no one single conflict defined the Civil War. Instead, hundreds of wars existed, variously categorized by geography, race, gender, environment, and myriad other factors. Only by concentrating on these communities can we grasp the scope and complexity of the Civil War."