Booknotes: From Dakota to Dixie

New Arrival:

• From Dakota to Dixie: George Buswell's Civil War edited by Jonathan W. White & Reagan Connelly (UVA Press, 2025).

Generally speaking, Union volunteers from the Trans-Mississippi, be they from states closest to areas of expected fighting or those in the Far West region of the country, enlisted to fight Confederates. The reality was that a great many would never see a gray-uniformed enemy over the entire length of their service. Others would be caught up in a hybrid war, facing hostile tribes at one or more points in their service and Confederates at another, typically later, date. In this latter group resided George Buswell of Minnesota.

From the description: "In the summer of 1862, young Minnesotan George W. Buswell enlisted in the Union army, but his marching orders did not take him to the South to fight the Confederacy, as he had hoped, but to the US-Dakota War. Until the end of 1863, Buswell served with the 7th Minnesota Infantry, witnessing and describing that war’s infamous final act: the hanging of thirty-eight Dakota men at Mankato, the largest officially sanctioned mass execution in American history. Afterward, he volunteered as an officer to lead the 68th US Colored Infantry, serving in the Civil War’s Western Theater and seeing action in Mississippi."

Published for the first time in From Dakota to Dixie: George Buswell's Civil War and co-edited by Jonathan White and Reagan Connelly, Buswell's writings "offer an extraordinary record of his unusually wide-ranging experience, taking readers through the Dakota War, into Union prisons in St. Louis and Memphis, onto picket lines where he searched Confederate women suspected of smuggling, and into the ranks of a Black regiment that fought against Confederate forces led by Nathan Bedford Forrest. His eyewitness accounts represent a vital contribution to the ongoing debate over the parameters of the American Civil War."

Editorial features include a general introduction, introductory passages for each of the volume's eight chapters, footnotes, and an epilogue.