Review - "Hundreds of Little Wars: Community, Conflict, and the Real Civil War" by Schieffler & Stith, eds.

[Hundreds of Little Wars: Community, Conflict, and the Real Civil War edited by G. David Schieffler and Matthew M. Stith (Louisiana State University Press, 2025). Hardcover, chapter notes, index. Pages:xii,271. ISBN:978-0-8071-8220-8. $45]

Beginning most prominently with 1995's Seasons of War, historian Daniel E. Sutherland has had a profound impact on the field through his exploration of the many ways in which local history enriches and expands our modern understanding of the American Civil War. Developed in another line of study headlined by 2009's A Savage Conflict, Sutherland's sweeping reinterpretation of the character, scale, and larger meaning of the war's vast irregular component has also proved to be highly influential. Additionally, as editor of University of Arkansas Press's The Civil War in the West series (now sadly defunct), Sutherland played a significant part in promoting and conveying to readers new scholarship dealing with the Civil War in the Trans-Mississippi West. In appreciation of Sutherland, as person, scholar, and mentor, is the essay anthology Hundreds of Little Wars: Community, Conflict, and the Real Civil War, edited by G. David Schieffler and Matthew M. Stith.

Given Daniel Sutherland's stature as one of the leading proponents of the idea that the local experience of the Civil War was the "real war" for most of the population, this set of essays written in his honor grabs onto that central concept and branches off from it far and wide. The traditional understanding of Civil War "community" as being tied to static local geography (i.e. cities, towns, and counties) is explored in fresh directions such as temporary POW and refugee camps. Entering into other spaces (including more figurative-level ones) are those essays that address community in the context of race, gender, regular and irregular military organizations (ex. volunteer regiments and partisan ranger units), and intersections between the natural and built environments. The resulting dozen essays are organized into pairs assigned to six themed sections: (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. To get a taste of what to expect, one chapter from each pairing will be commented upon below.

Through works such as Gerald Prokopowicz's All for the Regiment and others, the Civil War regiment, always seen to have been closely representative of the community or communities from which it was recruited, has also come to be viewed as a community in and of itself within the larger structures of the Union and Confederate armies. Similar to how she approached the topic in other writings dealing with the 16th Connecticut, 11th New York, and 2nd Texas, Lesley Gordon examines issues of alleged cowardice and the quest for redemption in her essay exploring the 128th New York, a regiment that was singled out as the worst of the "Harpers Ferry Cowards"—the context being alleged misbehavior that contributed to the entire garrison's disgraceful surrender on September 15, 1862. Interestingly, Gordon finds that the men of the 128th, unlike their fellow New Yorkers of the 11th, fully redeemed themselves in subsequent campaigning, yet (unlike other Harpers Ferry regiments collared with the same label) during reunions and for the decades after the war bitterly clung to a victim mentality that remained one of the central unifying elements of their communal memory. It's a testament to the far reaching power and endurance of such accusations.

Paired with an occupation study of Virginia's Fauquier County emphasizing the local irregular conflict and gender relations between civilians and occupiers is an examination of the prison community established at Camp Ford (Smith County, Texas, located a few miles outside Tyler) from 1863-65. In it, volume co-editor Matthew Stith explores the camp's interactions with the local population along with the natural (including area wildlife of various kinds) and man-made environments. With good water and wood for shelter-building widely available and given the opportunity to forage liberally from the resource-rich countryside, Camp Ford prisoners (even after overcrowding resulting from the breakdown of the exchange system and influx of new arrivals from the 1864 Red River Campaign) experienced much lower morbidity and mortality rates in comparison with the war's more infamous POW facilities.

As developed fully in The Rivers Ran Backward, his sprawling 2016 study of the nineteenth-century West's so-called Middle Border, the essay authored by Christopher Phillips again frames that vast multi-state region occupying both sides of the Missouri and Ohio Rivers as being not a distinct line of demarcation between northern and southern identities but rather a place, a region-sized "community" if you like, of integrated economies and mostly shared political and social values. As Phillips explains, the harshest and most enduring divisions within the Middle Border were not of a longstanding North versus South nature but rather were a product of mid-1850s political violence, the Civil War itself, and postbellum politics.

Co-editor G. David Schieffler's contribution expands the concept of Civil War community to the black refugee camp, one of the largest in the South, that was established at Helena, Arkansas after the Union Army of the Southwest entered the area and set up a permanent and heavily fortified garrison in the river town. As Schieffler shows, the reciprocal relationship that developed between the army and refugees, the former providing protection, employment, and limited supplies and the latter camp and military labor, forged a community of mutual assistance. However, those benefits to the refugees were also accompanied by inconsistent policies and support, much of which was dependent upon the attitude and priorities of the military officer who happened to be in overall command of the post at a given moment. That capriciousness, the frequent abuses, and the naturally unhealthy conditions at Helena that felled soldiers and freedpeople alike in alarming numbers, together rendered uncertain both life and freedom for the refugees.

The Barton Myers essay identifies a community of similarly skilled and motivated partisan officers who led irregular units in different parts of the border and southern states during the Civil War. In addition to offering fresh recognition of obscure figures, their commands, and their activities, Myers points toward commonalities among the leaders, with many having served in conventional forces before the appeal of independent action and of engaging in local defense led them to enter partisan service. The divide between regular and irregular service was also significantly blurred, as these officers frequently returned to the conventional war by directly cooperating with regular forces. In addition to their local knowledge, most possessed aggressive streaks and a high tolerance for risk that made them effective raiders and scouts. However, as evidenced by a number of violent deaths among these men long after the war ended, those qualities valuable during wartime could also negatively impact their relations with others off the battlefield and upon their return to civilian life. As Myers makes clear, among the host of factors that scholars have developed in recent years to explain the 1862 Partisan Ranger Act's mostly disastrous outcome, the lack of strong and effective leadership from officers such as these was not among them.

As recounted by Michael Shane Powers, Confederate veterans Edward Burke of Louisiana and members of Virginia's Imboden family represented international actors forging mutually beneficial links between Gilded Age America and the country of Honduras, with the added dimension of key involvement with British sources of capital. Powers's essay is not a tale of fleeing the country to escape postwar persecution or renewal of antebellum-style filibustering activities but rather one of successful entrepreneurs expanding New South economic ties with Central America. In the 1880s, Burke and the Imbodens utilized British investment to fund large-scale mining operations, and they became instrumental figures in developing Honduran mineral extraction industries and national infrastructure. Much of their success was owed to their integration into Honduran society in ways that previous foreigners failed to do, and as experienced soldiers they also played an active part in Honduran internal conflicts in support of the legitimate government.

Certainly, you can expand the definition of a word or concept like "community" so far and wide as to run the risk of losing its value as an object of reference or study, but the larger point of these essays, that of recognizing the abundant insights that localized (even microscopic-level) points of view can offer in both isolation and in sum, certainly holds true. A handful of men dying in a remote guerrilla ambush far behind the front lines barely merits mention, but a thousand of such forgotten incidents spread across the landscape of war can have the same impact on a combatant side's friends, families, and local communities as the Battle of Gettysburg. In similar fashion, the "hundreds of little wars" that this volume touches upon and that collectively fill in the innumerable gaps and crevices between and behind the major campaigns and battles that garner the lion's share of attention were often the war for a great many of those who participated in them.