Review - "'When All Our Troubles Will Be Forgotten': The Civil War Letters and Recollections of Captain George Henry Pettis" by Jerry Thompson, ed.

["When All Our Troubles Will Be Forgotten": The Civil War Letters and Recollections of Captain George Henry Pettis edited by Jerry D. Thompson (University of New Mexico Press, 2026). Hardcover, 5 maps, photos, illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:vii,194/336. ISBN:978-0-8263-6983-3. $34.95]

By his own estimate, Union Army captain George H. Pettis (First California Infantry regiment) marched 4,245 miles during a Civil War volunteer service that spanned the entire length of the war. There is no way to know which soldier, North or South, put in the most miles during the conflict, but Pettis's odyssey over parts of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas certainly ranked among the war's most arduous given the harsh conditions involved. A printer and publisher by trade, Pettis also frequently put pen to paper both during and after the war, his valuable body of writings collected together for the first time by leading Civil War in the Southwest historian Jerry Thompson and published under the title "When All Our Troubles Will Be Forgotten": The Civil War Letters and Recollections of Captain George Henry Pettis.

Thompson begins the book with a thorough overview, roughly two-dozen pages in length, of Pettis's life (1834-1909), which began and ended in Rhode Island. This fine mini-biography adds essential context to Pettis's public and private lives outside the topics of his writings. It also gives readers solid background information in regard to the places and events associated with Pettis's Civil War military adventures across the far flung Southwest. Thompson's compilation of Pettis writings is divided into three parts: Pettis's narrative "recollections," his newspaper articles, and his wartime letters to his wife.

Of the three recollections reproduced in Part I, the first is a brief summary of the 1861-62 New Mexico Campaign that Thompson ranks among the best early accounts (though Pettis did not personally participate in those parts of the campaign operating out of Fort Craig and Fort Union). The next piece recounts Pettis's own experiences as a junior officer of the California Column. Though he joins many Union supporters in perhaps exaggerating the Confederate threat to California, his descriptions of the marshaling of the famed California Column and its long and dangerous march across the lower Southwest from southern California all the way to New Mexico and West Texas is wonderfully descriptive and highly valuable as a firsthand account. In addition to assessing the dangers, real and imagined, from Apache Indian and Confederate foes, the text details the environmental and logistical conditions that necessitated the column's 900-mile march be conducted in stages and in small groups. That measured pace meant that the main campaign in New Mexico was already essentially over by the time they arrived at the front. Thompson praises the third recollection, a striking account of the November 1864 Battle of Adobe Walls, as the best of the trio, and it is indeed another excellent firsthand source that significantly enhances our understanding of the event. Students of Kit Carson's campaign will greatly appreciate Pettis's insights, as he led the mountain howitzer section generally credited with playing a central role in keeping the enemy at bay and staving off defeat (and perhaps even annihilation) at the hands of the aggressive and much more numerous Comanche and Kiowa. These recollections, but the last two in particular, are vividly written, abundantly detailed, and well balanced. As an example of the last point, in covering his own efforts at Adobe Walls Pettis does not try to make himself the hero of the battle.

Most prominent in Parts I and II, Thompson's annotations primarily consist of biographical information (often quite extensive) about noteworthy persons mentioned in the text, though there is also some background and commentary associated with places and events. These editorial notes occasionally raise objections, one being Pettis's perpetuation of the claim that the New Mexico volunteers and militia performed very poorly in action during the 1862 New Mexico Campaign. Rehabilitating the reputation of these New Mexico units is a major theme of Thompson's most recent scholarship.

After the war, Pettis, like many of his California Column comrades, settled in New Mexico with his family and contributed to the postwar economic boom and political scene there. The nine newspaper articles collected in Part II address a variety of events and personal anecdotes from the wartime and postwar periods. Their themes are eclectic, among them an account of a wartime mutiny, a humorous but respectful story related to Kit Carson's illiteracy, and a personal confrontation with the region's long tradition of debt peonage that persisted into the post-emancipation period.

The wartime correspondence consisting of Pettis's letters to his wife Annie between September 1861 and March 1865 is collected in Part III. In some ways the content is standard fare, with Pettis complaining about infrequent communications, highly irregular pay, homesickness, and loneliness. One can sense marital tension in many Civil War correspondence collections, but the sources of strain are uncommonly direct in Pettis's replies. We only have his letters to go on, but he frequently chastises her word choices, overall tone, and seeming neglect. It is an uncomfortable situation, and, as Thompson explains in the introduction, the pair eventually divorced. Beyond domestic concerns, the letters do recount at some length military activities that included recruitment duty in northern California, the long march to New Mexico over the spring and summer of 1862, and a number of mid to late-war campaigns and operations based out of New Mexico forts that were directed against Indian foes. All of that is useful source material for interested military scholars and researchers.

In addition to arranging and annotating Pettis's writings, Thompson includes in the volume a number of period illustrations and photographs rarely encountered in other Civil War publications, and extensive captions are attached to them. The book's map coverage is helpful in following the course of the California Column's epic march while also orienting readers to the major geographical points of interest in New Mexico that are mentioned at various points in the text.

George Pettis remains a little-known figure to the general Civil War reader. Fortunately, Jerry Thompson's edited collection brings Pettis's significant military service out of the shadows while also highlighting in full the quality, depth, and usefulness of his writings. "When All Our Troubles Will Be Forgotten" is a wonderful resource for those craving firsthand accounts of the Civil War as played out along one of its most isolated and distant fronts.