PREVIEWING THE JUNE 2022 JCWE ISSUE
By Kate Masur and Greg Downs, May 31, 2022
This issue exhibits historians’ continuing efforts to grapple with the complexities of the Civil War Era, emphasizing how our collective understanding of the period has been produced, which topics have been neglected or marginalized, and why.
Ryan Hall’s article, “Chaos and Conquest: The Civil War and Indigenous Crisis on the Upper Missouri, 1861– 1864,” extends the geography of the Civil War Era to the Upper Missouri River and expands the actors affected by it to include the Native groups who lived along the river’s banks. Drawing our attention to civilian rather than military matters—to federal agents, political patronage, and economic relationships—Hall makes a compelling case that the Civil War had a significant impact on Indigenous people in the northwestern United States because of the corruption and incompetence of the Republican appointees sent there. Seeing the Civil War Era not just from Indian Country but from a lesser-studied
vantage helps capture the wide-ranging and significant implications of the war.
In “Rereading the High Private: Restoring Class and Race to Co. Aytch,” Patrick Lewis analyzes a Confederate memoir that was made famous in the twentieth century by historian Bell I. Wiley and filmmaker Ken Burns and that eventually became a staple in public history interpretations of the Civil War, particularly in Tennessee. Lewis shows the ways the memoir’s author, Samuel Rush Watkins, constructed a narrative in the early 1880s that obscured his own elite status (and that of many in his regiment), the significance of slavery and enslaved people, and the white supremacist violence that characterized Middle Tennessee after the war. This piece should change how historians use the famous Watkins quotations, both in teaching and public history settings. ( … )