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Date: September 22, 2020 at 5:06:14 PM EDT
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Subject: H-Net Review [H-Nationalism]:  Zander on Nelson, 'The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West'
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Megan Kate Nelson.  The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the
Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West.  New York  
Scribner, 2020.  xx + 331 pp.  $28.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-5011-5254-2.

Reviewed by Cecily Zander (Penn State)
Published on H-Nationalism (September, 2020)
Commissioned by Evan C. Rothera

The introduction of the American West as an important region in the
historiography of the US Civil War has brought many issues into
sharper focus for historians--among them questions about race and
unfree labor in the age of emancipation and the length and extent of
Reconstruction. In the case of historian and writer Megan Kate
Nelson's Three-Cornered War, old debates about nationalism are
revived and given redefined stakes in a work that presents a sweeping
history of competing political and social visions for the future of
the Southwest in the midst of civil war.

In many ways, The Three-Cornered War serves as an update to two
important works on the history of the Civil War's westernmost
events--Alvin M. Josephy Jr.'s The Civil War in the American West
(1991) and Donald S. Frazier's Blood and Treasure: Confederate Empire
in the Southwest (1995).[1] Where Frazier and Josephy lent their
focus to military and diplomatic events, however, Nelson combines a
military narrative with analysis of the social, political, and
environmental factors at play in the region encompassing what is
today West Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and much of southern Colorado.
Nelson uses a diverse cast of characters, including army officers,
their wives, volunteer soldiers, Native American leaders and Native
American women, Hispanic borderlands residents, and territorial
politicians to weave together a narrative of conquest and
consolidation, where some participants emerge as winners, others
gamble their reputations and lose big, and some have their ways of
life permanently transformed, and often not for the better.

The Three-Cornered War makes a three-pronged argument. First, the
monograph implicitly argues for the importance of the West as an
ideological battleground between visions of a slaveholding empire in
the West and one predicated on free soil and free labor (an empire
for Anglo-Americans at the expense of all others). Second, the book
argues that Civil War events primed the region for debates that would
come to a head in the Reconstruction period, supporting historian
Elliott West's framework of a "Greater Reconstruction" that
encompassed a longer chronology and wider geography than most
traditional histories depict. Finally, Nelson demonstrates that
regardless of its military importance, the West warranted significant
attention from both the Union and Confederate national governments,
whose political and legal maneuvering caught Native American nations
and Mexican peoples in their crossfire.[2]

Historians of nationalism will be especially interested in how
Nelson's argument contributes to the field-defining debate over
whether the Confederacy existed as an independent nation--and whether
it existed as such solely in the minds of Confederates or as a
political entity capable of making and enforcing laws. In her
profiles of both Henry Hopkins Sibley and John Baylor--the two
military officers who led the Confederate invasion of the
Southwest--Nelson makes a case for the Confederacy's territorial
ambitions. Despite Confederate president Jefferson Davis's
pronouncement that "we seek no conquest, no aggrandizement ... all we
ask is to be let alone" in his inaugural address, Nelson shows that
the Confederate government made no attempt to stop Sibley and
Baylor's great land-grab in the Southwest.[3]

Nelson's work thus joins a new wave of scholarship that affirms the
legal and political ambitions of the Confederacy as a nation that
simultaneously waged a war of independence and one of aggrandizement.
Historian Adrian Brettle's recent Colossal Ambitions: Confederate
Planning for a Post-Civil War World (2020) offers an excellent
corollary to Nelson's work, investigating the ways in which
Confederate leaders envisioned their postwar nation, which
encompassed not only the American Southwest but also foreign
territory. Collectively these activities represented a continuation
of the antebellum Southern international ambitions that historian
Matthew Karp detailed in This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at
the Helm of American Foreign Policy (2016). Readers who approach the
question of Confederate nationalism in 2020 cannot ignore the
contributions of all three authors, as well as Paul Quigley's
excellent Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South,
1848-1865 (2011), in assessing whether there was a Confederate
nation. The answer in Nelson's work on the Civil War West is an
implicit yes.[4]

But what about the United States, whose national identity was
fractured by secession? What did the Western arc of the Civil War
mean for the Lincoln government and the ascendant Republican Party in
the territories? Nelson contends that for the United States the Civil
War in the West "exposed a hard and complicated truth about the Union
government's war aims: that they simultaneously embraced slave
emancipation and Native extermination in order to secure an American
empire of liberty" (p. 202). In her discussion of Union territorial
official John Clark, Nelson gives readers a chance to see the
interior politics of territorial expansion. While the Lincoln
government could not commit military resources to the Southwest on a
scale that compared to Virginia or Tennessee, the administration
placed trusted political subordinates in key positions early in the
war. Initially these appointments helped to prevent several
territories from voting in favor of secession, but as the war wore on
they worked to engender greater loyalty to the United States than had
previously existed in the region.

Territorial officials also worked closely with military officers to
approve and carry out one of the most brutal instances of Indian
removal in the nation's history. In 1864 Major General James H.
Carleton (whose California Column represented the largest Union force
in the far West) ordered Kit Carson to march as many as nine thousand
members of the Navajo nation over four hundred miles from their lands
in Arizona to the Bosque Redondo reservation in New Mexico. Carson
adopted a strategy that Civil War Americans were increasingly
becoming familiar with--razing much of the territory he crossed and
destroying Navajo property to compel capitulation. Historian Mark E.
Neeley Jr. has cautioned historians against comparing the strategy of
Carson (or the infamous John Chivington, perpetrator of the Sand
Creek massacre) too closely with that of Ulysses S. Grant, William T.
Sherman, or Phillip H. Sheridan, because, he argues, those officers
did not invent the strategy of "total war." If anything, the Civil
War version was an adaptation of tactics that had long been used
against Native Americans.[5] Nelson's narrative of the Bosque Redondo
and several other postbellum Indian conflicts reveals further
adaptation of the total war strategy and the way in which the Civil
War empowered the military conquest in the American West. From the
perspective of military historians, Nelson could have been clearer
about the development of American military strategy in the Southwest;
however, because the monograph is narratively driven, rather than
historiographically, this is a small quibble.

One final area where Nelson's monograph excels is in telling the
environmental side of the story of the Civil War West. The
Three-Cornered War's attention to the unique conditions present in
the Southwest allows Nelson to explain what set military campaigning
in the Southwest apart from marching and fighting in other Civil War
theaters. In New Mexico access to water mattered far more than any
other condition, for example, and without consistent supplies coming
over an established transportation network, territorial occupation
quickly became untenable--as Henry Hopkins Sibley discovered when his
supply train was destroyed after the battle of Glorietta Pass.
Attention to the environment is critical to Nelson's updated military
narrative and puts her work in conversation with both Kathryn Shively
(Nature's Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862
Virginia, 2013) and Earl J. Hess, (The Civil War in the West: Victory
and Defeat from the Appalachians to the Mississippi, 2012), who
detailed the effect of drought conditions on Confederate general
Braxton Bragg's 1862 Kentucky campaign, which ended similarly to
Sibley's New Mexico invasion.

Books about the US Civil War typically strive toward one goal--making
sense of an event that threw the nation into chaos and touched the
lives of millions of people. Though Megan Kate Nelson only deals with
a handful of individuals, her tapestry of stories offers a compelling
new format for writing about a conflict that often feels too large to
fully grasp. Nelson's characters help her to humanize the Civil War
in the West and should point future historians to rich veins of
testimony about the Civil War era that still have much to reveal
about the conflict's impact on a region that has not traditionally
been part of the geographical narrative. The Three-Cornered War is an
admirable effort to chart a new course on an old map and will no
doubt help to form the foundation of a new field of historical
inquiry into the causes, conduct, and consequences of the Civil War
in the West.

Notes

[1]. Other recent works dealing with the Civil War West include:
Christopher M. Rein, The Second Colorado Cavalry: A Civil War
Regiment on the Great Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
2020); Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill, eds., Civil War Wests:
Testing the Limits of the United States (Oakland: University of
California Press, 2015); Virginia Scharff, ed., Empire and Liberty:
The Civil War and the West (Oakland: The Autry National Center and
the University of California Press, 2015; and Ari Kelman, A Misplaced
Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2013).

[2]. Elliott West, "Reconstructing Race," Western Historical
Quarterly 3 (Spring 2003):6-26; Elliot West, The Last Indian War: The
Nez Perce Story (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Richard
White has taken up a similar argument in his contribution to Oxford's
History of the United States Series. See White, The Republic for
Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the
Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

[3]. Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers, and
Speeches, ed. Dunbar Roland, 10 vols. (New York: J. J. Little and
Ives Company, 1923), 5:84.

[4]. Two main schools of thought dominate the historiographical
question of Confederate nationalism, which in turn has been used a
point of analysis for explaining Confederate defeat--loss of civilian
morale and lack of national identity are often identified as two
critical factors in the Confederacy's defeat by the United States.
Nelson's work aligns more strongly with the school of thought that
Confederates did sustain a national identity throughout the conflict
and shows how geographically widespread a belief in Confederate
independence was, encompassing not only the eleven seceded states but
also substantial pockets of the Southwest. For the literature on
Confederate nationalism see Gary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); William A. Blair,
Virginia's Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation
of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War
South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988); Anne S.
Rubin, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy,
1861-1868 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005);
and Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in
the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

[5]. Mark E. Neeley Jr., The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 165-66.

Citation: Cecily Zander. Review of Nelson, Megan Kate, _The
Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in
the Fight for the West_. H-Nationalism, H-Net Reviews. September,
2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55636

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