Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861–1867
- ISBN-10
- 0806158530
- ISBN-13
- 9780806158532
- Category
- History
- Pages
- 464
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2017-02-03
- Publisher
- University of Oklahoma Press
- Author
- Andrew E. Masich
Description
Still the least-understood theater of the Civil War, the Southwest Borderlands saw not only Union and Confederate forces clashing but Indians, Hispanos, and Anglos struggling for survival, power, and dominance on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. While other scholars have examined individual battles, Andrew E. Masich is the first to analyze these conflicts as interconnected civil wars. Based on previously overlooked Indian Depredation Claim records and a wealth of other sources, this book is both a close-up history of the Civil War in the region and an examination of the war-making traditions of its diverse peoples. Along the border, Masich argues, the Civil War played out as a collision between three warrior cultures. Indians, Hispanos, and Anglos brought their own weapons and tactics to the struggle, but they also shared many traditions. Before the war, the three groups engaged one another in cycles of raid and reprisal involving the taking of livestock and human captives, reflecting a peculiar mixture of conflict and interdependence. When U.S. regular troops were withdrawn in 1861 to fight in the East, the resulting power vacuum led to unprecedented violence in the West. Indians fought Indians, Hispanos battled Hispanos, and Anglos vied for control of the Southwest, while each group sought allies in conflicts related only indirectly to the secession crisis. When Union and Confederate forces invaded the Southwest, Anglo soldiers, Hispanos, and sedentary Indian tribes forged alliances that allowed them to collectively wage a relentless war on Apaches, Comanches, and Navajos. Mexico’s civil war and European intervention served only to enlarge the conflict in the borderlands. When the fighting subsided, a new power hierarchy had emerged and relations between the region’s inhabitants, and their nations, forever changed. Masich’s perspective on borderlands history offers a single, cohesive framework for understanding this power shift while demonstrating the importance of transnational and multicultural views of the American Civil War and the Southwest Borderlands.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2017-02-03
- 464 pages
- Paperback
- University of Oklahoma Press
Similar books
-
Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States
By Andrew R. Graybill, Adam Arenson"This volume unifies the concerns of Civil War and western history, revealing how Confederate secession created new and shifting borderlands.
-
Confederates and Comancheros: Skullduggery and Double-Dealing in the Texas–New Mexico Borderlands
By James Bailey Blackshear, Glen Sample ElyJennings explained to a curious Goodnight that he had purchased them from Comancheros. One of the leaders was nearby Chaperito resident José Piedad Tafoya. As noted, Goodnight's lawyers brought Tafoya to Las Vegas to bolster the ...
-
The Civil War in Arizona: The Story of the California Volunteers, 1861–1865
By Andrew E. MasichCpl. Winfield S. Pearson originally enlisted as a private in Company F, Third California Infantry but transferred to Company 1, Fourth California Infantry when Col. P. E. Connor's Third Infantry marched for Utah in 1862. Pearson's wife ...
-
Coast-to-Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands
By William S. Kiser... 2011), 1–38; Howard R. Lamar, The Far Southwest, 1846–1912: A Territorial History (Albuquerque: University of New ... and the Radicalization of Southern Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012); William H. Goetzmann, ...
-
1865 Alabama: From Civil War to Uncivil Peace
By Christopher Lyle McIlwainBerry, Thelma Caine. “The Life of Edmund Winston Pettus.” Master's thesis, Auburn University, 1944. Bessel, Richard. Germany 1945: From War to Peace. London: Simon and Schuster UK, 2009. Black, Robert C. Railroads of the Confederacy.
-
Cheyenne Dog Soldiers: A Ledgerbook History of Coups and Combat
By Andrew Edward Masich, Jean Afton, David Fridtjof HalaasAt Summit Springs, Colorado on July 11, 1869, Maj Eugene A. Carr led the Fifth United States Cavalry and a force of Pawnee scouts in an attack on Chief Tall...
-
War and Peace on the Rio Grande Frontier, 1830–1880
By Miguel Ángel González-Quiroga2 (quotation); Thompson, Mexican Texans in the Union Army, vii,38; Thompson, Vaqueros in Blue and Gray, 10, 55–56. “Not only did Mexican Texans cross the physical international border to escape conscription but they also intentionally ...
-
Fighting Means Killing: Civil War Soldiers and the Nature of Combat
By Jonathan M. SteplykFighting Means Killing explores the spectrum of soldiers' attitudes toward and experiences of killing, arguing that ultimately most Union and Confederate soldiers accepted and affirmed the necessity of killing in combat.
-
The Commanders: Civil War Generals Who Shaped the American West
By Robert M. UtleyRounding out the book with an objective comparison of all eight generals’ performance records, Utley offers keen insights into their influence on the U.S. military as an institution and on the development of the American West.
-
The Oxford Handbook of the American Civil War
By Earl J. Hess, Lorien FooteThe Oxford Handbook of the American Civil War assembles the contributions of thirty-nine leading scholars of the Civil War, each chapter advancing the central thesis that operational military history is decisively linked to the social and ...