Book Review: Hundreds of Little Wars: Community, Conflict, and the Real Civil War

Hundreds of Little Wars: Community, Conflict, and the Real Civil War. Edited by G. David Schieffler and Matthew M. Stith.  Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2025. Hardcover, 259 pp. $45.00.

 Review by John G. Selby

To honor the retirement of the award-winning historian Daniel T. Sutherland, several of his friends and former students have produced an anthology of twelve original essays on a variety of Civil War communities. Inspired by Sutherland’s call for historians to examine the many “little wars” that comprise the Civil War, the editors argue that these smaller wars away from “traditional battlefields represent the real Civil War, or at least as real and expansive as the conventional fighting.” (2)

The editors organize the essays into six very different types of communities: regimental, county and environmental, border, hybrid, irregular, and transnational and comparative. Such a wide aperture allows Lesley Gordon to survey the complex history of the 126th New York Volunteer Regiment, whose initial distinction came from its inglorious rout and capture at the battle of Harper’s Ferry. The regiment’s soldiers would spend the rest of the war (and after) fighting to restore honor to the regiment, while clinging to their “communal identity as victims as much as heroes.” (24) In the same section of the book Eric Totten examines the behavior and divided sentiments of the 4th New Hampshire Volunteer Regiment, which acquired a reputation among abolitionist officers as being “too lenient on the white populace and too hard on the freedpeople” (39) of St. Augustine, Florida, during its occupation of that town in the early part of 1862.

Moving to county and environmental communities, Madeleine Forrest finds that the two biggest problems faced by Union soldiers occupying Fauquier County, Virginia in 1862 were the actions of Confederate guerrillas and “secessionist women.” (53) Looking at environmental concerns, Matthew M. Stith analyzes the conditions for the Union prisoners of war (POWs) housed in the largest POW camp west of the Mississippi River, Camp Ford in east Texas. Built by enslaved laborers around a spring, the camp had a higher survival rate than most POW camps in the South until local resources were exhausted by severe overcrowding in the last year of the war.

Under the category of border communities, Christopher Phillips examines conflicts within the communities clustered around the confluence of the Mississippi, Ohio, and Missouri rivers, while Scott A. Tarnowiecky focuses on the little-studied Green River region of western Kentucky.  He finds that an area considered “conditionally Unionist” (112) at the start of the war became increasingly more supportive of the Union after the Confederacy violated the state’s prized neutrality.

Turning to hybrid communities, Lorien Foote discusses the efforts of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers (a regiment of Black soldiers formed in 1862) and the Black women of the Sea Islands to protect themselves from the depredations of local white slaveholders. Harriet Tubman drew on the networks of support forged by these two groups to recruit men to lead the largest slave liberation operation of the Civil War, the Combahee River raid of 1863. Offering a contrast to the successful cooperation of groups on the Sea Islands would be the experiences of the Black refugee community in Helena, Arkansas. G. David Schieffler argues that a community of over 3,000 Black refugees “found their efforts to achieve freedom contested at every turn.” (134)

Looking at communities of “irregular” fighters, Barton A. Myers details similarities and differences among some of the officers in irregular units in the Civil War. Terry L. Beckenbaugh probes the fighting of irregulars along the White River in Arkansas, punctuated by the “deadliest shot” of the Civil War: the artillery shell that hit the boiler of the US Navy’s Mound City, “killing or wounding 150 of the 175-man crew.” (172)

The book’s last topical section has two intriguing essays on transnational and comparative communities. Niels Eichhorn discovers illuminating parallels between wartime Vienna, Austria, and Richmond, Virginia, while Michael Shane Powers explores the central roles played by Confederate veterans in the mining boom and revolts that convulsed the young nation of Honduras in the late 19th century.

The book concludes with a thoughtful “Afterword” by Elliot West, which pairs nicely with the foreword by Patrick G. Williams. Each essay has endnotes, and an index completes the book.

The greatest benefit of these types of anthologies created to honor eminent historians is that writers can share new research and ideas that are on the cutting edge of the field. There are innumerable stories yet to be told about America’s greatest conflict, and these twelve historians have given us a glimpse of some of the new topics expanding our understanding of this fascinating war.

John G. Selby is a Professor Emeritus of history at Roanoke College and the former holder of the John R. Turbyfill Chair in History. A Civil War scholar, Selby wrote: Meade the Price of Command, 1863-1865; Virginians at War: The Civil War Experiences of Seven Young Confederates; and coedited Civil War Talks: Further Reminiscences of George S. Bernard and His Fellow Veterans.