| The intersection between society, nature, and warfare on America's physical and cultural frontier during the Civil War yields valuable insight into how ordinary people endured, or succumbed to, extraordinary conditions. Varying cultures and ethnicities including Native Americans and African Americans intersect in the border region with white Confederate and Union civilians, creating a fascinating middle ground in midst of the larger forces of the environment and warfare. Women and children--no matter their allegiance or ethnicity--represent the main characters, acting at once as combatants and victims. When examining these civilians embroiled in the quagmire of terror and hardship, a disturbing narrative emerges, one that has hardly been noticed in the voluminous literature on the Civil War. Residents along the lower Trans-Mississippi frontier had been enmeshed, at times inextricably, in a situation unlike any other in American history. For four years, these civilians lived in a society verging on social and political anarchy. Never quite certain who to trust, deprived of governmental services, and facing some of the harshest environmental conditions east of the Great Plains, people along America's frontier, Union or Confederate, suffered immeasurably. And while this unsettling story of terror perhaps did little to influence the overall war effort for either side, it certainly represented a precursor to the total war of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. |
