This collection of essays represents the best recent history written on Civil War activity in Arkansas. It illuminates the complexity of such issues as guerrilla warfare, Union army policies, and the struggles between white and black civilians and soldiers, and also shows that the war years were a time of great change and personal conflict for the citizens of the state, despite the absence of great battles or armies. All the essays, which have been previously published in scholarly journals, have been revised to reflect recent scholarship in the field. Each selection explores a military or...

Written and first published in 1866 soon after the author's discharge from the Union army, A. F. Sperry's History of the 33d Iowa Infantry is one of the classic regimental histories of the American Civil War. It is a fresh, honest, and detailed account of the regiment's movements and actionsin Kentucky, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, and, most notably, Arkansas, where it played a conspicuous role in the Helena, Little Rock, and Camden campaigns. As the regiment's fife and drum major responsible for sounding the duty calls that regulated a soldier's day, Sperry was well situated to observe the...

In the CIVIL WAR IN THE WEST series, this noncombatants' eyewitness account of the war and its destabilizing effects focuses on the civilians of the Arkansas and Missouri describing their precarious and vulnerable positions during the advances and retreats of armies as Confederate and Federal forces marched across their homelands.

This collection of letters written between Theophilus and Harriet Perry during the Civil War provides an intimate, firsthand account of the effect of the war on one young couple. Theophilus Perry was an officer with the 28th Texas Cavalry, a unit that campaigned in Arkansas and Louisiana as part of the division known as "Walker's Greyhounds". Letters from Theophilus Perry describe his service in a highly literate style that is unusual for Confederate accounts. He documents a number of important events, including his experiences as a detached officer in Arkansas in the winter of 1862-1863, the...

In the fall of 1861, fifty-one-year-old Rev. Francis Springer enlisted in the Union army. The following spring, Reverend Springer, a friend of and one-time neighbor to Abraham Lincoln, rode away with the 10th Illinois Calvary. A witness to the Battle of Prairie Grove (December 1862), Springer was later named post chaplain at Fort Smith, where, in addition to preaching and ministering to the troops, he was placed in charge of refugees -- widows, orphans, and contrabands -- the displaced victims of virulent guerrilla warfare in northwest Arkansas. Springer also wrote articles and columns in the...

This Civil War memoir of Capt. Dennis E. Haynes is both unique and rare. Not only did few southern unionists write of their experiences after the war, Haynes s is the only publication by a Louisiana unionist. Furthermore, it is the only account by a member of the First Louisiana Battalion Cavalry Scouts, a unit that existed for less than three months and saw its only real action during the Red River Campaign of 1864. Haynes s memoir is a historic collection of his wartime experiences as a unionist in the Confederate South. Among his writings, Haynes describes how he opposed the secession of...