Union General: Samuel Ryan Curtis and Victory in the West. William L. Shea. Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2023.
William L. Shea’s recent biography of Union General Samuel Ryan Curtis joins the growing body of literature on the Civil War in the trans-Mississippi West but is astonishingly the first book-length study of the general. Relying predominantly on Curtis’ papers scattered in repositories across the nation, Union General: Samuel Ryan Curtis and Victory in the West, published by Potomac Books, is an in-depth look at Curtis’ life and prodigious military career. Union General is a crucial reminder that Curtis deserves far greater popular and scholarly attention than he has received in years past and will hopefully motivate scholars to incorporate Curtis’s military career into their own work.
Fundamentally, Shea succeeds in elevating the importance of Curtis to the Union war effort in the trans-Mississippi West. A graduate of West Point in 1831, Curtis worked as a civil engineer throughout the 1830s & 1840s and served as a colonel of the Second Ohio Volunteers during the Mexican American War. Following the war, he moved to Keokuk, Iowa, where he was elected for three terms in Congress but gave up his seat to fight for the Union when the Civil War broke out in April 1861. He was promoted to brigadier general of U.S. Volunteers in May of that year, transferred to St. Louis, Missouri, and received a command in the Army of the Southwest. Shea devotes significant time to analyzing Curtis’ victory against the Confederacy during the 1862 Pea Ridge campaign in Arkansas, for which he received a promotion to major general and command of the Department of Missouri.
The Battle of Pea Ridge (Library of Congress)
The most intriguing aspect of Union General, however, is Shea’s analysis of Curtis’ wartime emancipation policies. Curtis first witnessed slavery during his transport to Mexico along the Mississippi River. In his journal he recorded observing “ignorant and stupid” enslaved people picking cotton in Mississippi overseen by a “very black fine looking Negro.”[1] His journal, however, offered little insight into how he felt about the institution beyond a few racist, paternalistic musings and reflects a limitation of Union General’s sources.
Shea’s treatment of Curtis’ march through Arkansas in the spring and summer of 1862, however, reveals more about his abolitionism and military strategy. Federal forces not only foraged and pillaged their way across the state, but empowered by the First Confiscation Act—which allowed Union forces to seek judicial approval to temporarily confiscate enslaved people as property used to aid the Confederate war effort—they also emancipated five people who were laboring for the Confederacy at Cross Timbers in March. This act, while limited in scale, opened the door somewhat to Curtis’ more expansive and controversial emancipation practices that summer.
By June, Shea finds that Curtis’ forces were emancipating enslaved people on a much larger scale. Across Arkansas, they commandeered printing presses to create and offer emancipation papers to whomever inquired, without judicial review and regardless of whether or not they had aided the Confederate war effort. While encamped at Helena beginning on 12 July, Curtis continued to negotiate the emancipation of enslaved people by offering freedom papers, primarily to women and children, despite not having the legal authority to do so.
Although the Second Confiscation Act declared Union forces could seize people who were enslaved by anyone rebelling or aiding the rebellion against the United States, it was not passed until 17 July of that year. Shea reveals that Curtis’ actions in Arkansas preceded the passage of this act by a matter of mere weeks, but his efforts challenge historians’ eastern focus on wartime emancipation.
Moving beyond emancipation, Shea finds Curtis established refugee camps at Helena, which provided freed people with food, clothing, shelter, equipment, transportation north, and, on at least one occasion, cash. Furthermore, he encouraged his fellow officers to employ freedmen and personally hired men on construction projects for the Union military. By the summer of 1863, Helena became the Mississippi Valley’s enrollment center for African American men into the Union army, and some of the first recruits were men emancipated by Curtis in Arkansas.
Many Missouri politicians, including Missouri governor Hamilton Rowan Gamble, opposed Curtis’ actions, and President Abraham Lincoln removed Curtis from his command of the Department of Missouri. While his career suffered for these policies, Shea notes that Curtis “probably freed more human beings from bondage than any other political, military, or religious leader in the first eighteen months of the Civil War.”[2] Likely due to Curtis’ location in the trans-Mississippi West, scholars, however, have paid little attention to Curtis’ emancipatory policies, which are ripe for historians’ further analysis of wartime emancipation.
Shea’s inclusion of Curtis’ wartime racial views and emancipatory policies is significant, but his work could be strengthened by situating his analysis more firmly within the primary and secondary literature. Shea relies predominantly on Curtis’ personal correspondence, papers, and official Union military records. Consequently, he fails to include the voices of the enslaved Arkansans and Missourians, and his analysis of local white residents’ reactions is similarly limited. Incorporating records produced by ordinary Black and white Arkansans and Missourians—such as federal pension files, correspondence, oral interviews, and local newspapers—would deepen scholars’ understanding of Curtis’ regional impact and humanize the people within Shea’s research. Furthermore, by not situating Curtis’s treatment of enslaved people within the greater historiography, such as Elizabeth D. Leonard’s work on Benjamin Butler, Shea missed a key opportunity to help scholars rethink the scale, scope, and timeline of wartime emancipation during the first eighteen months of the war and elevate the trans-Mississippi West’s importance on a national scale.[3]
Following Curtis’ removal for abolitionist policies, he was sent to the Department of Kansas but returned to Missouri when Confederate General Sterling Price’s forces threatened Union control of the region in 1864. Curtis’ command repulsed Price’s invasion of Missouri and Kansas during the Westport campaign, and he pursued Price as far as the Arkansas River Valley, but Shea argues that without support from Union General Alfred Pleasonton’s forces, Curtis failed to capture Price’s army. Despite his success during the Westport campaign, he was transferred to the Department of the Northwest in January 1865.
Shea incorporates Curtis’ postwar career into his narrative but largely views his postwar activities as distinct from Curtis’ life during the Civil War. After the war, Curtis returned to civil engineering and oversaw the progress of the Union Pacific Railroad line near Council Bluffs, Iowa, and tirelessly advocated for the completion of the Trans-Continental Railroad. He also served as an Indian commissioner, representing the United States’ interests in negotiations with American Indian tribes on the Northern Great Plains until April 1866. He died later that year on 26 December and was buried in Keokuk. “Greater Reconstruction” scholars argue that late-nineteenth century Americans drew critical connections between the Union’s war aims against the Confederacy and westward expansion and colonization in the West.[4] As a Civil War general in the trans-Mississippi West, Indian commissioner, and settler, Curtis’s biography offers a chance to test “Greater Reconstruction” theories, and engaging with this scholarship would strengthen Curtis’ relevance to late-nineteenth century national movements.
Curtis statue in Keokuk (Wikimedia)
Despite Curtis’ astounding military record, he is largely unremembered today. Shea observes that fellow Union officers such as Philip Sheridan and Grenville Dodge attempted to “restore him to his rightful place in history” but were unsuccessful.[5] While most post-war collective remembrances discounted Curtis’ legacy, the Iowa Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument dedicated in Des Moines in 1898 and the Curtis statue in Keokuk erected that same year memorialize the Union general in stone. Shea, however, does not offer any analysis of the historical memories created by these monument dedications. Instead, he theorizes that Curtis “was a victim of geography” due to his military service being in the trans-Mississippi West.[6] “Greater Reconstruction” scholars focused on postwar memories assert that western collective remembrances of the Civil War were used to defend settler colonialism.[7] Curtis, once again, provides an opportunity to test these theories. As such, a deeper analysis of the connection between collective remembrances (and erasure) of Curtis’ wartime emancipation practices, place, and settler colonialism is needed.
While Shea’s analysis of Curtis needs a stronger basis in the secondary literature on wartime emancipation, “Greater Reconstruction,” and Civil War memory, Shea successfully demonstrates that more attention should be paid to this understudied Union general. Curtis’ wartime emancipation policies should shift historians’ narrowed focus away from the Eastern Theater to more thoroughly integrate the trans-Mississippi West into their analyses of wartime emancipation. Hopefully, Union General will inspire other historians to incorporate Curtis into the current historiography on wartime emancipation, the Missouri and Arkansas home front, and Civil War memory. Ultimately, Union General is a worthy addition to the scholarship on military leadership and will appeal to readers seeking a traditional military biography of an understudied but impactful commander.
Lindsey R. Peterson received a Ph.D. in history from the Dale Center for the Study of War & Society at the University of Southern Mississippi (Hattiesburg) and her research analyzes the role of western Union Civil War commemorations in settler colonialism. She currently serves as the Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of South Dakota (Vermillion) and co-director of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi project (cwrgm.org), which is a digital edition of over 22,000 documents written to Mississippi Governor’s during the American Civil War and Reconstruction.
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Header Image: Major General Samuel Curtis (center, seated) and members of his staff. The photograph was probably taken in 1862 in St. Louis when Curtis was commander of the Department of the Missouri. (Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield)
Notes:
[1] William L. Shea, Union General: Samuel Ryan Curtis and Victory in the West (Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2023), 25.
[2] Shea, Union General, 149.
[3] See Elizabeth D. Leonard, Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022). See also LeeAnn Whites, Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 53–56; Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 78–88; and Tera W. Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriages in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2017), 135–153.
[4] See Elliot West, “Reconstructing Race,” Western Historical Quarterly 34, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 6–26; Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill, eds., Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015; and Bradley R. Clampitt, The Civil War and Reconstruction in Indian Territory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015).
[5] Shea, Union General, 295.
[6] Shea, Union General, 296.
[7] See Tony Klein, “Memorializing Soldiers or Celebrating Westward Expansion: Civil War Commemoration in Sioux City and Keokuk, 1868–1938,” Annals of Iowa 71 (2012): 291-322; Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), xi., 16–17, 23–25, 31–37, and 278; William Deverell, “After Antietam: Memory and Memorabilia in the Far West,” in Empire and Liberty: The Civil War and the West edited by Virginia Scharff (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 175–189; and Matthew Christopher Hulbert, The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016).