The Annals of Iowa

Back Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 79 no. 3 Summer 2020

Review of: Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America, by Thomas J. Brown

Hunter, Edith M.

Book Reviews and Notices      305 
Although there is no direct link to Iowa, the articles addressing the 
use of artillery in the Great Sioux War and the Native American view of 
Wounded Knee do occur in the upper Midwest and are welcome addi-
tions to the history of the region. The interaction and warfare between 
white settlers, the military, and the Sioux is an important aspect to the 
settlement of Iowa and the Midwest. This warfare lasted over forty-five 
years, starting with the Spirit Lake Massacre in Iowa and not ending 
until another massacre, this time of the Sioux at Wounded Knee in pre-
sent-day South Dakota. The role of the frontier army in these conflicts 
and a study of the men who served in this army is a needed contribution 
to the history of the region. 
 
 
Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America, by Thomas J. 
Brown. Civil War America Series. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North 
Carolina Press, 2019. 366 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $29.95 paper-
back.  
Reviewer Edith M. Hunter is a graduate student in history at Iowa State 
University. Her research focuses on the destruction of Civil War monu-
ments during WWII scrap metal drives. 
“If the nation is to continue as a whole,” warned former Confederate 
General Fitzhugh Lee in 1869, “it is better to forget and forgive rather 
than perpetuate in granite proofs of its civil wars.” Yet, the United States 
failed to heed Lee’s warning, and now its landscape is dotted with mon-
uments to, memories of, and myths about this internal conflict. The first 
of these persistent myths that Thomas Brown busts in Civil War Monu-
ments and the Militarization of America is the existence of a code that re-
vealed the fate of the rider in an equestrian statue based on the number 
of his horse’s hoofs that were touching the ground. Despite this de-
bunked mythology, Brown argues that public monuments are worthy 
of much deeper and richer study than any simple code can reveal. Me-
morials, then as now, can tell us as much about the subject they seek to 
commemorate as the times in which they were dedicated. 
Brown organizes this work both thematically and chronologically. 
He moves from honoring the dead with simple funerary obelisks, rec-
ognizing ordinary citizens in common soldier statues, and memorializ-
ing public leaders with equestrian statues to celebrating the war and its 
veterans with triumphal arches and allegorical figures of victory. The 
book is richly illustrated with examples from the anonymous creations 
of Gorham Manufacturing and the New England Granite Company to 
306      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
those of pivotal artists Augustus Saint-Gaudens, John Quincy Adam 
Ward, Fredrick Law Olmstead, and Gutzon Borglum. 
Expanding the breadth and depth of his 2004 work The Public Art of 
Civil War Commemoration, this new study traces American attitudes con-
cerning memorials from the toppling of the equestrian statue of George 
III at the beginning of the American Revolution through the years after 
World War I. Brown argues that the creation and dedication of Civil War 
monuments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries re-
placed concepts of iconoclastic Republicanism, the American ideal of 
the yeoman farmer, and a voluntary army of citizen-soldiers. Ulti-
mately, he contends that “democratic postwar creativity gradually gave 
way to more violent, hierarchical, self-aggrandizing representations of 
social and political order” (7).  
For example, he traces criticism of early common soldier statues— 
posed with rifles raised—as too aggressive and militaristic. This resulted 
in their rejection in favor of the more passive and reflective “parade 
rest” and “flag bearer” poses in keeping with American attitudes to-
ward individualism, soldiering as a career, and the need of a standing 
army. But as Civil War commemoration evolved from memorializing 
the dead to honoring the veterans of the rebellion, by the centennial of 
the Revolution “Americans increasingly looked upon independence as 
primarily a military achievement rather than an inspirational political 
movement” (58) and returned to more active representations of victory.  
With recent controversies regarding the removal of Confederate 
memorials across the American South, Brown brings overdue and 
timely research on Civil War monuments in both the North and the 
South. As such, readers in Iowa should find this book especially inter-
esting as, unlike much of the state’s participation in the Civil War which 
took place on far away battlefields, statues and memorials can be found 
in public squares, parks, and cemeteries across the state. Each of the me-
morial types Brown explores in his book, obelisks, common soldier stat-
ues, equestrian, and allegorical figures, can be found in nearly every 
county in Iowa, throughout the Midwest, and across the nation. Read-
ing Brown’s work will give a deeper appreciation for these tangible re-
minders of Iowa’s participation in the American Civil War. 
 
Poles in Illinois, by John Radzilowski and Ann Hetzel Gunkel. Carbondale, 
IL:  Southern Illinois University Press, 2020. xii, 224 pp. Illustrations, ta-
bles and figures, graphs, appendixes, notes, index. $24.50, paperback. 
William J. Galush is Associate Professor History, Loyola University Chicago 
(emeritus). He is an expert on the Polish immigrant experience, and the au-
thor of For More than Bread: Community and Identity in American Polania (2006). 


English

Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America

Front Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 79 no. 3 Summer 2020

Back Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 79 no. 2 Spring 2020

Review of: The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s Forgotten Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality, by Anna-Lisa Cox

Harbour, Jennifer

192      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Through the political, educational, and economic transitions supported 
by Pitchlynn and others, readers gain insight into the work of Choctaw 
elites as they sought to build a new Choctaw Nation west of the Missis-
sippi River. For his final case study Kelderman turns to Ojibwe authors 
and the romanticized image of the Indian headman. Even as American 
officials saw “real political value in representing Ojibwe leaders through 
the trope of the sympathetic Indian chief” (179), Ojibwe writers like 
George Copway sought to promote images of Ojibwe communities and 
politics that could not be so easily distilled. 
 Authorized Agents addresses each of the four cases with the com-
plexity they deserve, and Kelderman never pushes his argument be-
yond what the evidence allows. Although the nature of the project re-
sults in case studies that don’t flow smoothly from one to the next, each 
chapter offers a critical perspective that pushes readers to think differ-
ently about how to understand and work with the writings of Native 
peoples in the nineteenth century.  
 
 
The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s Forgotten Black Pioneers and the 
Struggle for Equality, by Anna-Lisa Cox. New York: PublicAffairs, 2018. 
xviii, 280 pp. Maps, notes, index. $28.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Jennifer Harbour is associate professor of black studies and wom-
en’s studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. She is the author of Or-
ganizing Freedom: Black Emancipation Activism in the Civil War Midwest (2020). 
Anna-Lisa Cox’s new monograph tells the story of black farming settle-
ments in the antebellum and wartime Old Northwest (what is present-
day Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin). In her introduc-
tion, Cox argues that, while her deliberate use of the words pioneer and 
frontier may seem problematic and redolent of indigenous genocide, she 
aims to engage the historiography by framing the lost history of “The 
First Great Migration” as agricultural, ambitious, and decidedly African 
American. The growing communities that resulted from that migration, 
she posits, spread across five states with free people who envisioned 
themselves as farmers with citizenship rights. How on earth, Cox won-
ders, did historians overlook where and how black men and women 
became pioneers on the land carved out by the Northwest Territory in 
1787? This space was to date the largest piece of American land to be 
free from slavery—at least in theory. The territory also offered equal 
voting rights to property-owning men, thus making it a safe haven for 
hundreds of black people who had the money and means to migrate 
and settle.  
Book Reviews and Notices      193 
 Cox’s discovery and analysis of more than 300 African American 
communities shows what historians have only just begun to under-
stand: black people deliberately settled this land because they sought a 
new space in which to pursue equality. Cox’s research is meticulous, 
and she clearly defines the parameters of her study: she sought only 
people who owned property and who self-identified as farmers. Her 
historical subjects include neither urban dwellers nor rural “entrepre-
neurs” who owed businesses such as mills, general stores, and smith-
eries. Even when she discovered fascinating people who made their liv-
ing as teachers or pastors, she deliberately excluded them. This degree 
of specificity allows Cox to cast her historical subjects as Jeffersonian in 
nature—men and women who employed westward expansion, and its 
language of the ideal democratic agrarian society, to capitalize on the 
opportunity to settle in the new, more equitable America. Of course, 
like the already present indigenous populations, African Americans 
quickly discovered that these rural enclaves were heavily populated by 
white racists who had no intention of sharing their spaces.  
 Cox organizes her study into nine chapters, each recounting a nar-
rative oriented to reveal how diverse the midwestern frontier actually 
was, a striking characteristic for historians who once believed that the 
real substantive action in the West only began with Bleeding Kansas. In 
flowing chapters with titles like “Gibson County, Indiana, 1828” (chap. 
3), “Cincinnati, 1841” (chap. 6), and “A History of Repeated Injuries and 
Usurpations” (chap. 9), Cox provides a series of historical vignettes. 
These will undoubtedly whet the appetite for a deeper understanding 
of how tightly knit kinfolk refused to fail in their demanding emotional 
and physical labor. Each of these sections describes seemingly disparate 
situations; African Americans experienced an incalculable range of 
aggressions from the land, the law, and the social landscape. Cox uses 
these scenarios to argue that black pioneers insisted on being an integral 
part of the new and expanding nation. Readers seeking fascinating sto-
ries of this place and period will find stories of marriage and romance, 
crime and punishment, law and retribution. There are fights, fires, friend-
ships, and fierce competition. 
 This work builds on Cox’s first book-length study, A Stronger Kin-
ship: One Town’s Extraordinary Story of Hope and Faith (2006), which 
chronicled white and black inhabitants of Covert, Michigan. In that 
town, Cox discovered, black Michiganders built extraordinary postbel-
lum interracial friendships and partnerships with their white counter-
parts. That work was a welcome addition to the oft-ignored field of mid-
western history, in part because of her unrelenting search for evidence. 
Admirably, Cox also visited these communities and interviewed the 
194      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
descendants of the community’s founders. No historian of any margin-
alized group could quibble with such painstaking research, and it is a 
testament to Cox’s commitment to her historical subjects that she tells 
their story in such artistic and heartfelt prose. It is this insistence upon 
portraying the most positive aspects of the lives of these black pioneers, 
however, that occasionally comes across as hyperbolic. For instance, in 
the last few sentences of the book, Cox writes that the black pioneers 
“rose up to trample tyranny and to bring the blessings of liberty and 
equality along the length and breadth of the land” (200). It is likely that 
the black settlers themselves felt this way, especially because records 
such as speeches, diaries, letters, sermons, and especially black political 
convention records use this exalted language. Given the rancor and 
hostility of white racism and white supremacy everywhere in America, 
however, it would seem that black Americans did not actually trample 
tyranny, but instead constantly dreamt of doing so. 
 
 
In God’s Presence: Chaplains, Missionaries, and Religious Space during 
the American Civil War, by Benjamin L. Miller. Modern War Studies. 
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019. xi, 256 pp. Illustrations, 
notes, bibliography, index. $39.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Timothy Wesley is associate professor of history at Austin Peay 
State University. He is the author The Politics of Faith during the Civil War 
(2013). 
Benjamin Miller’s impressive In God’s Presence is first and foremost a 
spatial study of religious life “under the gun.” Evaluating the wartime 
interactions between spiritual captains and the men to whom they min-
istered based largely on the physical settings in which such interactions 
occurred allows Miller to make clear the vitally malleable nature of 
“religious space.” But it is not solely in highlighting the differences be-
tween the understood religious realm, what the author calls the “sacred 
space” of churches and religious ceremonies, and the newly contested 
but still “profane” spaces of the camp, battlefield, and hospital that 
makes Miller’s effort significant. To the contrary, for while the author 
documents in detail the wartime clergy’s efforts to sacralize the numer-
ous environments through which they were compelled to lead their 
beleaguered flock, arguably more memorable in Miller’s offering is 
simply the constancy of the shepherds themselves.  
 Most of the men who served in America’s Civil War armies were 
religious to one extent or another. Their spirituality had been forged in 
an antebellum world of separate public and sacred spheres, the latter’s 
static spaces adding meaning to their faith and providing the context 


The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America's Forgotten Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality

Review of: Old-Fashioned Modernism: Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature, by Andy Ole

Raymond, C. Elizabeth

Old-Fashioned Modernism: Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature

Review of: Slavery's Reach: Southern Slaveholders in the North Star State, by Christopher P. Lehma

Chambers, Linda

Slavery's Reach: Southern Slaveholders in the North Star State

Review of: The Preacher's Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities, by Kate Bowle

Koerselman, Rebecca

The Preacher's Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities

Review of: Iowa Confederates in the Civil War, by David Connon

Roberts, Tim

Book Reviews and Notices      301 
home front, instead making only repeated general references to north-
ern women. 
Where Carr succeeds is in creating a platform for Wisconsin’s Civil 
War era women to add their voices to the tumultuous times that sur-
rounded them. Some of their observations are insightful gems for his-
torians. For example, historians have long sought to know the degree to 
which mid-nineteenth-century women shared their political views. 
Ann Waldo observed to her husband in a letter dated February 16, 1862, 
that “I find it is the very general opinion (among Republicans even) that 
Lincoln and McClellan are neither of them the right men in the right 
places” (66). From Waldo’s vantage point, by the end of the war’s first 
year apparently some midwesterners had as many concerns about Pres-
ident Lincoln as they did about General McClellan. Similarly, from 
Madisonite Emily Quiner readers gain insight into the impact at home 
of the shock and grief over the sudden tragic death of Governor Louis 
P. Harvey, who drowned in the Tennessee River in April 1862 while 
leading an effort to get medical supplies to Wisconsin troops wounded 
at Shiloh. “We all felt a shock of deep sorrow this morning,” Quiner 
wrote, noting that stores and businesses “were all closed and draped in 
mourning as also the State House” (81). His wife, however, may have 
been among the last to know. Quiner described how Mrs. Harvey was 
“on the street when the report came getting subscriptions for the relief 
of a poor family in town” upon noticing that capitol and court house 
flags were at half-mast. The news caused her to drop “senseless to the 
ground” (81).  
Carr’s volume of Wisconsin women’s writings from the home front 
offers insight about the sense of immediacy experienced by women and 
localities during the Civil War. The lack of regional historical ground-
ing and analysis reduces its value somewhat and leads to some mis-
statements by the editor. Nevertheless, Carr’s editing efforts and these 
women’s voices represent an invaluable addition to nineteenth-cen-
tury women’s, midwestern, and Civil War era histories. 
 
 
Iowa Confederates in the Civil War, by David Connon. Mount Pleasant, 
SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2019. 208 pp. Timeline, maps, illustrations, 
notes, bibliography, index. $24.99 paperback. 
Reviewer Tim Roberts is a professor of history at Western Illinois Univer-
sity. His newest book, "The Infernal War": The Civil War Letters of William and 
Jane Standard, was published by Kent State University Press in 2018. 
302      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
David Connon, an independent scholar, has compiled biographies of 
seventy-six men, residents of Iowa, who served the Confederacy during 
the Civil War. These individuals’ political sympathies and military ser-
vice on behalf of the seceded South reveal how Iowans’ robust support 
for the Union—the state’s population in 1860 was just under 700,000 
and some 76,000 Iowans served in the Union’s forces—was not absolute. 
Connon defines Iowa residents as people who lived in the state as 
civilians before the Civil War for at least two years, no earlier than 1850, 
and were at least thirteen years old during residency. Based on impres-
sive research in some seventy-one archives, forty-one period newspa-
pers, and equivalent period published sources, Connon determined 
that nearly half of the Iowa Confederates moved or returned to the South 
as a result of the economic Panic of 1857, because the region’s more agrar-
ian orientation helped it recover more quickly than the North. The war 
came to these migrant Hawkeyes in 1861, in other words, not the other 
way around. But, Connon still finds that nearly all Iowa Confederates 
served willingly, rather than being pressured to enlist or conscripted. 
On the other hand, Connon emphasizes that two-thirds of his co-
hort joined “out of opportunism, often related to earning a living, with 
little regard for principles or circumstances” (14). This explanation co-
incides with the self-perception of another Iowa soldier, Cyrus Boyd, 
who claimed “patriotic motives,” but also admitted that his “dull” life 
in Palmyra (Warren County) and fear the war would prove ephemeral 
prompted his enlistment as a Yankee (The Civil War Diary of Cyrus F. 
Boyd, Fifteenth Iowa Infantry, 1861–1863, ed. Mildred Throne, 2015, 6, 7). 
Notable Civil War scholars including James McPherson (For Cause and 
Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, 1997), Chandra Manning 
(What this Cruel War was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War, 2007), 
and Aaron Sheehan-Dean (Why Confederates Fought: Family & Nation in 
Civil War Virginia, 2009) have emphasized soldiers’ ideological inspira-
tion to join the ranks, North and South. However, Iowa Confederates’ 
more practical approach to the war, as well as their hardcore racism, 
coincides with the attitude of Union soldiers of southern background 
who had settled in southern and western Illinois (“This Infernal War”: 
the Civil War Letters of William and Jane Standard, ed. Timothy Roberts, 
2018). Indeed, forty-five percent of Iowa Confederates enlisted in the 
Confederate military because they or their father or mother were south-
erners by birth. 
Other than a three-page synopsis and two-page appendix where 
the statistics noted above are stated, Iowa Confederates in the Civil War 
does not offer an overall interpretation of Iowa Confederates’ historical 
significance. The book’s first two chapters describe Iowa politics on the 
Book Reviews and Notices      303 
eve of and during the war, which pressured a minority of Iowans to de-
cide to migrate. Abraham Lincoln ascended as a ruthless anti-secession 
president. Republican provost marshals arrested antiwar newspaper 
editors and a former U.S. Senator and Dubuque slave owner, George 
Wallace Jones (Jones’s image is one of the book’s numerous illustrations 
of Iowa Confederates and their networks). And Republican newspapers 
stoked hysteria about secret societies of southern sympathizers. These 
chapters confirm that Iowa likely had little of the “Copperhead” re-
sistance movements that swept southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois un-
til Lincoln’s 1864 re-election. 
After this introduction, the book is organized in six chapters, each 
one comprised of a series of individuals’ profiles reflecting patterns of 
experience. Chapter 3 focuses on wartime Dubuque, the home of a 
dozen Confederates. Chapter 4 identifies fourteen Iowa families whose 
fathers, sons, and brothers fought on different sides during the war. 
Chapter 5 describes three individuals who served the Confederacy out 
of “principled commitment,” including “hints of southern-defined 
honor” (84). The following two chapters examine the odysseys of a half-
dozen Iowans who deserted the Confederate ranks (Chapter 6), and Io-
wans who rendered professional service to the Confederate military as 
physicians, chemists, lawyers, chaplains, and armorers (Chapter 7). 
Chapter 8 highlights fifteen Iowans raised or educated in the South who 
chose to return to the region.  
Of the seventy-six Iowa Confederates that Connon documents, ten 
were killed in the war, a mortality rate about half that of Confederate 
troops’ overall death rate. This discrepancy may reflect the relative social 
affluence of the Iowa Confederates. Overall, Connon reveals patterns in 
these men’s backgrounds that predisposed them to join the rebellion, 
their various forms of wartime service, and their postwar lives spent 
either building careers in the reconstructed South or, if they returned to 
Iowa, seeking to live down reputations as traitors. 
 
 
The Frontier Army: Episodes from Dakota and The West, edited by R. Eli 
Paul. Pierre, SD: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2019. 189 pp. 
Maps, photographs, illustrations, artwork, notes, index. $29.95 hard-
cover. 
Reviewer Paul N. Beck is professor of history at Wisconsin Lutheran Col-
lege. His publications include Columns of Vengeance: Soldiers, Sioux, and the 
Punitive Expeditions, 1863–1864 (2013) and The First Sioux War: The Grattan 
Fight and Blue Water Creek, 1854–1856 (2004). 


Iowa Confederates in the Civil War

Review of: Buffalo Bill Cody: A Man of the West, by Prentiss Ingraham, edited by Sandra K. Sagala

Murphy, J. T.

Book Reviews and Notices      95 
Buffalo Bill Cody: A Man of the West, by Prentiss Ingraham, edited by 
Sandra K. Sagala. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019. ix, 349 pp. 
Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $55 hardcover, 
$29.95 paperback. 
Reviewer J. T. Murphy is professor of history at Indiana University South 
Bend. His research and writing have focused on frontier settlement, the 
Oregon Trail, and the military history of the nineteenth-century U.S. West. 
In 1854, eight-year-old William F. Cody moved with his family from 
Scott County, Iowa, to Kansas, where he began a kind of apprentice-
ship—as hunter, scout, and Indian fighter—that led to his becoming the 
iconic hero Buffalo Bill. His life, like Daniel Boone’s or Kit Carson’s, suited 
an American narrative about taming the wilderness. Proving a shame-
less champion of his image, Cody welcomed its dissemination. It was 
reshaped and retold in dime novels, in theatre productions (some writ-
ten by Prentiss Ingraham and often starring Cody), in an 1879 auto-
biography published when he was only 33, in his famous Wild West 
Show, and eventually in silent movies.  
 As a writer, Ingraham achieved his own legendary status by pub-
lishing 600 novels; of those, 287 used Cody as the protagonist (311–21). 
This volume, edited by Sandra K. Sagala, an independent scholar who 
has written excellent studies of Cody on the stage and in films, is a bi-
ography originally serialized between July 13, 1895, and May 16, 1896, 
in the Duluth Press, a newspaper partially financed by Cody but oper-
ated by his sister Helen and her husband, Hugh Wetmore. Ingraham 
follows Cody’s autobiography, often verbatim, embellishing here and 
there to flesh out an episode, add excitement, or offer lessons for young 
readers about personal responsibility, courage, and devotion to family. 
Even Turk, Cody’s childhood dog, is given a principal role to evoke 
those values. Ultimately, this is not only a book about Cody but also a 
fun example of nineteenth-century popular literature. 
 
 
Kansas Baseball, 1858–1941, by Mark E. Eberle. Lawrence: University 
Press of Kansas, 2017. xiii, 308 pp. Map, tables, illustrations, graphs, ap-
pendix, notes, bibliography, index. $45 hardcover, $27.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Michael E. Lomax retired as professor of sport history from the 
University of Iowa. He is the author of Black Baseball Entrepreneurs, 1860–
1901: Operating by Any Means Necessary (2003). 
Mark Eberle has written a thoroughly engrossing monograph on the his-
tory of baseball in the state of Kansas from the mid–nineteenth century to 
the eve of World War II. He chronicles baseball’s early history in the state, 
the local fans and civic leaders who constructed the ballparks, and the 


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