The Annals of Iowa

Review of: "Practical Liberators: Union Officers in the Western Theater during the Civil War," by Kristopher A. Teters

Wooster, Robert

92      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 The overall importance of this collection lies in its effort to connect 
the experiences of women in Civil War America across the sectional di-
vide. In many cases, however, the paired essays make few such connec-
tions, so it is not clear how reading the essays together would facilitate 
scholars’ thinking across regional boundaries more than would reading 
existing scholarship on both regions. Many of the essays—especially 
in the topic areas of politics, wartime mobilization, wartime relief, and 
one of the emancipation essays—have substantial topical overlap. The 
separation of wartime mobilization and wartime relief was particularly 
puzzling: as the editors themselves note, the distinction between them 
“seems rather a fine one” (xiv). Combining existing topic areas could 
have also created space for additional topics in the collection, such as 
sexuality and masculinity. Nonetheless, having all these essays in a sin-
gle volume is a convenience. The book should be of interest to scholars 
and graduate students working on women in the Civil War era. Readers 
of the Annals of Iowa may be particularly interested in Nichole Etche-
son’s essay, “Women and Family at Home in the North,” because of her 
use of primary sources from Iowa and other midwestern states.  
 
 
Practical Liberators: Union Officers in the Western Theater during the Civil 
War, by Kristopher A. Teters. Civil War America series. Chapel Hill: 
University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 225 pp. Notes on methodology, 
notes, bibliography, index. $32.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Robert Wooster is Regents Professor of History at Texas A&M 
University–Corpus Christi. His books include American Military Frontiers: 
The U.S. Army in the West, 1783–1900 (2009) and The Civil War Bookshelf: 50 
Must-Read Books about the War Between the States (2001). 
Since the 1950s, scholars have devoted considerable attention to the at-
titudes and actions of the Union Army regarding the confiscation and 
emancipation of slaves. In this first study to focus exclusively on Union 
officers in the western theater, Kristopher A. Teters concludes that “prag-
matism, far more than morality, motivated western officers to support 
emancipation” (2). In so doing, Teters positions himself firmly in the 
camp of historians Bell Irvin Wiley, Louis Gerteis, Mark Grimsley, and 
Gary Gallagher, all of whom have said much the same thing. Thor-
oughly researched and entirely convincing, Practical Liberators surely 
establishes this interpretation as representing the consensus among 
professional historians. 
 As the author explains, most western officers initially insisted that 
they were fighting to save the Union, not to end slavery. Following the 
Book Reviews and Notices      93 
hesitant actions of the Lincoln administration and Henry Halleck’s Gen-
eral Order No. 3, which instructed local commanders not to allow slaves 
to enter Union camps, in the first year of the war, with a few notable 
exceptions, they “adopted conservative policies toward slavery” (24). 
The Second Confiscation Act, which permitted the seizure of slaves 
owned by rebel masters, combined with a growing realization that 
slaves could help the Union Army, encouraged more sympathy for con-
fiscation in the second half of 1862. Government policy, concludes 
Teters, was especially significant in convincing generals as diverse as 
the moderate Ulysses S. Grant and the arch-conservative Don Carlos 
Buell to become less likely to return bondsmen to their masters. 
 Even as many remained reluctant to embrace the morality of eman-
cipation, practical-minded western officers became increasingly con-
vinced that ending slavery would hasten the bloody conflict’s conclu-
sion. Even critics recognized that former slaves provided useful mili-
tary intelligence, built fortifications, served as pioneers, and cooked and 
cleaned in military camps, thus freeing more white troops for front-line 
duty. As emancipation became official policy, officers did their duty 
and obeyed the commands of civilian authorities. Others came to join 
the cause as a result of having witnessed the brutality of slavery first-
hand. Associations with black servants sometimes tempered racial prej-
udices. Still, “it was pragmatism more than principle that had gotten 
them there” (66). Such pragmatism was particularly important in shap-
ing army activities in Missouri and Kentucky, which were covered by 
the Second Confiscation Act but exempt from the Emancipation Procla-
mation.  
 Resistance to using black troops remained strong, however—even 
more so than in the case of emancipation. Teters gives high marks to 
Adj. Gen. Lorenzo Thomas, who spearheaded efforts to arm former 
slaves in the Mississippi valley. Still, the racism that permeated most of 
the North only rarely wavered. “The war,” concludes Teters, “never 
radically altered racial attitudes of most Union officers. It represented 
no moment of enlightenment or transformative experience” (104). 
Teters thus devotes an entire chapter to assessing the views and actions 
of William T. Sherman, whose marches through Georgia and the Caro-
linas served to liberate tens of thousands of slaves. Taking their cue 
from their conservative commander, most of Sherman’s officers saw the 
multitudes of freedpersons who flocked to their advancing armies as a 
military impediment. But, as Teters points out, former slaves could be 
just as pragmatic as Union officers in the western theater. “Regardless 
of what army officers thought,” he notes, “many slaves viewed them as 
liberators and would not pass up an opportunity to gain freedom” (152). 
94      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 Midwesterners dominated the ranks of most units in the Union’s 
western armies and constituted 77.7 percent of the 410 officers included 
in this study. Several were from Iowa, including Col. John Edwards of 
the Eighteenth Iowa Infantry, who in August 1862 secured the assis-
tance of Governor Samuel Kirkwood in his efforts to remove his unit 
from the authority of Missouri militiamen, who insisted that they expel 
fugitive slaves from their camp. Capt. George C. Burmeister, Thirty-
fifth Iowa Infantry, whose diary is housed in the U.S. Army Military 
History Institute (Carlisle, Pennsylvania), also features prominently in 
Teters’s analysis. Perhaps most poignant were the experiences of Dr. 
William Vermilion, an officer in the Thirty-sixth Iowa. A self-described 
abolitionist, his published letters to his wife indicate that his father and 
brothers ostracized him for his beliefs. Lamented a rueful Vermilion, 
“They don’t want to correspond with an Abolitionist I suppose” (69).
  
 
Dodge City and the Birth of the Wild West, by Robert R. Dykstra and Jo 
Ann Manfra. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017. 236 pp. Illus-
trations, appendix, notes, index. $22.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Mark R. Ellis is professor of history and chair of the History De-
partment at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. He is the author of Law 
and Order in Buffalo Bill’s Country: Legal Culture and Community on the Great 
Plains, 1867–1910 (2007). 
When Americans think of Dodge City, a number of images come to 
mind. Some might remember fictionalized television characters from 
the long-running television series Gunsmoke: Marshal Matt Dillon, Miss 
Kitty, and Festus. Others might think of historical figures who have be-
come entwined in American popular culture such as Wyatt Earp and 
Bat Masterson who, during brief periods of their careers, policed the 
streets and vice industries of Dodge City. The iconic image of “Boothill,” 
where victims of gun violence and vigilantes reportedly lay buried with 
their boots on is a popular frontier image and one closely associated 
with Dodge City. Most Americans have heard and perhaps used the 
phrase, “Get outta Dodge,” which refers to a speedy escape from a dan-
gerous place or situation. In Dodge City and the Birth of the Wild West, 
authors Robert Dykstra and Jo Ann Manfra explore this popular cul-
tural fascination with Dodge City and its purported disorderly frontier 
period. 
 Dykstra is an expert on frontier communities. His influential book 
The Cattle Towns, published 50 years ago, forced historians to rethink 
the nature of personal and extralegal violence in frontier America. For 
decades he has used his research on frontier-era Dodge City and other 


English

Practical Liberators: Union Officers in the Western Theater during the Civil War

Review of: "The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word," by Marian Wilson Kimber

Lush, Paige

100      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
buying of Senate seats and stealing of elections. Rival governments, 
each claiming a majority, jockeyed for control in Alabama, Louisiana, 
and Arkansas. In this case, context would do more than enrich; it would 
inform. One could argue, for example, that the most visceral outrage 
against thieving that congressmen faced did not come from Credit Mo-
bilier but from their acceptance of a retroactive pay hike, and, contrary 
to the impression that Mitchell may leave, the scandal of ’73 had almost 
become an afterthought within three years: for muckrakers, there was 
treasure everywhere. All true, but that makes Mitchell’s contribution no 
less useful. Then and since, Credit Mobilier was the “King of Frauds,” 
and for a revelatory moment in stripping the gilding from the Gilded 
Age, readers should give this book a royal welcome. 
  
 
The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word, by Marian Wilson 
Kimber. Music in American Life series. Urbana, Springfield, and Chi-
cago: University of Illinois Press, 2017. xvii, 324 pp. Illustrations, appen-
dix, notes, index. $28.00 paperback.  
Reviewer Paige Lush is director of bands and instructor of music at 
McHenry County College. Her research and writing have focused on the 
role of music in the chautauqua movement. 
It is not entirely surprising that elocution has received little scholarly 
attention relative to other Progressive Era American phenomena. It was 
performing written word, but not exactly acting. It could be musical, 
but was not exactly music. By the early twentieth century it was derided 
as trite and dated by many performers, some of whom were arguably 
still practicing (repackaged) elocution. And many of its leading figures 
were women, often professional performers who specialized in rein-
forcing traditional gender roles, despite their very presence on stage 
challenging those same conventions. Marian Wilson Kimber’s The Elo-
cutionists provides a much needed examination of the elocution move-
ment in the context of turn-of-the-century America. 
 Kimber’s analysis of women’s dialect recitations offers valuable in-
sight into women’s place on the stage and in broader performing cul-
ture. The use of child dialect to reinforce maternal roles for girls while 
also providing a voice of rebellion against those same social structures 
is an intriguing paradox that Kimber explains thoroughly without be-
coming tedious. Her description of the career of child-dialect specialist 
Kitty Cheatham provides valuable insight into the relationship of the 
spoken-word performer in general, and the dialect speaker in particu-
lar, with the audience. For instance, Kimber quotes from a New York 
Times review stating that Cheatham’s performances “seem to appeal 
Book Reviews and Notices      101 
more especially to those that would like to be children than to those 
who are” (140). 
 In chapter two Kimber provides excellent examples of the musical 
component of elocution, which is no small feat considering the scarcity 
of surviving sheet music in archives related to the practice. Her musical 
analyses are deep enough to be useful but are never tedious and would 
not deter the non-musician. The analysis of the notation systems used 
in various elocution texts is fascinating. The obvious parallels between 
many of the notation systems used for elocution and standard musical 
notation speak to the paramusical quality of elocution, which becomes 
even more clear when elocution is paired with music as in many of 
Kimber’s examples.  
 Kimber analyzes the role of music in either legitimizing or cheap-
ening recitation, depending on context (44). Particularly interesting is 
the discussion of the practice of reciting, rather than singing, the text of 
an art song while the piano performs its original music. This is ad-
dressed in the career profile of Jane Manner, one of several performers 
whose career Kimber uses to tell the story of women in elocution.  
 In chapter five Kimber uses the discussion of the practice of Del-
sarte and its place in midwestern society in the early twentieth century 
to examine Meredith Willson’s 1957 Broadway musical The Music Man 
and its complex relationship with the small-town Iowa society it de-
picts. Kimber artfully connects Willson’s depiction of River City em-
bracing the arts with issues of women’s role in performance discussed 
earlier in The Elocutionists. “When the males are involved in the creation 
of River City’s cultural life, only then will it be significant, in a way that 
Marian’s piano lessons and Mrs. Shinn’s patriotic pageants are not, as 
they are merely women’s efforts” (106). 
 Kimber’s brief biographies of Phyllis Fergus and Frieda Peycke 
show just how uneasy Progressive Era Americans were with women—
especially professionals—in performing roles. Fergus and Peycke were 
just two of many women whose livelihood depended, at least in part, 
on performing domesticity for women’s clubs. This is a recurring theme 
in The Elocutionists, one that Kimber weaves throughout the work, cul-
minating in chapter ten’s discussion of musical recitations by female 
composers in the waning years of the art.  
 The Elocutionists does, at times, suffer from a lack of a clear chronol-
ogy. This is likely unavoidable, as the rise and fall of public recitation is 
not entirely linear. For instance, choral speaking gained acceptance well 
into the decline of solo elocution. It is appropriate to avoid a completely 
chronological telling of the story of women in elocution, but it would 
be helpful for the reader to have some familiarity with early twentieth-
102      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
century platform culture and history in order to keep track of the vari-
ous threads of the narrative.  
 The Elocutionists would be of interest to scholars of midwestern cul-
ture in general and Iowa in particular. Kimber’s discussion of Delsarte 
centers on Iowa and addresses not only Delsarte and elocution but also 
the performance venues (public and private), training institutions, and 
leading figures of chautauqua and other closely related (and largely 
midwestern) phenomena.  
 
 
The Fort Dodge Line: Iowa’s Feisty Interurban, by Don L. Hofsommer. Cen-
tral Electric Railfans’ Association Bulletin 149. Chicago: Central Electric 
Railfans’ Association, 2018. 188 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes. $65.00 
hardcover. 
Reviewer Simon Cordery is professor of history and chair of the Depart-
ment of History at Iowa State University. He is the author of The Iron Road 
in the Prairie State: The Story of Illinois Railroading (2016). 
Interurban railroads developed at the end of the nineteenth century by 
connecting two or more urban areas, often running electric-powered 
equipment. Don Hofsommer’s latest book chronicles the development 
and decline of one such line linking the capital of the Hawkeye State 
with Fort Dodge, 84 miles to the northwest. The book relies heavily on 
contemporary newspapers, government publications, and the extensive 
secondary literature on Iowa railroading, much of it produced by 
Hofsommer himself. Arranged chronologically, it fits the Fort Dodge, 
Des Moines & Southern line (FDDM&S) into the larger picture of state 
and national developments.  
 Hofsommer has, with his customary panache, written a fine sum-
mary of the corporate life of the FDDM&S. He opens with a brief ac-
count of riding the line to Des Moines, admitting his “affection” for it (3). 
Its origins were far from romantic, however, as he explains. The FDDM&S 
emerged in the wake of a failed attempt to mine coal in central Iowa for 
the railroads of James J. Hill, the “Empire Builder.” Hill-backed entre-
preneur Hamilton Browne, “genetically enthusiastic and chronically 
optimistic,” moved to Newton and, in 1902, created the Newton & 
Northwestern, a “most improbable route” (14, 17). It grew slowly and, 
in 1905, collapsed quickly. Boston investors purchased it and installed 
Homer Loring as president. Loring shifted the focus to a Des Moines to 
Fort Dodge artery with an Ames branch. The new line operated electri-
fied passenger service alongside steam-hauled freight, giving it a “dual 
personality” (32). 


The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word

Review of: How the West Was Drawn: Mapping, Indians, and the Construction of the Trans-Mississippi West, by David Bernstein

Mergenthal, Rebekah M. K.

396      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 French people arrived in this world in the late 1600s, but they 
hardly transformed it to any “imperial” purpose. Cross-cultural con-
versions happened in both directions, but most of the power continued 
to rest in long-standing indigenous kinship networks, particularly out-
side of tiny European beachheads like Kaskaskia. As Lee shows in an-
other one of the book’s impressively innovative chapters, French ambi-
tions to mediate between the Chickasaw, Illinois, and Miami—let alone 
to project imperial power outright—failed. Except in certain individual 
and short-term cases, French officials remained outside of these indige-
nous networks, which limited their power. When British officials and 
merchants tried to establish a foothold in the region, as did the Phila-
delphia-based merchant George Morgan, who arrived in the Illinois 
Country in the 1760s, they, too, largely failed to gain access to social net-
works that controlled trade in the midcontinent. More successful, as Lee 
shows in a chapter that might be of the most interest to readers of early 
Iowa history, were the kinship networks established by Osages and eth-
nically French families like the Chouteaus in Spanish-controlled upper 
Louisiana. In the final chapter, Lee narrates how American empire 
worked in what had become the region’s familiar patterns, gaining 
crucial control over riverways by extending kinship networks between 
prominent Anglo elites and Francophone upper Louisiana families, 
who now used their influence to help dispossess the indigenous peo-
ples with whom they had previously built their power.  
 This book takes its place among the best recent works in a recent 
outpouring of scholarship on early midwestern history. Lee’s original 
argument is backed by superb research, and his narrative style is en-
gaging. Those interested in the indigenous and colonial history of the 
Mississippi Valley will find this book indispensable.  
 
 
How the West Was Drawn: Mapping, Indians, and the Construction of the 
Trans-Mississippi West, by David Bernstein. Borderlands and Trans-
cultural Studies Series. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. xvii, 
303 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $65 hardcover. 
Reviewer Rebekah M. K. Mergenthal is associate professor of history at 
Pacific Lutheran University. Her research explores the accommodations 
and exclusions among the variety of racial and ethnic groups in the lower 
Missouri River valley during the first half of the nineteenth century. 
In How the West Was Drawn, David Bernstein argues that “Indians were 
central to the cartographic creation of the trans-Mississippi United States” 
during the nineteenth century and thus must be put “squarely into stories 
of American state building” (3, 11). Building on insights from previous 
works of the “new Indian history,” including those of Kathleen DuVal, 
Book Reviews and Notices      397 
Brian DeLay, and John Bowes, Bernstein adds an emphasis on maps, 
including the power and negotiations involved in their creation. He 
urges readers to focus on the motivations of actors at the time, including 
the Iowa, the Lakota, and especially the Pawnee, so that we can under-
stand a broader “collective history” (3). Bernstein is aware of the critique 
that maps were a tool and exemplar of the violence of colonization, but 
he wants to show how U.S. expansion was “negotiated” (5). Because 
Natives were involved in mapping projects, they were also, Bernstein 
asserts, involved in shaping how the expansion of the United States 
happened, and thus their role needs to be understood. For some readers, 
Bernstein’s book might put too much emphasis on “stories of nego-
tiation and cooperation” and too little on the elements of “coercion and 
contestation” (19), but Bernstein presents his book as a corrective within 
a broader conversation that he says often overemphasizes the latter. 
 Readers of the Annals of Iowa might be particularly interested in 
Bernstein’s first chapter, as it explores Iowa Indian Notchininga’s 1837 
map and its role in securing at least some land for the Iowas even during 
a period of “massive encroachment from Indians and Euro-Americans 
alike” (29). That chapter, along with the next two, which largely focus 
on the Pawnees, make up the first section of the book, titled “Living 
in Indian Country.” Bernstein uses it to establish that Indian concepts 
of place were not incompatible with Euro-American constructs (even 
though they have often been described as such, even by some current 
scholars). Shifting from the on-the-ground perspectives highlighted in 
the first section, Bernstein’s second section, “The Rise and Fall of ‘Indian 
Country,’” investigates the Euro-American cultural and political desig-
nations of the land directly west of the Missouri River (roughly the cur-
rent states of Kansas and Nebraska). Bernstein focuses on how John C. 
Frémont and other Euro-Americans used distinctions between “sav-
agery” and “civilization” to minimize Natives’ roles in cartographic 
practices. In the briefer third section, Bernstein considers the shifting 
power of naming as a way to indicate a richer story of expansion than 
might first be accessible on most maps. He develops a close reading of 
Gouverneur Kemble Warren’s 1857 map that was “created . . . to find 
the best transcontinental railroad route” but at the same time “strongly 
inscribed Indian presence” (198). Thus, Bernstein seeks to move beyond 
a tale of the inevitability of U.S. expansion to one that can convey “con-
testation and negotiation” (227).  
 As one would expect in a book that focuses on cartography, Bern-
stein’s is filled with numerous maps (nearly 50 overall). Unfortunately, 
the reproductions are often on a small scale, and in gray scale, so the 
details can be difficult for readers to discern. Yet Bernstein provides 
398      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
important tools for thinking about maps in complex ways. He carefully 
draws attention to the multifaceted processes and power involved in 
their construction, which, in turn, opens up many avenues for under-
standing how and why U.S. expansion developed as it did. By showing 
that maps were “syncretic creations” (199), Bernstein also shows how 
the nation that was being mapped was one as well. 
 
 
Fire, Pestilence, and Death: St. Louis, 1849, by Christopher Alan Gordon. 
St. Louis: Missouri History Museum Press, 2018. 280 pp. Map, illustra-
tions, notes, bibliography, index. $19.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Jeffrey S. Adler is professor of history at the University of Florida. 
He is the author of Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West: The 
Rise and Fall of Antebellum St. Louis (1991) and First in Violence, Deepest in 
Dirt: Homicide in Chicago, 1875–1920 (2006). 
A dizzying, jarring series of crises shaped daily life in St. Louis during 
1849. Perhaps faster than any other urban center in the United States in 
that era, the city’s economy boomed and population soared. Thousands 
of ambitious easterners and European immigrants settled in St. Louis, 
while tens of thousands of trans-Mississippi migrants and California-
bound gold prospectors passed through the city in 1849. But St. Louis 
also endured horrific natural disasters during that fateful year, includ-
ing a cholera outbreak that claimed at least 10 percent of the local pop-
ulation and a huge fire that consumed part of the levee and downtown 
area. In an engaging and accessible book, one lavishly illustrated with 
mid-century photographs and lithographs, Christopher Alan Gordon 
describes these scourges and depicts life in St. Louis in 1849. 
 The director of library and collections for the Missouri Historical 
Society, Gordon pitches his narrative to informed general readers rather 
than to professional historians. He is more interested in recounting the 
flavor of mid-century St. Louis and the vigor of its residents than in en-
gaging scholarly debates about the city or the region. “Although demo-
graphic breakdowns and statistics provide perspectives on the serious-
ness of St. Louis’s cholera,” Gordon explains, “individuals’ personal 
stories give us the truest insight into this tragedy” (41). Nor does his 
examination of the city’s massive 1849 fire compare the local disaster 
with comparable conflagrations in Pittsburgh in 1845 or in other cities.  
 After offering interesting snapshots of St. Louisans’ challenges from 
pestilence and fire, Gordon moves beyond themes relating to death and 
destruction to include chapters on race relations, law enforcement, and 
crime, all of which provide fascinating, informative perspectives on the 
fabric of daily life in the city in 1849. Gordon does not calculate crime 


How the West Was Drawn: Mapping, Indians, and the Construction of the Trans-Mississippi West

Review of: The Life of Mark Twain: The Early Years, 1835–1871, by Gary Scharnhorst

Raymond, C. Elizabeth

Book Reviews and Notices      399 
rates or chart institutional changes in St. Louis policing. But the book 
presents colorful portraits of a high-profile embezzlement scandal and 
a double murder involving visiting French noblemen. 
 Much like the newspapers of the era, which sought both to report 
local events and to promote the city, Gordon’s narrative strikes a cele-
bratory, triumphalist tone, emphasizing the “determination and resili-
ence” of St. Louisans, even in the face of devastating crises (251). His 
examinations of the epidemic and the fire depict residents at their best, 
focusing on the heroism of prominent citizens, their unshakable faith in 
the future of the city, and their zeal to restore stability and rebuild St. 
Louis. With a keen eye for finding riveting details and selecting evoca-
tive quotations, Gordon draws skillfully from the diaries and personal 
papers of these residents and, in doing so, makes effective use of the 
rich holdings of the Missouri Historical Society. Similarly, his chapters 
on crime underscore the resourcefulness of local lawbreakers and the 
integrity of St. Louis attorneys. 
 In sum, Fire, Pestilence, and Death: St. Louis, 1849 reconstructs the 
thrall of urban life during an unimaginably tumultuous year. Gordon’s 
emphasis on the grit and optimism of St. Louisans is difficult to evaluate. 
Were residents of the Mound City more valiant and heroic than New 
Orleanians confronting the yellow fever epidemic of 1853 or Chicagoans 
dealing with the Great Fire of 1871? Other city dwellers, after all, also 
did not abandon major urban centers after any of these disasters. That 
issue aside, Gordon has skillfully captured the chaos and spirit of St. 
Louis during perhaps the most challenging year in its long history.  
 
 
The Life of Mark Twain: The Early Years, 1835–1871, by Gary Scharnhorst. 
Mark Twain and His Circle. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2018. 
xxxi, 686 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $36.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer C. Elizabeth Raymond is Grace A. Griffen Professor of History at 
the University of Nevada, Reno. She is the author of “Creating the Heart-
land: The Midwest Emerges in American Culture” in The Midwestern Mo-
ment, edited by Jon K. Lauck (2017). 
In the first of a projected three volumes, Gary Scharnhorst offers an ex-
tremely detailed biography of the writer Samuel Clemens. This stately 
account assiduously follows its subject through childhood and early ad-
ventures, focusing intently on the process of literary professionalization 
that eventually led to the emergence in 1863 of the humorist and writer 
Mark Twain. The book will be of genuine interest to Twain scholars, but 
the very comprehensiveness that makes it valuable to academics will 
limit its appeal to general readers.  
400      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 Given the plethora of existing scholarship on Mark Twain, a reader 
might be forgiven for wondering whether another biography is war-
ranted, particularly one of such magnitude. Clearly sensitive to this 
question, Scharnhorst provides an explanatory prologue. He lists scores 
of limited Twain studies that are either thematic or chronological in 
their emphasis and deftly characterizes the most important single-
volume biographies. He rationalizes his own immense labor by noting 
that no multivolume study has appeared since 1912, when Twain’s au-
thorized biographer, Albert Paine, began publishing what Scharnhorst 
characterizes as a “hagiography” of the famed writer (xxvi). Since then 
significant additional material in the form of letters, interviews, and 
ephemeral newspaper articles has emerged. Mark Twain remains a lit-
erary figure of note and interest, and Scharnhorst feels justified in offer-
ing an unapologetically comprehensive account of his writing life. 
 Somewhat curiously, given his title, Scharnhorst makes a point of 
referring to the author consistently as Sam Clemens rather than as Mark 
Twain, his adopted literary pseudonym. Choosing to document the life 
of a writer who “enjoys a reputation unrivaled in American literary his-
tory” yet “was in large part the architect of that reputation,” his biog-
rapher resolutely insists that Twain is an invented persona who cannot 
be relied upon (xv). In the interest of reaching “the bedrock of biograph-
ical facts about Sam Clemens,” Scharnhorst conscientiously seeks doc-
umentation for various inflated claims made by the irrepressible Twain 
(xxvii). As an unfortunate result, the tone of this volume often seems 
scolding, as if Clemens’s biographer were reproaching his subject for 
having written fiction instead of history. 
 For those with sufficient leisure and interest in Twain, however, 
volume one amply repays the time invested to read it. It begins with the 
Clemens family’s English antecedents and quickly arrives in Florida, 
Missouri, where Samuel was born in 1835. Here Scharnhorst’s painstak-
ing research is evident, as he explores father Marshall Clemens’s career 
and unfortunate investments; the economic history of Hannibal, where 
the family soon moved; and the various childhood friends and inci-
dents that Samuel Clemens later drew on in his fiction.  
 The Early Years is a distinctly literary history. People and places 
matter to the extent that they appear accurately in later Twain creations, 
rather than being explored as context for the ideas or development of 
the young Clemens. A good example is slavery. Sam Clemens’s aunt 
and uncle owned several slaves, and he spent childhood summers on 
their farm listening to stories told by an enslaved African American 
elder known as Uncle Dan’l. Clemens claimed that the experience gave 
him a “strong liking for the African race,” even though “color and con- 
Book Reviews and Notices      401 
dition interposed a subtle line which both parties were conscious of” 
(22). Rather than analyzing such nuances of nineteenth-century race 
relations in the border South, Scharnhorst disputes Clemens’s represen-
tation of his own life, concluding condescendingly that “[Sam] over-
stated his lack of racial prejudice” and “harbored some biases for the 
rest of his life” (22). It is certainly true that Clemens was a product of 
his own time, but a literary biographer might helpfully have explained 
how that time differs from our own, and how the nineteenth-century 
experience was reflected in Twain’s own writing. 
 Geographically, The Early Years is expansive, following Sam Clem-
ens from Hannibal east to New York as a journeyman printer, south 
along the Mississippi River as he studied to become a river pilot, and 
west to the silver boom town of Virginia City, Nevada, where he 
learned the craft of journalism and first appeared in print as Mark Twain. 
Iowa readers might be intrigued to learn that Clemens’s first public 
speech—on Benjamin Franklin—was delivered in Keokuk in 1856. A 
pattern of itinerancy emerged as Clemens wrote for newspapers in San 
Francisco that sent him to Hawaii and sponsored the 1867 expedition to 
Europe and the Middle East that was transformed into his first book, 
The Innocents Abroad. Capitalizing on such experiences, and with a gift 
for humor, Clemens launched a career as a lecturer before the publica-
tion of his first books. He spent time in Washington, D.C., as a senator’s 
clerk and briefly owned a share in a newspaper in Buffalo, New York. 
The volume ends with his marriage to Olivia Langdon in 1870 and their 
decision to relocate to her hometown of Elmira, New York, after the 
birth of their first child in 1871. Two additional volumes await the 
reader whose taste for detailed recounting of Samuel Clemens’s literary 
practice has been whetted by this one. 
  
 
Long Road to Harpers Ferry: The Rise of the First American Left, by Mark A. 
Lause. People’s History Series. London: Pluto Press, 2018; distributed 
by University of Chicago Press. vi, 266 pp. Notes, index. $99 hardcover, 
$26 paperback. 
Reviewer John R. Kaufman-McKivigan is Mary O'Brien Gibson Professor 
of History at IUPUI. He is editor or coeditor of several works by and about 
Frederick Douglass and is the author of Forgotten Firebrand: James Redpath 
and the Making of Nineteenth-Century America (2008) and War against Pro-
slavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865 (1984). 
Historian Mark A. Lause seems engaged in a multivolume master proj-
ect to document the history of antebellum and Civil War–era American 
radical movements. In recent years, he has authored volumes on the 


The Life of Mark Twain: The Early Years, 1835-1871

Review of: Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America, by J. L. Anderso

Warren, Wilson J.

Book Reviews and Notices      297 
midwestern histories. Future works could help us understand the Mid-
west’s post-1945 transformations due to deindustrialization, suburban-
ization, white flight, global immigration, and other forces. Susan Gray 
calls Native American history in the region a “map in motion” and 
broadens this idea, stating, “So, too, is the history of the Midwest as a 
region” (56). This volume’s introduction and 21 essays demonstrate that 
the Midwest is a fascinating region in motion, both in its rich history 
and in its evolving identity, which provides a useful road map for fu-
ture scholarship. 
 
 
Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America, by J. L. Anderson. 
Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2019. xiii, 285 pp. Tables, 
maps, illustrations, notes, index. $99.99 hardcover, $34.99 paperback. 
Reviewer Wilson J. Warren is professor and chair of the Department of His-
tory at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. His most recent book 
is Meat Makes People Powerful: A Global History of the Modern Era (2018). 
The field of human-animal studies is a rapidly growing area of histori-
cal inquiry. Capitalist Pigs is an important contribution to this literature. 
J. L. Anderson’s focus on pigs is especially salient in terms of the human-
animal connection since Americans and many others around the globe 
have continuously reshaped the animal to suit their changing needs. 
Anderson argues that this changing relationship especially illuminates 
the dynamics of power in economics and human dominion over animals. 
Conveyed in clear prose enhanced by well-chosen tables, maps, illus-
trations, and an enticing title, the book is valuable for scholars and ac-
cessible to a broad audience. 
 Capitalist Pigs examines the entirety of American history with chap-
ters that delve into production, consumption, marketing, and scientific 
and state intervention in the hog’s transformation into food and other 
products. Although comprehensive in scope, the book focuses espe-
cially on pre–twentieth-century developments when free-range hus-
bandry characterized hog production, especially in the South but also 
in northern rural and urban locations. Lard-type hogs were dominant 
early on because their meat could be readily processed and preserved 
and because lard was essential in American cooking practices. They 
were also relatively low-maintenance animals. Well into the nineteenth 
century, hogs foraged for food and then were rounded up in fall for 
either subsistence or marketing. Hogs also roamed American cities, 
especially through the mid-nineteenth century. Although no longer al-
lowed to forage in cities during the twentieth century, pigs nevertheless 
served as convenient waste recyclers. Anderson points out, “By 1940 
298      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
almost every American city of over twenty-five thousand residents uti-
lized swine to reduce market waste” (96). Federal and state government 
intervention to control hog cholera and trichinosis began in the nine-
teenth century, but the importance of farm sanitation and eliminating 
garbage feeding to control pig diseases did not achieve success until af-
ter World War II, when pig-raising followed broiler-raising confinement 
practices that managed diet, housing, and sanitation. These postwar de-
velopments contributed to the emergence of a leaner, meat-type hog as 
producers hoped to capitalize on Americans’ heightened health con-
cerns. Nevertheless, pork’s popularity sank below both poultry and 
beef. In recent years, pig meat has captured renewed consumer attention 
in the form of bacon—once the epitome of poor people’s food—and a re-
turn to so-called heritage pork with higher amounts of fat (and flavor) 
than the meat-type hogs produced during the middle and late twentieth 
century. 
 Anderson’s book provides valuable insights for those interested in 
Iowa’s role in hog developments. Although the center of the country’s 
pig production in 1860 was in Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee, 
by 1900 Iowa was the center of the corn-hog belt. Starting in the 1970s, 
contract hog farming practices opened up new areas outside the Mid-
west, particularly in North Carolina, largely because of the location of 
Smithfield Foods’ slaughtering facilities in the region. Anderson pro-
vides excellent maps of hog locations in 1860 and 1900, but unfortu-
nately not for the middle or latter twentieth century. Iowa’s hog farmers 
were also at the center of disease control and prevention efforts. They 
were somewhat reluctant adopters of confinement methods. More re-
cently, Iowans have voiced protests about the effects of confinement 
production on quality of life due to air and water pollution. 
 Anderson makes the case in several places that working people, 
especially African Americans, preferred pork for much of American 
history. Beef was what most Americans, when they could afford it, 
wanted to eat. “Only with the onset of the Great Depression and the 
spread of poverty did pork challenge beef for primacy” (152). The dis-
cussion of pork versus beef’s primacy is belabored and difficult to arbi-
trate with any certainty given that consumption statistics are unreliable 
before the twentieth century. However, U.S. Department of Agriculture 
statistics show that pork was first among retail meats consumed be-
tween 1900 and 1950. Also unfortunate is the near absence of discussion 
of the role of the major meat companies in shaping hog production as 
well as consumer preferences.  
 The conclusion of Capitalist Pigs focuses on the very direct connec-
tion between people and pigs in terms of xenotransplantation. Our re- 
Book Reviews and Notices      299 
spective biological similarities make the potential for organ transplants 
promising yet also ethically controversial. Anderson is hopeful about 
such developments, but the growing animal rights movement may create 
significant roadblocks. Nevertheless, this topic demonstrates, as do so 
many discussed in the book, not only pigs’ importance in our food cul-
ture but also their central role in the evolution of the American economy.  
 
 
Peoples of the Inland Sea: Native Americans and Newcomers in the Great Lakes 
Region, 1600–1870, by David Andrew Nichols. New Approaches to Mid-
western Studies Series. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2018. xiii, 271 pp. 
Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 hardcover.  
Reviewer Claiborne Skinner is an instructor at the Illinois Mathematics and 
Science Academy. He is the author of The Upper Country: French Enterprise 
in the Colonial Great Lakes (2008). 
In Harpers Ferry, in the northeast corner of Iowa, stands Effigy Mounds 
National Monument: silent, mysterious designs of bears, birds, turtles, 
and panthers raised by the Ho Chunk and other nations some 1,400 
years ago. Old as these mounds are, they are Johnny-Come-Latelies to 
Iowa, whose human history actually begins more than 10,000 years 
earlier in the Pleistocene Era. Few Iowans, or anyone else for that matter, 
have any conception of this story. It is said that “history is written by the 
victors,” but it is also written by those who can write. Early Europeans 
concluded, therefore, that the Indians were a people without a history, 
with all that that implied and still does.  
 David Andrew Nichols has produced a potent corrective to this 
misconception with his extraordinary Peoples of the Inland Sea. The peri-
odization in the title is ambitious enough, but Nichols, an ethnohistorian, 
draws deeply on archeology, environmental science, and ethnology to 
push the dates back to the Ice Age. The Mastodon Hunters are here, the 
Copper Age, the Archaic agricultural revolution, and the Hopewell 
Mound Builders. Nichols fills the region with a history rarely seen in 
such a short survey. His coverage is as wide as it is deep: The Great 
Lakes “region” is stretched to include much of the Mississippi Valley. 
His treatment of the historic period is of a piece, with sharp analysis 
grounded in good sources. His choice of when to close his study is 
significant. Where many treatments conclude with a significant date in 
Euro-American history, Nichols ends with the execution of 38 Dakota 
warriors in 1862 and the return to Wisconsin of the Ho Chunk people, 
who had staked their claim to the country more than a thousand years 
before, thus bringing the story full circle. This might seem anticlimactic 


Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America

Winslow, Brady G.

David W. Kilbourne: The Creation of an Iowa Anti-Mormon

Review of: Peoples of the Inland Sea: Native Americans and Newcomers in the Great Lakes Region, 1600–1870, by David Andrew Nichols

Skinner, Claiborne

Book Reviews and Notices      299 
spective biological similarities make the potential for organ transplants 
promising yet also ethically controversial. Anderson is hopeful about 
such developments, but the growing animal rights movement may create 
significant roadblocks. Nevertheless, this topic demonstrates, as do so 
many discussed in the book, not only pigs’ importance in our food cul-
ture but also their central role in the evolution of the American economy.  
 
 
Peoples of the Inland Sea: Native Americans and Newcomers in the Great Lakes 
Region, 1600–1870, by David Andrew Nichols. New Approaches to Mid-
western Studies Series. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2018. xiii, 271 pp. 
Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 hardcover.  
Reviewer Claiborne Skinner is an instructor at the Illinois Mathematics and 
Science Academy. He is the author of The Upper Country: French Enterprise 
in the Colonial Great Lakes (2008). 
In Harpers Ferry, in the northeast corner of Iowa, stands Effigy Mounds 
National Monument: silent, mysterious designs of bears, birds, turtles, 
and panthers raised by the Ho Chunk and other nations some 1,400 
years ago. Old as these mounds are, they are Johnny-Come-Latelies to 
Iowa, whose human history actually begins more than 10,000 years 
earlier in the Pleistocene Era. Few Iowans, or anyone else for that matter, 
have any conception of this story. It is said that “history is written by the 
victors,” but it is also written by those who can write. Early Europeans 
concluded, therefore, that the Indians were a people without a history, 
with all that that implied and still does.  
 David Andrew Nichols has produced a potent corrective to this 
misconception with his extraordinary Peoples of the Inland Sea. The peri-
odization in the title is ambitious enough, but Nichols, an ethnohistorian, 
draws deeply on archeology, environmental science, and ethnology to 
push the dates back to the Ice Age. The Mastodon Hunters are here, the 
Copper Age, the Archaic agricultural revolution, and the Hopewell 
Mound Builders. Nichols fills the region with a history rarely seen in 
such a short survey. His coverage is as wide as it is deep: The Great 
Lakes “region” is stretched to include much of the Mississippi Valley. 
His treatment of the historic period is of a piece, with sharp analysis 
grounded in good sources. His choice of when to close his study is 
significant. Where many treatments conclude with a significant date in 
Euro-American history, Nichols ends with the execution of 38 Dakota 
warriors in 1862 and the return to Wisconsin of the Ho Chunk people, 
who had staked their claim to the country more than a thousand years 
before, thus bringing the story full circle. This might seem anticlimactic 
300      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
given the scope of his study, but this is Indian history, with its own mile-
stones, rather than those of the invading whites.  
 By the author’s own admission, this is a work of synthesis rather 
than original research, but what a synthesis! Conventional history rubs 
elbows with “The Ceremonial Landscape of the Newark Earthworks 
and the Raccoon Creek Valley.” The bibliography alone is worth the 
purchase price. If I had a complaint, which I really do not, it would be 
that perhaps Nichols has tried to do too much: events, nations, individ-
uals, and numbers relentlessly confront the reader. I have an advanced 
degree in the subject and I often found myself having to come up for 
air. I offer this only as a warning to the casual reader. Peoples of the Inland 
Sea offers a comprehensive, succinct analysis of a vast and complex topic. 
Nichols has done a great service for teachers and students alike. This 
will be the standard short survey for many years to come.  
 
 
Lincoln’s Mercenaries: Economic Motivation among Union Soldiers during 
the Civil War, by William Marvel. Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions 
of the American Civil War Series. Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2018. 
xviii, 329 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $48 hard-
cover. 
Reviewer Donald C. Elder III is professor of history at Eastern New Mexico 
University. He is the editor of Love Amid the Turmoil: The Civil War Letters of 
William and Mary Vermilion (2003) and A Damned Iowa Greyhound: The Civil 
War Letters of William Henry Harrison Clayton (1998). 
After reading Lincoln’s Mercenaries, students of the Civil War may have 
to reconsider their conclusions regarding the primary reason why indi-
viduals from Northern states decided to enlist in the military. Author 
William Marvel challenges the widely held notion that individuals who 
volunteered for service in the Union Army did so largely for patriotic 
reasons. He argues instead that economic considerations played a far 
larger role than historians have realized or acknowledged. His well-
crafted monograph should cause anyone interested in the motivation of 
Union Civil War volunteers to reexamine long-held assumptions. 
 Marvel begins by examining the historiography relating to enlist-
ment, noting that many authors discount evidence of volunteers enter-
ing military service for financial reasons; they choose instead to focus 
on other considerations, usually patriotism or mere wanderlust. Since 
these authors could only do rudimentary statistical computations based 
on the census of 1860 to inform their analyses, many of them discounted 
such evidence, instead using memoirs or regimental histories as the 


Peoples of the Inland Sea: Native Americans and Newcomers in the Great Lakes Region, 1600-1870

Front Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 78 no. 2 Spring 2019

Review of: "Sixteenth President-in-Waiting: Abraham Lincoln and the Springfield Dispatches of Henry Villard, 1860-1861," edited by Michael Burlingame

Andreasen, Bryon

Book Reviews and Notices      89 
The Journey West: The Mormon Pioneer Journals of Horace K. Whitney with 
Insights by Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, edited by Richard E. Bennett. 
Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt 
Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 2018. xlv, 442 pp. Maps, illustrations 
(many in color), notes, glossary, index. $34.99 hardcover. 
Reviewer Brady G. Winslow is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Texas Chris-
tian University. He is working on a dissertation that examines the receptivity 
to Mormonism in the upper Mississippi River valley from 1830 to 1860. 
In early February 1846 Horace Kimball Whitney and Helen Mar Kimball, 
members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, were mar-
ried in Nauvoo, Illinois. The next day, the young couple joined the first 
group of their coreligionists to cross the Mississippi River into Iowa 
Territory on their journey toward the Great Basin. Over the next several 
years, the Whitneys and many of their Mormon counterparts traversed 
Iowa, encamped for a time just west of the Missouri River in Nebraska 
Territory, and made their way to the Salt Lake Valley. Once there, the 
Latter-day Saints went about establishing a settlement. Some, including 
Horace, returned to Nebraska to assist those who remained. The Journey 
West, a documentary transcription of six of Horace’s journals, chronicles 
one man’s experiences on the Mormon Trail and in the Salt Lake Valley 
from February 15, 1846, to October 30, 1847. Interspersed throughout are 
selections from Helen’s reminiscences that add understanding to the 
entries of her husband. 
 The Journey West joins a long list of published nineteenth-century 
overland trail accounts, Mormon and otherwise. An important contri-
bution of the volume is in its male and female perspectives as well as its 
contemporary and reflective outlooks. While Helen’s recollections lack 
the immediacy of her husband’s record, her words complement those 
of Horace by offering a retrospective viewpoint. Readers interested in 
the history of Iowa and the Midwest will be attracted to the Whitneys’ 
descriptions of the Mormons’ trek through Iowa and their time spent in 
and traveling across Nebraska. 
 
 
Sixteenth President-in-Waiting: Abraham Lincoln and the Springfield Dis-
patches of Henry Villard, 1860–1861, edited by Michael Burlingame. Car-
bondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2018. ix, 407 pp. Appendix, 
notes, index. $45.50 hardcover. 
Reviewer Bryon Andreasen is a historian at the Church History Museum 
in Salt Lake City, Utah, and former research historian at the Abraham Lin-
coln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois. He is the author of Looking 
for Lincoln in Illinois: Lincoln’s Springfield (2015). 
90      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
This book—the most recent compilation of edited primary source ma-
terial from Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame—contains annotated 
transcriptions of all newspaper dispatches written by New York re-
porter Henry Villard from Springfield, Illinois, from November 10, 1860, 
to February 11, 1861, reporting the activities of president-elect Abraham 
Lincoln for the New York Herald, Cincinnati Commercial, and San Fran-
cisco Bulletin. Villard’s reports document the scramble for patronage 
posts and cabinet appointments that consumed the time and attention 
of mid–nineteenth-century politicians and commentators. An appendix 
includes Villard’s reports on the 1858 Illinois senatorial contest between 
Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, wherein Villard’s pro-Douglas bias is 
evident in his disparaging observations regarding Lincoln and other 
Republicans. 
 Students of Iowa history will find that relative to office seekers from 
other states, Iowans were relatively modest in their badgering of the 
president-elect. Only two Iowa delegations are reported to have trav-
eled to Springfield, both in support of fellow Iowan Fitz Henry Warren, 
whose quest to become Postmaster General proved unsuccessful. Iowa 
Governor Samuel J. Kirkwood made an obligatory call on Lincoln, as 
did Lee County’s Hawkins Taylor, an old Lincoln friend and ally. Vil-
lard’s account of an Iowa office seeker too inept to impress his name in 
the memory of Lincoln and his associates illustrates his easterner’s con-
descending attitude toward midwestern people and culture. Scholars 
looking for evidence of a general sense of eastern regional superiority 
will find it in both the general tenor of Villard’s dispatches and in spe-
cific examples. 
 
 
Women and the American Civil War: North-South Counterpoints, edited by 
Judith Giesberg and Randall M. Miller. Kent, OH: Kent State University 
Press, 2018. xviii, 358 pp. Illustration, notes, index. $49.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Barbara Cutter is associate professor of history at the University 
of Northern Iowa. She is the author of Domestic Devils, Battlefield Angels: The 
Radicalism of American Womanhood, 1830–1865 (2003). 
Historical scholarship on women and the American Civil War has pro-
liferated in the past 30 years. As Judith Giesberg and Randall M. Miller 
note, this scholarship has become increasingly diverse in recent years, 
expanding to focus on the experiences of Northern and Southern women, 
black and white, immigrant and native born, elite, middle class and 
working class, and rural and urban. Yet, as they point out, the scholar-
ship overall is still “regionally segregated.” “Historians writing about 
Southern women rarely comment on or interact with those working on 


Sixteenth President-in-Waiting: Abraham Lincoln and the Springfield Dispatches of Henry Villard, 1860-1861

Review of: This War Ain’t Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America, by Nina Silber

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