The Annals of Iowa

Review of: War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era, edited by Joan E. Cashin

Sacco, Nick

404      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era, edited by Joan E. 
Cashin. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. xi, 263 pp. 
Map, graphs, table, illustrations, notes, index. $29.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Nick Sacco is a Park Ranger at the Ulysses S. Grant National His-
toric Site in St. Louis. 
Americans’ fascination with the Civil War stems in part from their in-
terest in collecting relics from the conflict. Relic hunting started as early 
as the Appomattox surrender proceedings, when Union officers and 
soldiers who were aware of the event’s historical significance promptly 
took furniture and other items from the parlor of Wilmer McLean’s 
home. Since then, historians and enthusiasts have collected everything 
from weapons and bullets to clothing, letters, and diaries. For collectors, 
these artifacts give the American Civil War a tangible quality that pro-
vides a deeper meaning to the country’s deadliest war and bridges the 
divide between past and present. 
 Despite a popular interest in Civil War artifacts and relics, Civil War 
historians have largely neglected this aspect of study. In War Matters, 
historian Joan E. Cashin has edited the first collection of essays devoted 
solely to Civil War material culture. Cashin and the various contribu-
tors provide two different arguments that serve as the intellectual basis 
of the book. The first argument focuses on the state of Civil War studies. 
Cashin argues that previous scholars have not provided enough atten-
tion to material culture, which she defines as “the study of physical ob-
jects as evidence of cultural values” (3). She asserts that material culture, 
among other things, holds the potential to enhance scholars’ under-
standing of “the common soldier’s experience” during the war and war-
time allegiances to the Union and Confederacy. Attention to material cul-
ture can also offer “new approaches to race, bondage, and emancipation” 
(3–4). Analyzing physical objects the same way a scholar might under-
take a textual analysis of a written document can yield new insights into 
the Civil War era.  
 The second argument comes through in the book’s various essays, 
which demonstrate the ways material culture can shape environmental, 
political, and cultural history. Each essay in the book demonstrates a 
strong understanding of both the historical subject and the theoretical 
aspects of material culture studies. A number of essays are particularly 
noteworthy for their scholarly contributions. Lisa M. Brady and Timothy 
Silver’s essay on the environmental history of the Antietam battlefield 
takes readers back several hundred million years, when the area sat un-
der water on the floor of an ancient sea. They remind readers that before 
it became a cultural and historical site, Antietam “existed as an artifact 
of nature” (55). Earl Hess explores the relationship soldiers had with 
Book Reviews and Notices      405 
their weapons; in particular, he examines the story of William Vermil-
ion of the 36th Iowa Regiment, who purchased a bulletproof vest and 
wrote a detailed letter to his wife about the experience. Hess points out 
that Vermilion was concerned about the possibility of death but hid his 
purchase from the rest of his comrades for fear of being labeled a cow-
ard. “The boys here don’t know it,” Vermilion pointed out, stating that 
“I consider it my duty to protect myself in every manner possible” (110).  
 Sarah Jones Weicksel explores the material culture of “refugee re-
lief,” examining the African American community of Mitchelville, South 
Carolina, home of the first self-sustained black community in the 
United States. Weicksel argues for textual, photographic, and archaeo-
logical research at refugee camps to better understand the lived experi-
ence of slave refugees during the Civil War. Finally, Peter Carmichael’s 
essay examines the collection of war relics in the aftermath of the Appo-
mattox surrender, pointing out that “the craving for the material objects 
of war became a preoccupation during the last weeks of the Confeder-
acy’s existence, when both sides were grasping for things to help them 
remember the past as they transitioned to a future without war” (201).  
 War Matters is best suited for students and public historians work-
ing at Civil War historic sites throughout the country. For the former—
to whom the book is dedicated—this useful volume serves as an effec-
tive introduction to the idea that physical objects have just as much to 
say about the Civil War as does a letter, diary, or official government 
paper. For the latter, the book’s various case studies can serve as a use-
ful guide for analyzing historical artifacts at museums, battlefields, 
and other historic sites that interpret Civil War history. Ultimately, War 
Matters pushes readers beyond the idea that relics are just “things” col-
lected by Civil War enthusiasts and are instead meaningful artifacts that 
speak to the history of the American Civil War.  
 
 
The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived 
in Civil War Armies, by Peter S. Carmichael. The Littlefield History of 
the Civil War Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 
408 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 hardcover. 
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). 
The term sound bite did not enter into common usage until the 1970s, 
but long before that Civil War historians had mastered the technique of 
using highly selective quotes to support their assertions about the conflict. 


English

War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era

Back Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 78 no. 3 Summer 2019

Review of: John W. Barriger III: Railroad Legend, by H. Roger Grant

Schneider, Gregory

316      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
John W. Barriger III: Railroad Legend, by H. Roger Grant. Railroads Past 
and Present. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018. xiv, 226 pp. 
Illustrations, notes, index. $45 hardcover. 
Reviewer Gregory Schneider is professor of history at Emporia State Uni-
versity. He is the author of Rock Island Requiem: The Collapse of a Mighty Fine 
Line (2013). 
H. Roger Grant, one of America’s most distinguished railroad historians, 
has turned his attentive gaze to chronicling the life history and contri-
butions of John W. Barriger III, the prominent railroad executive and 
government official whose story prominently intersects the twentieth 
century and its railroad history. In this captivating official biography 
(sanctioned by his son, Jack Barriger), Grant captures the essence of this 
railroad leader and his role in shaping American railroad policy and 
leadership in a troubled time for the railroads. 
 Barriger was born in St. Louis in 1899. When he was a young boy, 
his engineer father was murdered by a deranged acquaintance to whom 
he had loaned money. The young Barriger grew up with the assistance 
of his mother and her family and excelled in school, attending MIT and 
majoring in engineering, writing a senior thesis on the history of the 
Pennsylvania Railroad. He loved railroad history and proved an adept 
collector of railroad materials and books—the foundation of what later 
became the John W. Barriger III Research Library housed on the Uni-
versity of Missouri, St. Louis campus.  
 After short stints at Kuhn, Loeb and the International Carriers unit 
of Calvin Bullock, where Barriger diligently studied the financial and 
economic prospects of railroad investments for his clients, he was hired 
by Frederick Prince, an investor and owner of the Union Stock Yards in 
Chicago, to prepare a consolidation study of the nation’s railroad sys-
tems, which Prince wanted to be the basis for the long-delayed and 
tortuous path towards consolidation that began with the passage of the 
1920 Transportation Act. Barriger studied the consolidation proposals 
and wrote the Prince Plan which favored seven railroad systems. Al-
though it was probably the best of all the consolidation plans, nothing 
came of the proposal, except that it catapulted the obscure Barriger into 
national prominence. In 1933 the long-time conservative Republican 
took a job with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) Railroad 
division, studying loans and offering guidance on whether the RFC 
should fund bankrupt railroads. The government career continued 
during World War II, when Barriger took a position with the Office of 
Defense Transportation. He spent the waning years of the war as the 
federal manager for the troubled Toledo, Peoria and Western, which 
had nearly shut down due to labor troubles. 
Book Reviews and Notices      317 
 Following the war, Barriger worked briefly as president of the 
Union Stock Yards Railway and as president of diesel engine manufac-
turer Fairbanks-Morse (based in Beloit, Wisconsin) before becoming 
president of the Monon Railroad. Long a believer in modernization of 
plant and equipment, Barriger spent his years at the Monon improving 
the physical property, streamlining passenger service, and dieselizing 
the road. Running a railroad gave Barriger the impetus to develop his 
concept of super railways, which included proposals for limiting cur-
vature, improving efficiency and operations, and ending government 
regulation. Following his departure from the Monon, Barriger worked 
for a short time at the troubled New Haven and as a vice-president for 
the (then) prosperous Rock Island. 
 In 1956 Barriger began a nine-year tenure as president of the Pitts-
burgh and Lake Erie, a wealthy coal and steel hauler and a New York 
Central affiliate. He was recruited to that task by his friend and icono-
clast railroad executive Alfred Perlman. Barriger relished the chance to 
run a profitable railroad, improving the property and turning the line 
into a symbol of his super railroad.  
 In 1964 he turned 65, considered the mandatory retirement age for 
railroad executives, but he was not finished. He was offered the presi-
dency of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas (Katy), a struggling, moribund plains 
railroad whose prospects seemed dim. He turned that road around. 
After he cut the deficit for the struggling carrier, he left in 1970, but the 
Katy lived on until it merged with the Union Pacific in 1982. His final 
presidency was of the bankrupt Boston and Maine before finishing his 
railroad career at the Federal Railroad Administration and then again 
as a traveling sales agent for the bankrupt Rock Island. He died in 1976. 
 His career was varied, he never retired (or did several times, as Grant 
explains), and his legacy is a testament to the vision and love of an indus-
try that makes the Barriger name a legend in the field of railroading and 
railroad history. Grant tells the story of this visionary leader quite well. 
Readers will find in his biography an extraordinary tale of the travails of 
twentieth-century railroading through the career of this one man. 
 
  
A River in the City of Fountains: An Environmental History of Kansas City 
and the Missouri River, by Amahia Mallea. Lawrence: University Press of 
Kansas, 2018. x, 348 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 
$50 hardcover, $29.95 paperback and e-book. 
Reviewer Joseph Otto is a communications specialist with the Iowa Water 
Center at Iowa State University. He is also a doctoral candidate at the Uni-
versity of Oklahoma, writing a dissertation on the history of agricultural 
drainage in Iowa. 


John W. Barriger III: Railroad Legend

Review of: "A Brief History of Nebraska," by Ronald C. Naugle

Scherer, Mark R

Book Reviews and Notices      215 
Finkelman provides important historical context on the political 
milieu in which Abraham Lincoln operated. Lincoln spoke out against 
slavery, calling it morally wrong, and he said that African Americans 
were included in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence, its natural rights affirmation. His statements seem all the 
more remarkable given the antiblack sentiment of his own state. 
 Finally, Bob Sampson’s work is included twice in the collection, a 
reflection of his stellar if unsung scholarship on Illinois. In his piece on 
the Charleston riots of 1864, Sampson explains the conditions that pro-
duced the violence in Charleston, Illinois, violence that clearly reflected 
strong Democratic opposition to Lincoln administration policies, such 
as emancipation, and to the ongoing war in general. When Democrats 
from Coles and Edgar Counties fired on Union troops, they were, 
Sampson suggests, acting on a “logic of rebellion,” responding to what 
they perceived as acts of repression on the part of the Lincoln ad-
ministration, acts that, in their view, warranted an extreme reaction. 
Sampson builds on the work of Jean Harvey Baker and others and 
enhances our understanding of Illinois Democrats. 
 The collection features compelling articles on twentieth-century 
events and figures as well; indeed, no substantive period in the state’s 
history is neglected. Anthologies and collections are notorious for in-
coherence and for the uneven quality of the assembled pieces. Mark 
Hubbard has succeeded in organizing a collection that is thematically 
coherent, informative, and interesting. Any scholar of Illinois history 
would profit from reading this fine work. 
 
 
A Brief History of Nebraska, by Ronald C. Naugle. Lincoln: History Ne-
braska, 2018. v, 143 pp. Illustrations, map, index. $14.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Mark R. Scherer is professor of history at the University of Ne-
braska–Omaha. His research and writing have focused on Nebraska and 
Great Plains legal and political history. 
As its title suggests, A Brief History of Nebraska is an abridged version of 
Ronald C. Naugle’s familiar and highly respected History of Nebraska. 
That volume, coauthored with John J. Montag and James C. Olson, is 
now in its fourth edition and has become the leading narrative text in 
Nebraska history, long serving specialists, students, and general readers 
as an essential starting point for exploring the state’s rich and complex 
past. With this extremely condensed abridgement, Naugle obviously 
seeks to reach a much more casual readership, one that—regrettably 
but probably accurately—reflects the shortened attention spans of so 
many readers in the Instagram/Twitter world we now inhabit.  
216      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 Given the breadth and depth of Naugle’s expertise in the field, the 
winnowing process for this book must have been especially difficult. 
While it is easy enough for an interested observer to identify topics that 
beg for more detailed coverage and analysis (such as the displacement 
of Native Americans or the long-term effects of the Homestead Act, to 
name just two), nitpicking of that sort is unfair and almost completely 
irrelevant in evaluating this volume. The book’s brevity is actually its 
greatest strength. Naugle’s goal here is to whet rather than to satisfy 
readers’ appetites. Viewed from that perspective, the book can only be 
judged a success. Indeed, one of the most remarkable aspects of the 
author’s work is not what he has been forced to leave out, but rather 
what he has been able to include. In less than 150 total pages, and using 
chapters that rarely exceed three or four pages each, Naugle introduces 
a truly impressive array of themes, topics, events, and personalities, 
ranging from the prehistoric geology of the Midwest and Great Plains 
to the rural-urban dichotomies that help to shape the state’s current 
social, political, and economic dynamics. The author’s analysis of these 
topics is perceptive but necessarily brief. Like the Platte River valley 
that has itself been so central to Nebraska’s history, the treatment is, 
by design, “a mile wide and an inch deep.” 
 Written in a lively, conversational, and accessible style and en-
hanced by well-chosen illustrations and maps, this is a book that 
meets its intended purpose and should find its intended audience. 
Academics, specialists, and advanced students will need to look else-
where for the interpretive scrutiny, sourcing, citations, and footnotes 
that their interests may require. But for newcomers to the state, 
younger students, and anyone seeking a brief and highly readable 
introduction to Nebraska’s colorful and sometimes controversial past, 
Naugle’s volume will fill the bill splendidly.  
 
 
Gabriel Renville: From the Dakota War to the Creation of the Sisseton-
Wahpeton Reservation, 1825–1892, by Gary Clayton Anderson. Pierre: 
South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2018. xi, 220 pp. Map, illustra-
tions, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 hardcover.  
Reviewer Linda M. Clemmons is a professor of history at Illinois State 
University. She is the author of Conflicted Mission: Faith, Disputes, and De-
ception on the Dakota Frontier (2014) and the forthcoming Dakota in Exile: 
The Untold Stories of Captives in the Aftermath of the U.S.-Dakota War. 
Gary Clayton Anderson has written an important biography of Gabriel 
Renville, a Dakota man whose life intersected with the major events in 
Dakota history from the 1820s until the late nineteenth century. This 


A Brief History of Nebraska

Review of: "Wild Mares: My Lesbian Back-to-the-Land Life," by Dianna Hunter

Rose, Katrina C

Book Reviews and Notices      115 
Wild Mares: My Lesbian Back-to-the-Land Life, by Dianna Hunter. Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. xi, 239 pp. Illustrations, bib-
liography. $18.95 paperback.  
Reviewer Katrina C. Rose completed her doctorate in history at the Univer-
sity of Iowa in 2018. Her dissertation is titled “Forgotten Paths: American 
Transgender Legal History, 1955–2009.”  
Dianna Hunter retired in 2012 from the University of Wisconsin–Superior, 
where she was a lecturer and director of women’s and gender studies. 
Wild Mares, covering merely a portion of Hunter’s midwestern life’s 
journey, chronicles her pre-Wisconsin years. A North Dakota adoles-
cence fraught with Cold War nuclear fears preceded a move to the Twin 
Cities and attendance at Macalester College in St. Paul. A generation 
and a gender removed from The Evening Crowd at Kirmser’s, Ricardo 
Brown’s narrative of gay life in pre-Stonewall Minnesota, Wild Mares 
offers the remembrances of a woman coming to terms with her sexuality 
and coming to question where and how best to live as a woman-loving 
woman in a society that was only beginning to evolve.  
 Those with knowledge of Minnesota’s tumultuous politics (sexual 
and otherwise) of the late 1960s and early 1970s will encounter familiar 
places, entities, and events: Hubert Humphrey’s quest to return to the 
Senate after his vice presidency, the early days of Minneapolis’s Ama-
zon Bookstore, St. Paul’s Town House bar, and the lesbian-feminist 
publication So’s Your Old Lady. An adventure outside the Midwest, to 
the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference, yields Iowa’s only notable 
presence in the memoir; a spring snowstorm targeting Mason City led 
to an unanticipated overnight stay while on the road to California. 
 The bulk of Wild Mares focuses not on the Twin Cities but on farm-
land to their north. For as much as Hunter’s move to Minnesota led to 
a sexual awakening, it in turn led to a desire to dispense with as many 
material burdens of urban life as possible in favor of a purer existence 
living off the land. The stresses of attempting a communal existence and 
the frictions of varying relationships combined with the inherent uncer-
tainties of farming to make her experience at different times rewarding 
and less than successful. 
 After arriving in the Twin Cities, Hunter learned that the personal 
is political. A decade of attempts at dairy farming self-sufficiency brought 
her back to the adage. By the mid-1980s she found that it applies not 
merely to women’s quest for equality but also to agriculture. Far more 
than failed equipment or a failed relationship, the devastating impact 
of Reagan-era agriculture policies finally brought an end to her own 
attempt to get back to the land. 
116      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 “This strange mental power of ours can be sketchy and unreliable,” 
she acknowledges about memory, “but it lets us bring the dead back to 
life and travel in time through multiple pasts” (2). Not reliant solely on 
her own memory, she has consulted archival materials and conferred 
with those she encountered years ago. In conversation with the reader, 
she pauses to note where the documentary and oral history evidence 
conflict with her own long-held recollections.  
 The volume consists of 23 chapters, all relatively short. Some boldly 
telegraph approaching sadness. The Minnesota focus should not dis-
suade an Iowa reader. Even if Iowa did not also see lesbian back-to-the-
land endeavors in the 1970s, it certainly felt the agricultural pain of the 
1980s. 


Wild Mares: My Lesbian Back-to-the-Land Life

Review of: Big Sister: Feminism, Conservatism, and Conspiracy in the Heartland, by Erin M. Kempker

Haugeberg, Karissa

426      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Big Sister: Feminism, Conservatism, and Conspiracy in the Heartland, by 
Erin M. Kempker. Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History. 
Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2018. xii, 
201 pp. $99 hardcover, $24.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Karissa Haugeberg is assistant professor of history at Tulane Uni-
versity. She is the author of Women against Abortion: Inside the Largest Moral 
Reform Movement of the Twentieth Century (2017). 
In Big Sister: Feminism, Conservatism, and Conspiracy in the Heartland, 
Erin M. Kempker complements the scholarship of Kim Nielsen, Cath–
erine Rymph, Landon Storrs, and Michelle Nickerson by exploring the 
history of reactionary women in Indiana. To understand how oppo-
sition to feminism operated, Kempker studied Indiana-based news-
papers, newsletters, the papers of key conservative activists and their 
organizational records, and scholarship on conservative women and 
conspiracy theory–fueled politics in the United States.  
 Most of the book focuses on right-wing women, but Kempker also 
offers a brief yet fascinating history of progressive feminist work in In-
diana during the 1970s. Leaders of Indiana’s Equal Rights Amendment 
(ERA) coalition understood that they operated in a conservative state 
and were decidedly cautious. To court moderate Republican legislators, 
they emphasized the theme of justice and muted calls within their ranks 
to fight homophobia or to rethink capitalism. That disciplined approach 
may have worked in the short term: in 1977 Indiana became the thirty-
fifth—and final—state to pass the ERA. But just as the ERA effort stalled 
nationally, only three states shy of the three-quarters needed for ratifica-
tion, the coalition unraveled. ERA supporters’ “low-key” strategy did not 
prevent detractors from maligning feminists as dupes or conspirators in 
a world government movement. It is not clear from this book how ERA 
coalition leaders in Indiana sought to mollify progressive activists’ 
demands or whether a less cautious approach would have prepared 
feminists for antifeminists’ attacks. 
 As the coalition of feminists who came together to support the ERA 
adopted narrow parameters for speaking publicly about their vision, 
right-wing women in the Hoosier State enlarged their tent, welcoming 
diverse groups into the fold. By the 1950s, these groups had welcomed 
evangelical Christians who offered explicitly religious arguments for 
fighting communism and defending families. Kempker explores how 
diverse right-wing coalitions enabled conservative women to attack 
progressive feminists on a number of fronts, accusing them of under-
mining traditional gender roles and subverting states’ rights.  
Book Reviews and Notices      427 
 This book is useful for understanding why so many Americans 
found conspiracy theories appealing in the postwar period. With sensi-
tivity, Kempker explains that conspiracy theories offered women who 
had little advanced education and who did not have access to politically 
powerful people creative ways of understanding the world. For example, 
ordinary women could study the Congressional Record and identify bills 
that sought to increase federal aid to local police. Drawing on theories 
circulated in the John Birch Society, right-wing women then pointed to 
such bills as examples of federal meddling in municipal affairs.  
 One of the right-wing groups Kempker calls attention to is Minute 
Women, who charged that internationalists rather than nationalists con-
trolled the levers of power in the Eisenhower administration, just as they 
had during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. Kempker under-
scores the importance of Minute Women’s use of the telephone, a recent 
technology in many Americans’ homes in the 1940s and ’50s that en-
abled women to forgo formal meetings. This must have been especially 
important for women in rural Indiana, for whom travel to meetings 
may have been burdensome. Minute Women also used this technology 
to harass their perceived enemies: they sought to blacklist Indiana Civil 
Liberties Union members by calling their employers and churches.  
 Despite women’s outsized role in organizing grassroots right-wing 
groups, many groups ignored women in their official publications. It is 
not clear whether women resented these slights or whether the publica-
tions’ focus on men aligned with the patriarchal perspective right-wing 
women found appealing. Kempker suggests that conservative women, 
acting as wives and mothers invested in protecting the home, found 
their work to be both personally meaningful and socially acceptable. 
That reinforces the conclusions that Kristen Luker drew from her study 
of antiabortion activists and that Donald Critchlow found in his inves-
tigation of Phyllis Schlafly. 
 Big Sister opens the door for scholars to investigate understudied 
topics. Other scholars might study internal communiques in the pro-
gressive ERA coalition to understand how feminist-identified activists 
responded to homophobic attacks, which they had both anticipated and 
feared. It might also be fruitful for scholars to compare Kempker’s find-
ings to states that adopted less conservative strategies for securing 
passage of the ERA in order to understand what was lost and what 
was spared when Indiana feminists privileged reform over revolution. 
Kempker persuasively demonstrates that scholars must look to the states 
to understand how the right wing seized control of the GOP. Future 
scholars might take the next step by examining how these battles were 
waged in townships and cities throughout the United States. 


Big Sister: Feminism, Conservatism, and Conspiracy in the Heartland

Review of: Dakota in Exile: The Untold Stories of Captives in the Aftermath of the U.S.-Dakota War, by Linda M. Clemmons

Westerman, Gwen N.

Book Reviews and Notices      409 
Carpenter’s tone and accessibility. Gage helped in her own way by leav-
ing a rich collection of attention-grabbing quotes. Carpenter’s appreci-
ation of Gage is apparent, and Born Criminal is both an interesting his-
torical account and a tribute to her unflappable spirit. 
 
 
Dakota in Exile: The Untold Stories of Captives in the Aftermath of the U.S.-
Dakota War, by Linda M. Clemmons. Iowa and the Midwest Experience 
Series. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019. xvii, 260 pp. Map, 
illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $27.50 paperback. 
Reviewer Gwen N. Westerman is professor of English and Humanities at 
Minnesota State University, Mankato. She is a coauthor of Mni Sota Makoce: 
The Land of the Dakota (2012). 
Many works published about Dakota history concentrate on the 1862 war 
in Minnesota, often with minimal attention to its complicated causes 
and even less to the devastating effects on the Dakota people afterward. 
In Dakota in Exile, Linda Clemmons introduces multiple different points 
of view to broaden the analysis of these events through letters, news-
paper articles, and reports written by people during that time. What dis-
tinguishes her work is the inclusion of letters written by imprisoned and 
exiled Dakota men and women, including Caskedaŋ Robert Hopkins, 
who grew up reading and writing in his native Dakota language. A 
Christian convert, he taught other Dakota people to read and write and 
served as a church elder throughout his life. The historic and cultural 
legacy of Hopkins and his family is presented in the context of the 
broader impact of the U.S.-Dakota war on the history of Iowa and 
the Midwest. 
 Clemmons provides readers with context for events leading up to 
the war, including the exponential settlement of the state after the 1851 
treaty was signed with the Dakota bands: “In 1850, Minnesota had only 
157 farms; by 1860, that number had jumped to 18,081” (20). Although 
she rightly includes land loss and reservation confinement, corrupt offi-
cials, proselytizing missionaries, steamboat tourists, and limited food 
and supplies among the many factors affecting Dakota people, the au-
thor overlooks the years of drought, grasshopper and locust infesta-
tions, and financial woes that left not only Dakota families starving by 
1862, but also many of the newly established farmers in rural counties 
as well. (See Mary Lethert Wingerd, North Country: The Making of Min-
nesota [2012]). It is a colossal task to condense a complex history. The 
growing resentment of Minnesotans toward Dakota communities be-
fore the outbreak of war was, however, a major factor in the subsequent 
backlash against them, including the role of newspapers in fueling post-
war hysteria.  
410      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 What happened to those Dakota people after their removal from 
Minnesota is not widely known. Clemmons traces the journeys of the 
women and children from Fort Snelling (via St. Louis and St. Joseph) to 
Crow Creek near Fort Thompson in Dakota Territory. There the inhu-
mane conditions of starvation in a drought-ravaged land were veiled 
by a “conspiracy of silence” among the government agents responsible 
for those women and children (57). Separated from their families who 
were sent to Crow Creek, the prisoners from Mankato, who ranged in 
age from 15 to 78 years, were removed to Camp McClellan near Daven-
port, Iowa. There the conditions were not only brutal, but also included 
“the objectification and commodification of Dakota for amusement and 
profit” (xiii). (See Linda Clemmons’s article on that imprisonment in the 
Spring 2018 issue of the Annals of Iowa.) 
 Amid this devastation, the Dakota people were writing letters in 
their own language to each other, to the missionaries, even to govern-
ment officials. The author’s inclusion of these primary sources written 
by the prisoners, by the men hired as scouts by the U.S. Army, and by 
their family members adds an essential breadth of understanding to this 
aspect of the story between 1863 and 1869. Clemmons has done exten-
sive archival research to gather the views of the public regarding those 
“curiosities.” She documents interactions among local residents, tour-
ists, and Dakota prisoners who raised money for themselves and their 
families by hiring out to farmers and selling trinkets to visitors and chil-
dren. It is a revealing look into their will to survive, adapt, and endure 
in the most horrific conditions imaginable.  
 Especially important is the focus on Caskedaŋ Robert Hopkins, 
which provides a window into the experiences of one family who suf-
fered the lasting effects of incarceration and harsh conditions. When 
Hopkins’s wife, Wawiyohiyewiŋ, died from consumption in October 
1869, missionary Stephen R. Riggs “directly linked her death to the 
events that followed the U.S.-Dakota War, including her exile from 
Minnesota, her time at Crow Creek, and her extended separation from 
Robert during his imprisonment” (171–72). This personal and very hu-
man account has the potential to affect common cultural perceptions 
about the Dakota people who surrendered at the end of war. Their sto-
ries are valuable. Equally valuable is Clemmons’s recognition that be-
cause of the small number of literate Christian Dakota, she was “unsure 
of how much of his story was representative of Dakota people’s overall 
experiences” (xx). One family can never represent the cumulative expe-
riences of all people, but Dakota in Exile may give readers another view 
of the complex narrative perspectives that contribute to our collective 
history. 


Dakota in Exile: The Untold Stories of Captives in the Aftermath of the U.S.- Dakota War

Index to v. 78 and Back Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 78 no. 4 Fall 2019

Review of: The Children of Lincoln: White Paternalism and the Limits of Black Opportunity in Minnesota, 1860–1876, by William D. Green

Coleman, Dwain

304      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
However, given the high stakes involved, the Leagues’ actions seem 
eminently reasonable. The book ends with a chapter on the spread of 
Union Leagues in the South, as they struggled unsuccessfully to graft 
Northern fraternal ideals onto a society riven by racial division. 
 The signal virtue of this book is its abundant research. Scholars 
seeking to build our still limited understanding of Union political 
thought, among other topics, will do well to use this book’s footnotes 
as a guide. Iowans such as Samuel Kirkwood appear in cameo roles, but 
the book is predominantly shaped by debates in more established states. 
Taylor’s prose is reasonably accessible, but the audience for this book is 
scholars and the most highly motivated lay readers. 
 
 
The Children of Lincoln: White Paternalism and the Limits of Black Opportunity 
in Minnesota, 1860–1876, by William D. Green. Minneapolis: University 
of Minnesota Press, 2018. xi, 498 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $34.95 
hardcover. 
Reviewer Dwain Coleman is a Ph.D. history student at the University of 
Iowa. The Iowa History Center recognized his master’s thesis, “Still in the 
Fight: The Struggle for Community in the Upper Midwest for African Amer-
ican Civil War Veterans” as the outstanding master’s thesis in Iowa history 
for 2017.  
William Green’s Children of Lincoln is a welcome addition to the grow-
ing historiography of emancipation and Reconstruction studies. Green 
reveals the rich history of racial politics in Minnesota and the rest of the 
Midwest and the critical role racial politics played in the political and 
demographic development of the nation during Reconstruction. At the 
same time, Green explores the often paradoxical positions that white 
“Lincoln Republicans” took concerning race. 
 At over 400 pages containing meticulously researched information 
taken from newspapers, journals, and letters, Green’s book makes a 
statement about the rich history of Reconstruction in Minnesota and the 
Midwest and the transformative role it played. Green takes great care 
to reconstruct the national, state, and local context in which Minnesota’s 
Republican Party stalwarts developed and espoused their political and 
social views on race during Reconstruction. Green’s examination chal-
lenges the standard narrative of Northern racial progressivism during 
this period and reveals the often complicated reality of racial politics 
and the limits of white paternalism. Green scrutinizes four prominent 
white Lincoln Republicans from Minnesota as he charts the multi-
faceted nature of the efforts of white Republicans to reform the political, 
social, and demographic makeup of the state and nation. 
Book Reviews and Notices      305 
 The first Lincoln Republican Green analyzes is Morton S. Wilkin-
son, a prominent U.S. Senator from Minnesota who championed black 
suffrage. During the Civil War he worked tirelessly to abolish slavery 
in the District of Columbia and throughout the nation. At the same time, 
he was also a member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee and 
advocated the protection of property of Indians who adopted the habits 
of “civilized life.” Green uses the reactions of Wilkinson and other 
Lincoln Republicans to the U.S. Dakota War, the mock trial and exe-
cution of those accused of atrocities during the war, and the expulsion 
of Native Americans and confiscation of their lands to the benefit of 
white businessmen and settlers to demonstrate the limits of their egali-
tarianism.  
 Another of Green’s subjects is Thomas Montgomery, an Irish immi-
grant farmer turned soldier during the U.S. Dakota War and an officer 
of a U.S. colored regiment during the Civil War. Green uses Montgom-
ery’s letters to examine his reasons for serving, perceptions concerning 
the black soldiers he commanded, and his continuing self-interest and 
paternalist mindset after service.  
 Daniel D. Merrill is another similar example Green uses to demon-
strate the limits of Republican paternalism. As a church and business 
leader in St. Paul, Merrill enables Green to explore the complex racial 
divisions within the state capital’s churches and education system. Mer-
rill and other white Baptist churchgoers of the community supported 
the creation of a black Baptist church in St. Paul. They were, however, 
unwilling to relinquish control to black congregants to choose their own 
black leader.  
 The fourth prominent leader that Green explores is Sarah Burger 
Stearns, a woman suffragist in Minnesota. Through his examination of 
Stearns’s rhetoric and her fight for women’s voting rights, Green dem-
onstrates the heated tension and widening chasm that emerged between 
advocates of black male suffrage and those supporting white woman 
suffrage. 
 For those interested in Iowa history during this period, Green’s 
examination of Minnesota’s Lincoln Republicans provides rich parity 
with other midwestern states. Like Minnesota, Iowa passed black laws 
and exclusionary acts to control black residents living in the state and to 
prevent further immigration. Like Wilkinson, Iowa Republican leaders 
—Governor Samuel Kirkwood and others—worked during and after 
the Civil War to convince a reluctant white constituency to support the 
formation of a black regiment as well as Reconstruction reforms like 
the state passage of black male suffrage, which became law just months 
before Minnesotans’ similar reform.  
306      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 Green’s dense narrative, although an extensive read that is occa-
sionally encumbered by the inclusion of extensive quotations, reveals 
the complex realities of state, regional, and national politics during the 
Reconstruction Era. Green’s work joins a growing chorus of historians, 
such as Leslie Schwalm, Elliott West, and Steven Hahn, who argue for a 
“Greater Reconstruction” narrative that examines the whole continent 
and the effects of Reconstruction rather than an isolated Southern ac-
count. Green’s work should become required reading for those inter-
ested in the contradictory positions taken by white Republicans who 
championed black suffrage and equal citizenship rights but eventually 
abandoned black citizens to navigate by themselves continuing racial 
hostility and inequalities in both the North and South.  
 
 
Pictures of Longing: Photography and the Norwegian-American Migration, 
by Sigrid Lien, translated by Barbara Sjohom. Minneapolis: University 
of Minnesota Press, 2018. x, 290 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibli-
ography, index. $120 hardcover, $29.95 paperback. 
Reviewer L. DeAne Lagerquist is Harold H. Ditmanson Distinguished Pro-
fessor of Religion at St. Olaf College. She is the author of In America the Men 
Milk the Cows: Factors of Gender, Ethnicity, and Religion in the Americanization 
of Norwegian-American Women (1991). 
Photography and photographs convey anticipation and memory in 
Sweetland, Ali Selim’s film adaptation of Will Weaver’s short story “A 
Gravestone Made of Wheat.” When his parents arrange for him to marry 
German Inge Altenberg, Olaf Torvik, a Norwegian farmer in the Red 
River Valley, sends her a letter, enclosing a photograph of himself. She 
carries both with her to Minnesota. But, because a crease in the folded 
photograph obscured his face, initially Inge does not recognize him. In 
the train station she mistakes his friend Franzen for Olaf. At Olaf’s farm, 
Franzen makes a photograph of Inge in her traveling clothes in front 
of the house. Before the film ends, we see Franzen and Inge looking at 
the photo after Olaf’s funeral and then watch her grandson gaze at her 
image as a young woman as he considers selling the farm. None of this 
appears in Sigrid Lien’s intriguing book, and yet her nuanced, detailed, 
and theoretically rich exploration of photography and Norwegian 
American migration suggests the absolute rightness of Selim’s use of 
photographs and photography to convey a range of emotions, including 
longing—both for what is not yet and for what is no longer. 
 Although its format is small for the genre, this volume offers far 
more than what might be expected from a coffee-table book illustrated 
with interesting, old photographs. Certainly there are interesting, old 


The Children of Lincoln: White Paternalism and the Limits of Black Opportunity in Minnesota

Review of: “The Most Complete Political Machine Ever Known”: The North’s Union Leagues and the American Civil War, by Paul Taylo

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