"It Is Hard to Tell Who Is Who and What is What": An Introduction to the Southwestern Historical Quarterly 's Special Issue on Greater Reconstruction in the Southwestern Borderlands

"It Is Hard to Tell Who Is Who and What is What":An Introduction to the Southwestern Historical Quarterly's Special Issue on Greater Reconstruction in the Southwestern Borderlands Elliott West (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution An engraving of Gen. Philip H. Sheridan from between 1870 and 1890. Engraved by J. C. Buttre from a photograph by Mathew B. Brady. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002716946/ [Accessed Apr. 14, 2023]. [End Page i] Recently, American historians have begun to take a fresh look at how we have pictured the middle of the nineteenth century. In particular, they have questioned what Joel Silbey, more than a half-century ago, called the "Civil War synthesis."1 That way of imagining the midcentury begins with the fact of the war, then it views, weighs, and interprets events during those years by whether and how any one of them affected the war, its origins, its prosecution, and its aftermath. So ingrained is that perspective that we call the decades of the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s the "Civil War Era." The more obviously any development bears on the war, the more prominent the place we give it in the usual narrative. The less anything seems to say about the war, the farther we send it to the edges of the action. No one can credibly question the enormity and extent of the Civil War's consequences for the course of American history and for shifting that course toward what we would come to call "modern America." The question [End Page 1] is whether other events and developments during those years, even if they seem peripheral to the war, had their own weighty consequences and their own value in sharpening our grasp of the last century and three quarters—of how we have moved from then until now. Answering that question is quite a tall order, and as a tentative start, I've suggested elsewhere that we step away from the Civil War synthesis to what I've called the Greater Reconstruction.2 This asks us to pull back in our perspective in both space and time. As of 1848, the United States reached from coast to coast, so in understanding the thirty or so years that followed we ought to give due attention to developments in the newly acquired country, the region we would come to call "the West." That enlarged spatial focus, in turn, has us widening the temporal lens. The fundamental shift in the national trajectory began with its geographical reconstruction, the acquisition between 1845 and 1848 of about three quarters of a billion acres, an area just smaller than modern India. The newly expanded United States immediately began a process of rapid, convulsive changes, one provoked especially by the discovery of California gold in 1848. Those changes shaped profoundly the story of the nation at large, sometimes in ways relating to the Civil War, but at least as often in ways quite apart from it. The Greater Reconstruction would ask us to picture the roughly three decades after the mid-1840s as a drama with two leading actors, the Civil War and expansion, and their aftermath, playing roughly equal roles in the same crucial transition in national life. The two developments followed their own distinct courses and deserve their own telling, but they were also in frequent conversation and interaction. Neither can be understood without the other, and only when we bring them together and give them roughly equal attention will the full national story begin to come truly into focus. The four essays in this issue of the Southwest Historical Quarterly are fine illustrations of the sorts of insights we can gain when we take up that perspective. But let's begin with a caveat. Saying that we ought to give more attention to events in the West glosses over a key point. "The West" is a collective noun. Defined roughly as the space bound by Canada and Mexico, the ninety-eighth meridian, and the Pacific, it is far and away the United States' largest and most diverse region. It was, and it remains, part jigsaw, part mosaic...

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