Posted inStories

Desert Warriors: The Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands

by Andrew E. Masich

The Southwest Borderlands is without question the Civil War’s least understood and appreciated theater. The sparsely populated region, extending from southern California to the Rio Grande, experienced not only clashes between Union and Confederate forces during the war, but also a struggle for survival and dominance among Indian and Hispanic populations on both sides of the Mexican border. Those conflicts were in fact interconnected civil wars that were spawned or exacerbated by the “war of the rebellion” in the United States.

Posted inStories

A Promise Betrayed: Reconstruction Policies Prevented Freedmen from Realizing the American Dream

by Rick Beard

On January 16, 1865, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Special Field Orders No. 15, which one admiring biographer lauded as “the single most revolutionary act in race relations in the Civil War.” The order promised thousands of freedmen 40-acre parcels of land located in a 30-mile wide swath from Charleston south along the Atlantic coast to the St. Johns River in Florida. But Southern-sympathetic Northern politicians and even Sherman himself would come to betray the famous order that gave freedmen “40 acres and a mule,” and former slaves would be forced off the land their families had worked for generations.