Although the Second Confiscation Act declared Union forces could seize people who were enslaved by anyone rebelling or aiding the rebellion against the United States, it was not passed until 17 July of that year. Shea reveals that Curtis’ actions in Arkansas preceded the passage of this act by a matter of mere weeks, but his efforts challenge historians’ eastern focus on wartime emancipation.
Moving beyond emancipation, Shea finds Curtis established refugee camps at Helena, which provided freed people with food, clothing, shelter, equipment, transportation north, and, on at least one occasion, cash. Furthermore, he encouraged his fellow officers to employ freedmen and personally hired men on construction projects for the Union military. By the summer of 1863, Helena became the Mississippi Valley’s enrollment center for African American men into the Union army, and some of the first recruits were men emancipated by Curtis in Arkansas.
Many Missouri politicians, including Missouri governor Hamilton Rowan Gamble, opposed Curtis’ actions, and President Abraham Lincoln removed Curtis from his command of the Department of Missouri. While his career suffered for these policies, Shea notes that Curtis “probably freed more human beings from bondage than any other political, military, or religious leader in the first eighteen months of the Civil War.”[2] Likely due to Curtis’ location in the trans-Mississippi West, scholars, however, have paid little attention to Curtis’ emancipatory policies, which are ripe for historians’ further analysis of wartime emancipation.
Shea’s inclusion of Curtis’ wartime racial views and emancipatory policies is significant, but his work could be strengthened by situating his analysis more firmly within the primary and secondary literature. Shea relies predominantly on Curtis’ personal correspondence, papers, and official Union military records. Consequently, he fails to include the voices of the enslaved Arkansans and Missourians, and his analysis of local white residents’ reactions is similarly limited. Incorporating records produced by ordinary Black and white Arkansans and Missourians—such as federal pension files, correspondence, oral interviews, and local newspapers—would deepen scholars’ understanding of Curtis’ regional impact and humanize the people within Shea’s research. Furthermore, by not situating Curtis’s treatment of enslaved people within the greater historiography, such as Elizabeth D. Leonard’s work on Benjamin Butler, Shea missed a key opportunity to help scholars rethink the scale, scope, and timeline of wartime emancipation during the first eighteen months of the war and elevate the trans-Mississippi West’s importance on a national scale.[3]
Following Curtis’ removal for abolitionist policies, he was sent to the Department of Kansas but returned to Missouri when Confederate General Sterling Price’s forces threatened Union control of the region in 1864. Curtis’ command repulsed Price’s invasion of Missouri and Kansas during the Westport campaign, and he pursued Price as far as the Arkansas River Valley, but Shea argues that without support from Union General Alfred Pleasonton’s forces, Curtis failed to capture Price’s army. Despite his success during the Westport campaign, he was transferred to the Department of the Northwest in January 1865.
Shea incorporates Curtis’ postwar career into his narrative but largely views his postwar activities as distinct from Curtis’ life during the Civil War. After the war, Curtis returned to civil engineering and oversaw the progress of the Union Pacific Railroad line near Council Bluffs, Iowa, and tirelessly advocated for the completion of the Trans-Continental Railroad. He also served as an Indian commissioner, representing the United States’ interests in negotiations with American Indian tribes on the Northern Great Plains until April 1866. He died later that year on 26 December and was buried in Keokuk. “Greater Reconstruction” scholars argue that late-nineteenth century Americans drew critical connections between the Union’s war aims against the Confederacy and westward expansion and colonization in the West.[4] As a Civil War general in the trans-Mississippi West, Indian commissioner, and settler, Curtis’s biography offers a chance to test “Greater Reconstruction” theories, and engaging with this scholarship would strengthen Curtis’ relevance to late-nineteenth century national movements.
