I Do Wish This Cruel War Was Over collects diaries, letters, and memoirs excerpted from their original publication in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly to offer a first-hand, ground-level view of the war’s horrors, its mundane hardships, its pitched battles and languid stretches, even its moments of frivolity. Readers will find varying degrees of commitment and different motivations among soldiers on both sides, along with the perspective of civilians. In many cases, these documents address aspects of the war that would become objects of scholarly and popular fascination only years after their initial appearance: the guerrilla conflict that became the “real war” west of the Mississippi; the “hard war” waged against civilians long before William Tecumseh Sherman set foot in Georgia; the work of women in maintaining households in the absence of men; and the complexities of emancipation, which saw African Americans winning freedom and sometimes losing it all over again.
Altogether, these first-person accounts provide an immediacy and a visceral understanding of what it meant to survive the Civil War in Arkansas.
“The value of original materials such as these is that they allow long dead participants to reach out once again to tell the reader what the civil war in Arkansas was really like.”
—Bobby Roberts, Central Arkansas Library System
Mark K. Christ is community outreach director at the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program and the editor or author of many books on the Civil War, including, most recently, Civil War Arkansas, 1863: The Battle for a State.
Patrick G. Williams is associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas and editor of the Arkansas Historical Quarterly. He is the author of Beyond Redemption: Texas Democrats after Reconstruction.
“Expertly curated… provides an interesting introduction to Civil War Arkansas, and it shines light on a variety of contemporary perspectives.”
—Journal of Southern History, November 2015
“A vibrant word picture of a war that was fought in less familiar locales by protagonists from an unfamiliar society.”
—America’s Civil War
The Civil War in the West has a single goal: to promote historical writing about the war in the western states and territories. It focuses most particularly on the Trans-Mississippi theater, which consisted of Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, most of Louisiana (west of the Mississippi River), Indian Territory (modern day Oklahoma), and Arizona Territory (two-fifths of modern day Arizona and New Mexico) but encompasses adjacent states, such as Kansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi, that directly influenced the Trans-Mississippi war. It is a wide swath, to be sure, but one too often ignored by historians and, consequently, too little understood and appreciated.
Topically, the series embraces all aspects of the wartime story. Military history in its many guises, from the strategies of generals to the daily lives of common soldiers, forms an important part of that story, but so, too, do the numerous and complex political, economic, social, and diplomatic dimensions of the war. The series also provides a variety of perspectives on these topics. Most importantly, it offers the best in modern scholarship, with thoughtful, challenging monographs.
Secondly, it presents new editions of important books that have gone out of print. And thirdly, it premieres expertly edited correspondence, diaries, reminiscences, and other writings by participants in the war.
It is a formidable challenge, but by focusing on some of the least familiar dimensions of the conflict, The Civil War in the West significantly broadens our understanding of the nation’s most pivotal and dramatic story.
—Daniel Sutherland, from the preface of I Do Wish This Cruel War Was Over
