Date of Award
Fall 2022
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
School
Humanities
Committee Chair
Dr. Susannah J. Ural
Committee Chair School
Humanities
Committee Member 2
Dr. Allison Abra
Committee Member 3
Dr. Kyle F. Zelner
Committee Member 3 School
Humanities
Committee Member 4
Dr. Heather Marie Stur
Committee Member 4 School
Humanities
Committee Member 5
Dr. Caroline E. Janney
Abstract
Eastern collective remembrances of the American Civil War have dominated discussions of the war’s causes and consequences. The West was located far from major Civil War battlefields and historic sites and therefore deemed peripheral to the war and its legacy. Consequently, historians’ eastern-focused arguments about the war’s historical memory have largely been applied to account for all Union veterans and their families’ experiences, even though the evidence is grounded predominantly in source materials from east of the Mississippi River. Using analytical methods of gender and race, The Expansionist Cause examines Union Civil War commemoration in the trans-Mississippi West to argue that the Civil War meant something distinctly different to these veterans and their families than to their eastern counterparts.
In their collective remembrances, western Union veterans and their families celebrated white expansion and supremacy as the ultimate inheritance of the Civil War, and in doing so, they constructed a legacy of the war that bolstered Anglo-American hegemony in the West. Similar to white southerners who crafted the Lost Cause to disempower African Americans, Union veterans and their families wielded Civil War commemorations as a weapon to colonize Native peoples in the West. By rooting their defense of western colonization in the shadow of the Civil War, they used collective remembrances of the Union cause as a “good war” to secure an American empire and erase the violence of colonization. These distinctions reveal a larger significance of the war to the Civil War generation, and underscore how western Union veterans and their families connected the war to the larger national narrative to disempower Indigenous people. Memory making, therefore, served as a crucial weapon in western colonization.
ORCID ID
0000-0002-6702-7633
Copyright
Lindsey R. Peterson, 2022
Recommended Citation
Peterson, Lindsey, "The Expansionist Cause: Union Civil War Commemorations as Weapons of Colonization in the American West" (2022). Dissertations. 2045.
https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations/2045