Garden of Ruins - (Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War) by J Matthew Ward (Hardcover)

About the Book

"J. Matthew Ward's Garden of Ruins is a social and military history of Civil War-era Louisiana. Delving deep into primary sources, Ward examines military occupation and state coercion from Union and Confederate authorities, concluding that despite the revolutionary potential of occupation, it was a conservative state mechanism that replicated much of the antebellum social order in the state. He suggests that social stability during wartime, and ultimately victory itself, developed from the capacity of military powers to secure their territory, governing powers, and civilian populations. White and Black residents, in turn, pressed Union and Confederate powers for supplies, security, and redress of grievances. Union troops occupied southern Louisiana beginning in May 1862, expanding their reach for the remainder of the war. During that occupation, Union forces relied on a comprehensive occupation structure that included military actions, social regulations, destabilization of slavery, and the creation of a complex bureaucracy. Struggles between Union forces and civilians, Ward suggests, reveal how occupation became a war on southern households and culture. Before occupation and in unoccupied regions of Louisiana, he shows that little functional difference existed between Confederate governmental and military forces. By examining the coercive policies of the state's Confederate government alongside civilian efforts to patrol the loyalty of their communities, Ward concludes that the Confederate war effort was also a joint production, one that urges historians to consider warfare as more than battles and strategy-it was a social event that revealed the underlying connections between people and state. Garden of Ruins reveals the Civil War, state-building, and democracy itself as contingent processes through which Louisianans shaped the world around them. It also shows that power during the conflict and immediately afterward was a collaborative production between occupying military forces and civilians. Ward's study is certain to be of interest to historians and general readers interested in the Civil War homefront in Louisiana"--

Book Synopsis

J. Matthew Ward's Garden of Ruins serves as an insightful social and military history of Civil War-era Louisiana. Partially occupied by Union forces starting in the spring of 1862, the Confederate state experienced the initial attempts of the U.S. Army to create a comprehensive occupation structure through military actions, social regulations, the destabilization of slavery, and the formation of a complex bureaucracy. Skirmishes between Union soldiers and white civilians supportive of the Confederate cause multiplied throughout this period, eventually turning occupation into a war on local households and culture. In unoccupied regions of the state, Confederate forces and their noncombatant allies likewise sought to patrol allegiance, leading to widespread conflict with those they deemed disloyal.

Ward suggests that social stability during wartime, and ultimately victory itself, emerged from the capacity of military officials to secure their territory, governing powers, and nonmilitary populations. Garden of Ruins reveals the Civil War, state-building efforts, and democracy itself as contingent processes through which Louisianans shaped the world around them. It also illustrates how military forces and civilians discovered unique ways to wield and hold power during and immediately after the conflict.

Review Quotes

"Ward has written the most inclusive state-level study of Louisiana to date. Viewing the war through the home, a place in which two emergent historical frameworks overlap, the household and occupation, Ward brings new analysis to well-worn tales while also folding into the narrative more obscure events of Civil War Louisiana. . . . Ward nails it. This book should be read by anyone interested in Louisiana during the Civil War, and in the war generally"--Journal of Southern History

"In a creative, conscientious, and compelling study, J. Matthew Ward analyzes the two conflicts that beset occupied Louisiana during the Civil War--a war within and by households to rearrange social relations and a bureaucratic war waged by the U.S. Army to subdue a rebellious local white population. Ward bridges the distance between those struggles beautifully, capturing the way occupation aims not simply to remake a political order but to remake daily life itself. An important contribution to Civil War history."--Gregory P. Downs, author of After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War

"In his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln meditated on the 'magnitude' and 'duration' of the U.S. Civil War. As Ward's brilliant monograph demonstrates, military occupation unfurled the war's vast reach that Lincoln sought to explain. Cloaked in military power and state authority, occupation dismantled the slaveholding regime and reordered the southern household. In reckoning with the swift transformations that Lincoln labeled 'fundamental and astounding, ' Ward has produced a first-rate work of history."--Andrew F. Lang, author of In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War America

About the Author

J. Matthew Ward is assistant professor of history at Quincy University.