Overview

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.

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9780807181393

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Reviews

"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"

Author Information

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

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