An Explanation of the Research Questions and Methodological Framework

In July 1862 James Madison Bowler, a sergeant in the 3rd Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment, wrote home to his wife Elizabeth Caleff Bowler in Nininger, MN. He wrote from his camp just outside of Nashville, TN as a recently paroled prisoner of war. He spoke of his “patriotic motives” that had emboldened him to enlist the prior year considering it his “duty and privilege to do something for [his] country” when the war began. He wrote of his parole and escape from “rebeldom to the land of our friend again.”¹ Even after being a prisoner of war he wrote of the Confederates as a clear adversary.

Two months later, however, Bowler and the rest of the 3^rd Minnesota returned home to take on a new enemy, the Dakota tribe. The transformation in his rhetoric was striking. In a letter home he expressed an eagerness “to exterminate the devils.”² This dramatic shift in language reflects the complex racial attitudes that would shape Minnesota’s frontier conflicts. The Dakota War of 1862 was the culmination of broken treaties, reservation policies that forced cultural change, and encroachment by settlers in western Minnesota.³

Minnesota citizen-soldiers played a pivotal role in both the Civil War and the Dakota War of 1862, along with subsequent conflicts known collectively as the Indian Wars. These conflicts occurred simultaneously, yet historians have typically studied the experiences of these conflicts in silos rather than layers. While both topics are well documented, the focus has often relied on traditional military history instead of a social military methodology-an approach that examines warfare through the lived experiences of common soldiers rather than just battle tactics and leadership decisions. Approaching these wars as distinct but interrelated conflicts through the lens of social military history allows for a necessary evaluation of soldiers’ motivations, battlefield conduct, racial attitudes, and postwar influence. Although soldiers and historians have initially viewed these as distinct wars, soldiers’ participation in both shaped a broader identity in Minnesota rooted in racial hierarchies, military activity, and postwar political influence.

The social military methodology provides a framework to understand warfare from soldiers’ perspectives by using letters, diaries, official documents, and regimental histories. The Minnesota Historical Society’s collections of soldier correspondence, including James Madison Bowler and Elizabeth Caleff Bowler papers, offer rich insights into how these men understood their duel service. While using the traditional narrative and documentary analysis, this research also employs comparative analysis of the soldier reaction to the two conflicts. How did soldiers discuss the experiences of the Civil War differently than in the Indian Wars? How did local newspapers like the St. Paul Pioneer report on battles and casualties from both conflicts? Why did soldiers fight? Answers to these questions as well as larger questions of the ongoing drive for westward expansion during a time of Civil War will hopefully be uncovered in this research.

This dissertation contributes to historiographical conversations regarding nineteenth century military and social history. First, it bridges the divide between Civil War historiography and that of the Western Indian Wars. While scholars like Heather Cox Richardson and Elliot West have noted the connections between these conflicts, few studies have examined how individual soldiers navigated these distinct but concurrent battlegrounds.⁴ This gap exists partly because scholars have traditionally specialized in either Civil War or Western History, rarely crossing these subdisciplinary boundaries.

Second, while social histories of Civil War soldiers have flourished since the publication of James McPherson’s For Cause and Comrades, similar methodologies have rarely been applied to soldiers who fought in both the Civil War and Indian conflicts.⁵ Finally, this study contributes to our understanding of how military experience shaped racial ideologies and political attitudes in the post-Civil War Midwest, a topic that has received less attention than Southern and Eastern states during Reconstruction.⁶

The central question of this research is: How did Minnesota’s Citizen-soldiers reconcile their service in two seemingly distinct conflicts, and what does their evolving racial and military worldview reveal about the interconnected yet separate legacies of the Civil War and the Indian Wars?

In addressing this question this research demonstrates the importance of deconstructing the complex interplay between two defining conflicts and the men who engaged at once in two landscapes of conflict that had national and local expressions. The case of Henry Sibley demonstrates this complexity, a man who commanded troops against both Confederates and Dakota warriors, applying different rules of engagement and different rhetoric to justify violence in each context.⁷ How these men engaged in the broader Civil War and the more regional Indian Wars, experienced the theaters of conflict and conceptualized their dual roles fighting Confederates and Dakota Indians provides insight into the seemingly contradictory narratives of national union and westward expansion.

As Minnesota soldiers transitioned between fighting fellow white Americans in the South and battling Native Americans on their home frontier, they helped construct racial, regional, and national ideologies that would shape American society well into the Twentieth Century. Their experiences offer a window into how Minnesota’s development as a state was fundamentally shaped by these parallel conflicts and the racial hierarchies they reinforced.

A Note on Qualifications

My research focus has been Minnesota and Midwest history in both undergraduate and graduate school. I have focused on Minnesota’s involvement in the Civil War since high school. My undergraduate thesis looked at Minnesota’s involvement in the Civil War looking at the regional challenges Minnesota soldiers faced. My Master’s subfield is Native American History focusing on the Midwest. This work is a culmination of these earlier works as well as a continuation of the doctoral coursework which has a strong focus on Minnesota, nineteenth century America, and a methodological focus of Social Military History.

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1. James Madison Bowler to Elizabeth Caleff Bowler, July 31, 1862, James Madison Bowler and Family Papers, 1827-1976. Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul. ↩︎
2. James Madison Bowler to Elizabeth Caleff Bowler, September 10, 1862, James Madison Bowler and Family Papers, 1827-1976. Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul. ↩︎
3. For context on the causes of the Dakota War of 1862, see Michael Clodfelter, The Dakota War: The United States Versus the Sioux, 1862-1865 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2006); Gary Clayton Anderson and Alan R. Woolworth, eds. Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862 (St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1988); Kenneth Carley, The Dakota War of 1862: Minnesota’s Other Civil War (St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2001). ↩︎
4. Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Elliott West, The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). ↩︎
5. James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). ↩︎
6. For regional historiography and overview of Midwest studies see, Jon K Lauck’s two works, The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, 1800-1900 (Oklahoma University Press, 2022); and The Lost Region: Toward A Revival in Midwestern History (University of Iowa Press, 2013). ↩︎
7. Sibley Expedition Records. Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul. ↩︎