Garden of Ruins

"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"--