Reviews for General Stand Watie's Confederate Indians

The average rating for General Stand Watie's Confederate Indians based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-05-21 00:00:00 Eric Fuller Very few historical texts address the Civil War in the Indian Territory in general, and the First and Second Mounted Cherokee Regiments in particular. In that sense, this is an useful resource. However, as Brad Agnew mentions in the forward, Cunningham was far from an impartial observer. His inherent biases are front-and-center. Union soldiers are always described as cowardly and evil while Rebels are noble and brave. The flat-out racist language he uses when describing blacks and full-blood Indians (particularly the Cherokee) also makes this a difficult read in modern times. There is a great opportunity to tell this story of an oft-forgotten part of the Civil War as an impartial historian. I'm looking forward to that some day.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-09-22 00:00:00 Lu Weifeng I am writing my Master's thesis on the First Nations peoples who fought for the Confederate States of America during the Civil War, so when I found this book, I was very excited. I was hoping to get some good ideas and information for further study. However, I was disappointed. I found very little in this book that I could put as a positive review. I have to commend the author for writing about a relatively overlooked topic in the Civil War. While Stand Watie has not been completely forgotten, he and his soldiers rarely appear in standard history texts, so this book does help somewhat to rectify that situation. [I have my own theories as to why Stand Watie has been "forgotten," but I won't go into that here.] Sadly, I found several reasons to become disappointed with this book and, ultimately, not feel that I could recommend it. The most frustrating aspect of this book was the percentage of the work actually dedicated to Stand Watie and his troops. The author constantly goes off on side stories that have little-to-nothing to do with Gen. Watie and that include massive quotations from letters and dispatches that only have the most rudimentary connection to Watie. I felt like I was reading a history of the war in the West more than reading about Watie and his troops. While interesting information did exist in these side stories, they did little to help the stated purpose of the book. Further, the author had a very strong bias that plainly colored everything he wrote. To be clear, every author will have a bias, and I don't fault any author for attempting to prove a point. But Cunningham wrote on the level of hero-worship, demonstrating little objectivity. Every (or almost every) Union commander was portrayed as cruel and/or incompetent, while Watie (and almost every Confederate) was viewed as intelligent and noble, only losing because of mistakes outside of their control. Again, I don't fault the author's bias towards the Confederacy; I cannot, however, justify the rather blatant disregard for any objectivity. As should probably be evident by now, this book was definitely not written as an academic source. The lack of references was disappointing, but I cannot fault the author too much for this, since he never claimed to be writing a scholarly source. I simply add this statement as a warning to future readers who - like me - might come to this book with hopes of finding "further reading" resources. In the end, this book was not a complete waste of time, but that is the best I can say about it. I cannot recommend it for anything beyond an interesting look at the historiography of the 1950-60s. Anyone desiring an evenhanded or scholarly history of Stand Watie or the First Nations' involvement in the Civil War should probably look elsewhere.