From Dakota to Dixie: George Buswell's Civil War (A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era)

The remarkable account of a Union soldier whose service took him from Indian Country to the heart of the Confederacy

CWBA Top Ten Book of the Year, 2025

In the summer of 1862, young Minnesotan George W. Buswell enlisted in the Union army, but his marching orders did not take him to the South to fight the Confederacy, as he had hoped, but to the US-Dakota War. Until the end of 1863, Buswell served with the 7th Minnesota Infantry, witnessing and describing that war’s infamous final act: the hanging of thirty-eight Dakota men at Mankato, the largest officially sanctioned mass execution in American history. Afterward, he volunteered as an officer to lead the 68th US Colored Infantry, serving in the Civil War’s Western Theater and seeing action in Mississippi.

Buswell’s unique diaries―published here for the first time―offer an extraordinary record of his unusually wide-ranging experience, taking readers through the Dakota War, into Union prisons in St. Louis and Memphis, onto picket lines where he searched Confederate women suspected of smuggling, and into the ranks of a Black regiment that fought against Confederate forces led by Nathan Bedford Forrest. His eyewitness accounts represent a vital contribution to the ongoing debate over the parameters of the American Civil War.

Jonathan W. White is Professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University and the author of A House Built by Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House. Reagan Connelly graduated from Christopher Newport University and is a J.D. candidate at George Mason Antonin Scalia Law School.