Date
5-20-2026
Department
College of Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD)
Chair
Allen York
Keywords
US Dakota War of 1862, Minnesota Soldiers in the Civil War
Disciplines
History
Recommended Citation
Curfman, Caleb Michael, "Without Recognition: Civil War Service, The Dakota War of 1862, and the Institutional Making of Empire in Minnesota, 1858-1890" (2026). Doctoral Dissertations and Projects. 8525.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/8525
Abstract
This dissertation argues that the Civil War and the Dakota War of 1862 were not separate conflicts that happened to involve some of the same personnel, but sequential stages in a single process of moral and institutional transformation. Drawing on soldier correspondence, official military records, and the 1890 commemorative volume Minnesota in the Civil and Indian Wars, this study traces how Minnesota’s volunteer soldiers were converted from republican citizens who understood military service as the temporary defense of constitutional liberty into disciplined agents of an emerging imperial order. That refinement was accomplished through five interlocking mechanisms: institutional conditioning through military drill, linguistic continuity that masked moral discontinuity, the fusion of military and legal authority in the Dakota War tribunals, providentialist religious framing that sanctified violence in both conflicts, and commemorative consolidation that rendered the transformation invisible to subsequent generations. The same moral vocabulary of duty, order, providence, and sacrifice that sustained the defense of the Union against Confederate rebellion was repurposed, without conscious acknowledgment, to justify the subjugation of the Dakota people. Minnesota’s compressed timeline, of weeks rather than years between conflicts, makes this process of institutional transcendence unusually visible.
