A Notable Bully: Colonel Billy Wilson, Masculinity, and the Pursuit of Violence in the Civil War Era by Robert E. Cray

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Notable Bully: Colonel Billy Wilson, Masculinity, and the Pursuit of Violence in the Civil War Era by Robert E. Cray Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai (bio) A Notable Bully: Colonel Billy Wilson, Masculinity, and the Pursuit of Violence in the Civil War Era. Robert E. Cray. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2021. ISBN 978-1-60635-424-7. 320 pp., cloth, $55.00. Billy Wilson may very well be the most infamous Union officer whom no one remembers. Years after the war, aggrieved white Southerners still cursed the names of the Union officers they hated the most: William Tecumseh Sherman, Benjamin [End Page 431] Butler, and Billy Wilson (and his Zouaves)! Historian Robert E. Cray has successfully resurrected the notorious and larger-than-life Billy Wilson by piecing together his biography from what glimpses newspaper accounts can offer. A Notable Bully tells the always engaging, oftentimes appalling, occasionally humorous, and sometimes unbelievable story of an immigrant who cut his teeth on the battlefields of New York City’s gang-ruled streets, rose to elected office, fell from power, and reinvented himself when the Civil War began. Having arrived in New York City as an immigrant, Billy Wilson learned to survive by using his fists and by intimidating and exploiting others. Despite his own background, he bullied, swindled, and took advantage of individuals just arriving on American shores. When Mayor Fernando Wood needed to run a candidate in the First Ward’s alderman race, Wilson “stood out” as “a staunchly loyal Democrat, pugilist, and ticket agent familiar to First Ward voters” (54). Wilson won public office on a violence-filled election day in which the candidate himself engaged in street brawls. He eventually lost his seat, when Albany reformers seized control of the New York City police force, weakening Wood’s ability to control the vote. Political defeat might have ended Wilson’s career, had the Civil War not provided the man with an opportunity to reinvent himself. Helping to establish the Sixth New York Volunteers, known as the “Wilson Zouaves,” Wilson played up the stereotypes New Yorkers had for the men who made up the regiment, proclaiming that he was taking the city’s criminal element to war and “allegedly offer[ing] $500 for any pickpocket discovered in Manhattan after the regiment[’s] departure” (132). The Union high command dispatched the unit to Fort Pick-ens, overlooking Rebel-held Pensacola, Florida. Disciplinary problems plagued the unit, and in an embarrassing moment, a nighttime rebel attack caught the regiment by surprise. Sent to support Union operations in Louisiana, the men looted plantations, outwardly displayed their hatred of African Americans, and assaulted their brigade commander. The Sixth returned to New York just in time to defend Staten Island during the July 1863 Draft Riots, coming full circle from street thugs to the proud defenders of the city. The unit’s colonel, Billy Wilson, embodied this transformation. Once viewed as a brute who punched and bullied his way into Manhattan’s corrupt political world, Wilson had his reputation enhanced and his image rehabilitated by the war. This brief listing of exploits cannot do justice to the rich and sometimes absurd incidents in Wilson’s career. For example, there was the matter of Andrew Jackson’s gold snuff box and the personal loyalty oath Wilson demanded of his men. Cray faced a difficult challenge in writing about an individual who crafted his own image in the popular press. Indeed, these snippets might cause the reader to feel like a contemporary who flips through the pages to see what shenanigans [End Page 432] Billy Wilson is up to this time. In general, Cray effectively deploys the sources he has, grounding his conclusions in the secondary literature to help fill out the world that men like Billy Wilson made. Indeed, readers will think of Elliott Gorn’s The Manly Art (1986) and Amy S. Greenberg’s Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (2005) in the first part of this book and Lorien Foote’s The Gentlemen and the Roughs (2013) in the second (with the exception that the “roughs” both command and fill the ranks of the unit!). Billy Wilson thus embodies several key...