The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West by Matthew Christopher Hulbert

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West by Matthew Christopher Hulbert Brent M. S. Campney The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West. By Matthew Christopher Hulbert. UnCivil Wars. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Pp. x, 327. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5002-8; cloth, $84.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5001-1.) "My purpose," writes historian Matthew Christopher Hulbert in The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West, "is to analyze the cultural politics behind how Americans have remembered, misremembered, and re-remembered narratives of guerrilla warfare in rhetoric, historical scholarship, literature, and film, at reunions, and on the stage" (p. 4). Focusing on the American Civil War on the Kansas-Missouri border, Hulbert argues that the long-standing historiographical emphasis on the eastern theater has obscured the irregular violence in the West. "The segregation of homefront violence—that is, of various types of guerrilla warfare—from traditional concepts of battlefield violence … has served a broader moral purpose that is unmasked through a study of guerrilla memory," he argues (p. 5). "On one hand, this distinction has effectively 'othered' irregular violence as uniquely uncivilized and awful; on the other, it has preserved the glories of the regular war by robbing it of its own true awfulness in memory" (p. 5). The author positions his work as a western extension and critique of David W. Blight's Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001) and Caroline E. Janney's Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel Hill, 2014). Whereas Blight and Janney explored sectional reunion and reconciliation in the eastern states, Hulbert looks at how combatants and contemporary observers, as well as later scholars and artists, struggled to tell their own stories of the war against the constraints of a master narrative developed by those who believed their interpretation of "the regular war" defined the Civil War (p. 12). He also examines how some of the most notorious pro-Confederate guerrillas—Jesse James in [End Page 995] particular—came to be remembered as western gunfighters and bank robbers rather than as Civil War fighters. Hulbert argues that the fictitious contemporary dime novels published after the war "systematically transformed Jesse James; they downplayed the formative Civil War elements of his biography; they placed him, with increasing frequency, in murderous showdowns along the frontiers of Mexico and Texas; and they simultaneously made him over as a sixgun-slinging desperado of the southwestern frontier and as the proprietor of a vast Texas ranching operation" (p. 199). The book is capacious in its breadth and depth, examining, among other subjects, the brutality of the guerrilla war in Missouri and—to a significantly lesser extent—in Kansas. The author also explores the active but often ignored roles of women, the efforts of pro-Confederates and Unionists to control "guerrilla memory" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the commemorative reunions of those who fought on one side or the other, and the interpretations offered by more recent films on the border war, such as The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Ride with the Devil (1999), and True Grit (1969) (p. 4). Hulbert is a strong and engaging writer capable of capturing and maintaining the attention of his readers. Nevertheless, he has a tendency in places toward overstatement. For example, while any reader would agree that the slaughter of some two hundred civilians and Union soldiers in Lawrence, Kansas, and the burning of the town were atrocities, many readers would surely object to Hulbert comparing the incident to genocide. By the early twentieth century, he writes, "Many of the 'old time' residents of Lawrence, Kansas, wore their survival of the 1863 massacre like a badge of honor—not unlike survivors of the Third Reich's 'final solution' several decades later" (p. 109). Still, The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory is an important book that should be of interest to scholars of the Civil War, the American West, and memory and popular culture studies. Brent M. S. Campney University of Texas Rio...