William Gregg’s Civil War: The Battle to Shape the History of Guerrilla Warfare ed. by Joseph M. Beilein Jr.

Abstract

Reviewed by: William Gregg’s Civil War: The Battle to Shape the History of Guerrilla Warfare ed. by Joseph M. Beilein Jr. Jennifer Lynn Gross William Gregg’s Civil War: The Battle to Shape the History of Guerrilla Warfare. Edited by Joseph M. Beilein Jr. New Perspectives on the Civil War Era. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 122. Paper, $26.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5577-1; cloth, $99.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5579-5.) The Civil War is one of the nation’s most studied wars, by both professional historians and history buffs, but the perspectives of its guerrilla combatants have not always enjoyed the same attention given to that of other fighting men or even civilians on the home front. In William Gregg’s Civil War: The Battle to Shape the History of Guerrilla Warfare, Joseph M. Beilein Jr. provides two [End Page 127] invaluable contributions. The first is the publication of the memoir itself, which Beilein correctly identifies as “an irreplaceable perspective on the war,” rendering it easily accessible to historians and laymen alike (p. 1). The memoir, which Gregg wrote with the intention of publishing, provides a jaunty and exciting tale of William Clarke Quantrill’s bushwhackers and the guerrilla war in Missouri and Kansas, taking the reader on, as Beilein promises, “a hellish and invigorating ride across a strange landscape” (p. 42). The second and perhaps more important contribution of this book lies in Beilein’s introduction, where he throws open wide a window on the historical process of writing history. Beilein’s ostensible jumping-off point is the memoir itself, which Gregg wrote as a way to venerate his and other guerrilla fighters’ contributions to the war. Much like the stories of other former Confederates written and published in the late nineteenth century, Gregg’s memoir reflects the political whitewashing done by the larger Lost Cause narrative. William Elsey Connelley’s Quantrill and the Border Wars: The Story of the Border (Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1910), which was also published in the early twentieth century, provides a sharp contrast to Gregg’s manuscript despite Connelley’s having been written with a great deal of personal help from Gregg. Though Connelley was not a professional historian, Beilein asserts that Connelley cloaked his work on Quantrill in the mantle of a historian’s objectivity all while pushing a very subjective perspective. Connelley vilified the guerrillas unconditionally and provided for none of their voices in his manuscript. To illustrate Gregg and Connelley’s friendship and communication, Beilein includes correspondence between the two men. Beilein asserts that Connelley’s failed promise to publish Gregg’s manuscript allowed Connelley’s voice and perspective to dominate successive studies of guerrilla warfare. The publication of Gregg’s memoir, according to Beilein, rectifies the silencing of guerrillas’ voices by Connelley’s and later historians’ claims to objectivity. Perceptively, Beilein cautions the reader: “If historians get too close, . . . they risk falling under the spell of the bushwhackers and becoming their mouthpiece. If historians create too much distance between their subject matter and themselves, they may never be able to truly see the guerrillas, let alone understand them. Pitfalls abound” (p. 42). William Gregg’s Civil War will prove to be a valuable primary resource for historians, but its greatest value lies in its usefulness as a tool for teaching students about the historical process. Beilein’s introduction is thoroughly instructive in how history is written and rewritten in “a war for the present,” as the words of both contemporary observers and later “historians live on, shaping and reshaping the past for generations, long after the ink has dried” (pp. 4, 3). With a component website that will allow students and teachers to more closely “interact with the volume’s content and sources,” William Gregg’s Civil War should become a go-to text for undergraduate classes in the American Civil War (p. 4). [End Page 128] Jennifer Lynn Gross Jacksonville State University Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association