The Logic of Bushwhacking:Civil War Guerrillas on the Missouri Frontier Aaron Astor (bio) Joseph M. Beilein Jr. Bushwhackers: Guerrilla Warfare, Manhood, and the Household in Civil War Missouri. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2016. 364 pp. Appendices, bibliography, notes, and index. $34.95. Matthew M. Stith. Extreme Civil War: Guerrilla Warfare, Environment, and Race on the Trans-Mississippi Frontier. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. 232 pp. Illustrations, map, bibliography, notes, and index. $43.50. One of the most profitable sub-fields to emerge in the study of the U.S. Civil War is the role of guerrilla warfare. Prior to the late 1980s, most scholars paid little attention to the irregular conflict that emerged behind Union (and occasionally Confederate) lines. The exceptions were those accounts of prominent personalities like William Clarke Quantrill, John S. Mosby, and Champ Ferguson; or quasi-guerrillas like John Hunt Morgan and Nathan Bedford Forrest. With the publication of Michael Fellman's Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War (1989), the modern study of guerrilla conflict took shape. Fellman portrayed the guerrilla war in Missouri as a nihilistic struggle of all against all, with never-ending cycles of revenge and grotesque personal violence leaving the entire Missouri countryside a charred ruin. Even more poignant was Fellman's assessment of the psychological impact of the war upon much of the civilian population, which descended into madness as longtime friends and kin became opportunistic killers. Ordinary men and women of every household began to doubt their own identities in this world turned upside down. The previously ignored Provost Marshal General papers offered Fellman and later scholars a window into this "inside war," contested by civilians, militiamen, guerrillas, and official soldiers alike. Since Fellman's Inside War, historians of the guerrilla-war experience have considered a range of new questions: How militarily decisive was guerrilla war? What were the motives and methods of the guerrillas? How were guerrilla bands organized, led, and supplied? What is the relationship between guerrillas, conventional armies, and criminal gangs? How did armies combat [End Page 431] guerrillas and how effective were counterinsurgent operations? In what ways did the guerrilla phenomenon differ in each region? How did civilians experience and survive persistent guerrilla war? And how has the popular memory of the Civil War reflected the guerrilla conflict within? Scholars approaching these questions have gone down three historiographical paths. First are those that examine the operational and strategic relationship between guerrilla war and the military effort as a whole. Robert Mackey's The Uncivil War: Irregular Warfare in the Upper South (2004) and Daniel Sutherland's A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War (2009) catalogued the typologies of guerrillas in operation, and assessed their military significance. Blurring the lines between civilian and military spheres of operation, guerrillas proved a persistent thorn in the side of federal military strategy. They made necessary more support troops to guard supply lines and to police the occupied territory. They also invited a harder and occasionally brutal response to the civilian population, enough to grind down morale and food supplies for the conventional Confederate armies. This literature built on earlier studies of Civil War brutality, including Mark Grimsley's Hard Hand of War (1995) and Charles Royster's The Destructive War (1993), both of which looked at conventional military operations against civilians. A second field examines the exteriority of guerrilla warfare in particular locales. These studies take a holistic approach to certain regions and account for the experiences of all participants and victims. They detail guerrilla depredations, physical devastation, counterinsurgent practices, and civilian responses in particular geographic locations, with the aim of drawing a general portrait of life in guerrilla-torn regions. Brian McKnight's Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia (2006), Noel Fisher's War at Every Door: Partisan Politics and Guerrilla Violence in East Tennessee (1997), and Jeremy Neely's The Border Between Them: Violence and Reconciliation on the Kansas-Missouri Line (2007) exemplify this regional approach, taking in matters of topography, military organization, civilian atrocities, and regional peculiarities. A third field probes the interiority of guerrilla culture—the...
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Mar 1, 2019
Sija J Van Der Wal + 4
Open Access
