A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War (review)

O C T O B E R 2 0 1 0 305 the Union, and without a clear threat, northern voters would not allow the federal government to intervene in state elections. Reconstruction ended, not in failure, but because it had succeeded in the eyes of most northerners, Summers argues. The primary goal of the Civil War—“a Union held intact forever”—was secure (p. 270). Summers makes his case convincingly throughout the book, relying both on his mastery of newspaper editorials and a wide array of manuscript collections to incorporate the words of editors and politicians from across the country. The richness of Summers’s source material, as well as his unique approach to the Reconstruction period, will appeal to scholars of the era, especially those looking for a new way to teach the aftermath of the Civil War. Summers’s typically engaging writing style may also make this a good choice for advanced undergraduates and lay readers. Some readers will be frustrated, however, by the murky nature of Summers’s story. Fears constantly swirl around this tale of presidential Reconstruction, often unconnected to any specific event, and so readers without prior knowledge of the period may find it difficult to nail down a clear timeline. Summers does clarify the procession of events when chronology really matters—in the weeks approaching the 1866 congressional elections, for example (pp. 157–73). While the vagueness of Summers’s paranoia—sometimes repetitive, sometimes shockingly malleable—is occasionally aggravating, it is no doubt an accurate portrayal, and one that deserves a place in the stories historians tell about the successes and failures of Reconstruction. JAIME AMANDA MARTINEZ University of North Carolina at Pembroke A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War. By Daniel E. Sutherland. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xvi, 435 pp. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-8078-3277-6. It is possible to make the case that all of the attention given in recent years to guerrilla warfare and community conflict in the Civil War has been more problematic than helpful. For all we now know about brother killers in Missouri, war at every door in Tennessee, victims in North Carolina, and border warriors and fear multipliers in Virginia, our grasp of guerrilla war sometimes seems as decentralized and fissiparous as guerrilla war itself. Daniel Sutherland’s superbly crafted work—a narrative that for the first time treats the whole of it together, from Arkansas T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 306 to the Carolinas, from Florida to Texas, from the streets of Baltimore to the farms of Iowa and Illinois, to the waters of the Great Lakes—not only ensures his place as one of the leading authorities of the Civil War’s most uncivil dimension. It ensures that savage dimension, so long in our perceptions the conventional war’s brash kid brother, its maturely considered place in the essence of the war. Not for nothing does Sutherland choose to open the book on the streets of Baltimore, where urban guerrillas—seldom until now considered as such—attacked the first Union volunteers on the move to Washington in April 1861. And not for nothing does he jump from there to Missouri. The volunteer intensity of the guerrilla conflict was every bit as real as that which energized the war in the infantry ranks; the scale of the guerrilla conflict was every bit as continental as that which characterized the moving of armies and navies. Sutherland is not much interested in the typical but smallish questions that have characterized the importance of the guerrilla war. Instead, as the subtitle makes plain, he argues that the guerrilla war was thoroughgoing. Guerrillas fundamentally shaped overarching Union and Confederate policy; they fundamentally shaped the war as it was experienced by those who fought in it and those who lived through it. No momentous question associated with the Civil War—military , social, political—can be separated from it. Ultimately, he argues, the guerrillas boomeranged on an indecisive Confederacy. The Federal response to them intensified the scale and the severity of...