The Civil War Guerrilla: Unfolding the Black Flag in History, Memory, and Myth ed. by Joseph M. Beilein Jr. and Matthew C. Hulbert (review)

In The Civil War Guerrilla: Unfolding the Black Flag in History, Memory, and Myth, editors Joseph M. Beilein Jr. and Matthew C. Hulbert have assembled a collection of eight insightful and wide-ranging essays from both established historians and rising young scholars. Together the authors explore the subject of guerrilla fighters during the Civil War from several fresh interpretive angles that incorporate the themes of race, region, ideology, and memory.

The book begins with “The Hard-Line War: The Ideological Basis of Irregular Warfare in the Western Border States” by Christopher Phillips, who argues that Missouri’s guerrilla fighters acted on ideological rather than personal motives. Phillips develops this point by showing how the federal government’s conscription and emancipation policies radicalized the guerrilla war, leading to an intensified irregular conflict in the war’s later years. In “Controlled Chaos: Spatiotemporal Patterns within Missouri’s Irregular Civil War,” Andrew William Fialka uses specialized software to create digital maps that track guerrilla violence. Fialka determines that irregular warfare in central Missouri actually followed rational and predictable patterns, showing that Confederate guerrillas avoided attacking targets in areas dominated by fixed garrisons. When troops from Missouri were moved to other theaters, Union commanders compensated by shifting troops from large, stationary garrisons to smaller, temporary outposts, which turned the communities around those outposts into magnets for guerrilla attacks. These two essays complement each other by emphasizing the purposefulness of rebel guerrillas.

Shifting eastward, two British historians—David Brown and Patrick J. Doyle—have coauthored an essay that explains why a belligerent, guerrilla-style opposition movement emerged to challenge the Confederate government’s authority in the North Carolina Piedmont but not in the South Carolina Piedmont. Brown and Doyle argue that the two regions entered the war with “fundamentally different views of the Confederacy” because of socioeconomic and political differences, including South Carolina’s greater dependence on slavery and cotton, and the longer, more fractious secession process in North Carolina (p. 73). Meanwhile, in the West, Confederate forces faced a very different opponent, one that Megan Kate Nelson argues has received far too little attention. In a fascinating case study, Nelson examines the role of Apache raiders during the Confederacy’s ill-fated New Mexico campaign from 1861 to 1862. Acting on their own motives, Apache leaders like Cochise and Mangas Coloradas ruined Confederate ambitions in the region by harassing rebel troop columns and stealing horses and provisions.

The last four essays explore the memory of Civil War guerrillas and how those memories have been altered, manipulated, or exploited to suit the interests of different groups. Matthew C. Hulbert, for example, shows that in Missouri former guerrillas and their supporters pushed a pro-guerrilla mythology that portrayed Confederate irregulars as “wartime folk heroes and postwar Robin Hoods” (p. 130). John C. Inscoe’s essay describes early fictional representations of the guerrilla conflict in southern Appalachia, showing that pro-Confederate playwright John McCabe and pro-Union authors John Trowbridge and Edmund Kirke all used guerrilla warfare as a vehicle for conveying clear moral interpretations of the war’s ultimate meaning and purpose.

The usefulness of such propaganda did not end with the war, as Rod Andrew Jr. explains in his essay on South Carolina’s infamous post–Civil War guerrilla Manse Jolly, who carried on a private war against occupying federal troops for a year and a half after Appomattox (p. 175). Finally, Beilein concludes the volume with an impassioned plea for historians to take guerrilla memoirs more seriously, analyzing the work of William E. Connelley, an early amateur historian of Missouri’s guerrilla war. Beilein believes Connelley’s book, Quantrill and the Border Wars (1910), has cast a long shadow over modern scholarship on the guerrilla war, even though...