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

The contributors to The Civil War Guerrilla, edited by Joseph M. Beilein Jr. and Matthew C. Hulbert, shed new light on irregular warfare during the Civil War and its place in American memory. The editors symbolize their approach to irregular warfare with the black flag. According to contemporary writings, irregulars raised it to signal a fight to the death. However, no such flags can be found in any archive. The volume’s essays “unfold the black flag,” tracing “both guerrillas and our perceptions of them from history to memory to myth” (11). Contributors refute the long-standing popular and scholarly view of the guerrilla as a merciless, apolitical villain. They engage Michael Fellman’s view of irregulars as participants in a sociopathic war. The volume also builds on Daniel Sutherland’s work demonstrating that local insurgencies shaped the outcome of the national Civil War. The volume ultimately seeks to explore and reassess the Civil War irregular’s place in American culture and history.

Writing at a time of major growth in the irregular warfare subfield, this volume’s essays make an important contribution to Civil War studies. They do so by expanding the profile of the Civil War irregular soldier and by writing a new chapter in the story of how Americans have remembered the Civil War. Moreover, they succeed in disproving mythical stereotypes of irregular warfare and introducing new ways of researching this type of combat.

The first set of essays examines the nature and participants of Civil War irregular warfare. Christopher Phillips highlights the ideological nature of irregular warfare in the western border states. Contesting the belief that irregulars were nihilists with personalized motives, Phillips cites official reports revealing that irregular activity erupted in response to the Unionist’s effort at emancipation. Andrew William Fialka uses GIS mapping technology to show that rather than being unpredictable and chaotic, Missouri’s irregular war had a larger order. His findings include that irregulars targeted Union soldiers more often than civilians and cooperated with the regular Confederate Army. In a comparative piece that expands the geographic boundaries of irregular warfare studies, David Brown and Patrick Doyle explore how the more commercial and politically divided North Carolina Piedmont underwent an acute irregular conflict, but the South Carolina Piedmont, located in the pro-Confederate cotton belt, never witnessed a large degree of guerrilla violence. Incorporating new racial groups into the story of Civil War irregular warfare, Megan Kate Nelson explores how Native Americans preserved a centuries-long guerilla tradition and conducted ambushes that doomed Henry Sibley’s campaign to implement the Confederate dream of a western slave empire.

Memory studies populate the second half of the volume. Hulbert’s piece on guerrilla memory reveals that the memoir of Thomas M. Goodman formed a part of the Civil War “memory industry.” Goodman portrayed “Bloody” Bill Anderson’s guerrillas as inhuman and sadistic to counter the border West’s “irregular Lost Cause” and to ensure that the sacrifices of Union soldiers fighting in the Kansas-Missouri irregular war would be remembered. John C. Inscoe discusses how the American public started to understand irregular warfare through literary fiction and theatrical productions about Appalachia in the 1860s. Unionist and pro-Confederate writers and playwrights venerated their favored side’s irregulars and demonized those of the enemy. In his essay, Rod Andrew Jr. examines the interaction between myth and fact in the story of Manse Jolly, a postbellum outlaw hero who resisted what white Southerners termed “Yankee tyranny” and “negro rule.” Beilein’s work “explores ... the process by which Confederate guerrillas ... have been wrapped in myth and hyperbole” (10). After hiding his intentions from former Confederate guerrilla William Gregg, who agreed to help conduct his research, amateur historian William Connelley selectively cited Gregg’s memoir to paint William Quantrill’s Confederate irregulars as blood-thirsty monsters motivated by self...