The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West by Matthew Christopher Hulbert (review)

The role of guerrilla conflict in the course and outcome of the Civil War has moved steadily toward the center of the story. Starting with Michael Fellman's Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War (1989), appearing nearly thirty years ago, and put solidly into place by Daniel E. Sutherland's A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War (2009), the vital place of irregular warfare, not only on the western fringe of fighting but across theaters, is now pretty much part of the historiographical canon. Matthew Christopher Hulbert now has taken a welcome step in positioning the topic more broadly within our understanding. His purpose, nicely achieved, is to situate guerrilla warfare in the evolving remembrance of the war and its aftermath. The recollection of the distinctive, near-anarchic guerrilla experience in turn followed its own distinctive path from Reconstruction to today. The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory takes us along that intriguing trajectory as Hulbert tells his "story within a story about a war within a war" (5).

His attention remains on the Kansas-Missouri borderland, and he begins with a sketch of the messy conflict—confused, unfocused and unbridled, familial—that memoirs of the time pictured rather accurately as "traumas that could never be either fully celebrated or fully forgotten" (23). The memory took its first turn when the editor John Newman Edwards made irregulars in his Noted Guerrillas (1877), and by association all Missourians, into both advocates of the Lost Cause (despite having never seceded) and its most enduring, never-say-die warriors. By the turn of the century, participants themselves were taking a hand, penning memoirs and holding reunions, notably of those who rode with William Quantrill in his serial butcheries, in an effort to integrate the border experience snugly into the conflict's noble mythic portrayal now firmly in place across the former Confederacy. Partly by identifying with the war in eastern theaters, partly by invoking themes of the New South, guerrilla veterans worked to re-remember their experiences into the South's recollected mainstream.

Having established the primary evolving pattern of guerrilla memory, Hulbert riffs on it to bring in illuminating variations and wrinkles. Writers brought in the dichotomous African American stereotypes, describing irregulars as defending southern womanhood against black rapists while also bringing in loyal slaves who supported, fed, and even fought beside them. Guerrilla war was by definition a war of households, with families as both victims and participants. This gave women a place in the narrative inherently different, and specifically more directly involved, than in accounts of traditional warfare elsewhere. One of Hulbert's most interesting chapters tells of female survivors' efforts to elbow their way into the collective memories dominated so far by men. This raised a curious conflict. The male trope throughout the South had men fighting to protect wives and sisters at home from abusive Yankees, but the women's accounts, brought together by the Missouri chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy, told of wielding axes and rifles and using cleverness, "household diplomacy" (126), to fend pretty effectively for themselves. By insinuating their way into the dominant story, they threatened to undermine it.

The conflict had two sides, of course, and as the losers developed, reshaped, and honed their version, the winners, veteran Jayhawkers from Kansas, pushed back. The retaliatory memories took various forms, from histories to commemorative addresses, to reminiscences and even theater, but they shared a portrayal of Confederate Missourians as bloody-handed debauchees epitomized by a sociopathic William Quantrill, the heroic ideal of John Newman Edwards's opening telling of the guerrilla myth. As a counterfigure they posed Jim Lane, the Jayhawker band leader whose own behavior was decidedly dicey, and portrayed him, in one overripe poem, as someday bound to appear

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