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Reviewed by:
  • The Guerrilla Hunters: Irregular Conflicts during the Civil War ed. by Brian D. McKnight and Barton A. Myers
  • Megan Kate Nelson (bio)
The Guerrilla Hunters: Irregular Conflicts during the Civil War. Edited by Brian D. McKnight and Barton A. Myers. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. 416. Cloth, $49.95.)

Any excellent edited volume must have three components: an organizing framework that is clear and compelling, a convincing argument for the volume’s historiographical significance, and essays that not only make [End Page 148] their own points but engage in conversation with others in the volume. The Guerrilla Hunters, a new collection of essays on Civil War irregular conflicts edited by Brian D. McKnight and Barton A. Myers, fulfills some but not all of these requirements.

The collection’s framework is both defensive and expansive. The Guerrilla Hunter is, in part, a response to Gary Gallagher and Kathryn Shively Meier’s article, “Coming to Terms with Civil War Military History,” published in the December 2014 issue of this journal. In it, Gallagher and Meier dismiss the significance of irregular conflicts in the Civil War, lam-basting guerrilla studies scholars for lavishing attention on atypical warfare tactics and experiences, and for speaking more to today’s obsession with atrocities and trauma than to the actual concerns of Civil War Americans.

In their introduction to The Guerrilla Hunters, McKnight and Myers take on these arguments directly, contending that irregulars “did play a fundamental military role in Southern strategy, policy, and, as a result of massive destabilization,” helped to bring about the military defeat of the Confederacy (3). While irregular fighters may have been vastly outnumbered by conventional soldiers, they argue, guerrillas engaged in a wide range of conflicts across the nation and their actions had an impact beyond mere numbers. Civil War Americans understood the brutality of guerrilla actions—they understood it so well, in fact, that they deliberately tried to obfuscate it in their narratives of the war. Continuing this kind of historical erasure by dismissing guerrillas and their histories, the editors point out, contributes to the Lost Cause narrative and “prevents clearer understanding of the origins and course of many people’s Civil War experience” (2).

In order to further defend guerrilla studies from the attacks of skeptical military historians, McKnight and Myers clearly decided that the most effective circle of wagons is the largest. They recruited fifteen essays and a foreword and afterword from almost every rising, established, and eminent scholar working in Civil War guerrilla history today (and got blurbs from the rest).

The collection begins with several essays one could categorize as “conventional military history,” detailed studies of irregular soldiers and their impact on Union and Confederate military strategy. The best of these call attention to new sources: partisan ranger petitions articulating would-be irregulars’ motives in Myers’s essay; Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Proclamation of Amnesty (which had a series of unforeseen effects on the Confederate home front), analyzed by Stephen Rockenbach; and digital mapping tools that Aaron Astor uses to track guerrillas’ social networks in Tennessee.

The second half of the collection turns to cultural studies of guerrilla warfare. As the editors note in their introduction, guerrilla studies scholars [End Page 149] often embrace interdisciplinary methods to “hunt up” their elusive subjects. In doing so, these scholars pursue research that speaks to experiences and issues beyond the conventional battlefield. The historians whose work appears in this section use political science (Adam H. Domby’s essay redefining guerrillas as warlords); gender studies (Lisa Tendrich Frank’s persuasive reframing of Union soldiers as guerrillas in southern homes); environmental history (Matthew M. Stith on landscapes of irregular warfare); social psychology (Joseph M. Beilein Jr.’s thirst-inducing analysis of guerrillas’ alcohol consumption); geographic information systems (Andrew Fialka on mapping civilian mobilization against Union occupation); and literary studies (Matthew C. Hulbert’s close readings of multiple narratives of the massacre[s] at Lawrence, Kansas).

Many of the essays in both sections turn from the usual sites of irregular engagements (the trans-Mississippi West and Appalachia) to understudied places. Frank and Domby reposition Sherman’s campaigns in Georgia and South Carolina as locations of guerrilla conflict...

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