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  • The Guerrilla Hunters: Irregular Conflicts During the Civil War ed. by Brian D. McKnight and Barton A. Myers
  • Matthew Hernando
The Guerrilla Hunters: Irregular Conflicts During the Civil War. Edited by Brian D. McKnight and Barton A. Myers. Foreword by Kenneth W. Noe. Afterword by Daniel E. Sutherland. Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. xxii, 399. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-6497-6.)

In The Guerrilla Hunters: Irregular Conflicts During the Civil War, editors Brian D. McKnight and Barton A. Myers have assembled an impressive collection of fifteen essays from a diverse group of established historians and innovative newcomers to the field of guerrilla studies. The authors approach the subject of irregular fighters during the Civil War from variegated perspectives, but each in his or her own way contributes something meaningful to the discussion.

If there is a single underlying theme to this collection, it is the diversity of irregular warfare during the Civil War. Each essay drives home the point that guerrilla/irregular troops varied greatly in form and appearance and adapted different tactics to suit their particular circumstances. In one fascinating case study, Laura June Davis shows how the Confederacy's riverine guerrillas waged a devastating campaign of sabotage and arson that destroyed at least forty steamboats on the lower Mississippi River, disrupting Union military operations along the river and sowing economic chaos throughout the region. Likewise, Scott Thompson classifies three different types of irregular cavalry units—guerrillas, partisan companies, and "regular raiders"—that fought in one northern Virginia county (p. 128).

Some of the more famous guerrilla leaders, like Nathan Bedford Forrest, bristled at being labeled as such. As Brian Steel Wills demonstrates in his insightful profile of the legendary Tennessee cavalryman, Forrest abjured the term guerrilla, consistently affirming his commitment to the "rules of Civilized Warfare" that supposedly bound the regular troops of either army (p. 62). Others, like John Gatewood, embraced the chaos the war brought to "failed state" regions like northern Georgia and became, as Adam H. Domby argues, something closer to a Somali warlord than a Confederate partisan fighting for his country (p. 154).

Of course, even the troops of the so-called regular armies could intimidate and abuse noncombatants. As Lisa Tendrich Frank argues in her study of the Union army's home front campaigns in Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia in 1864 and 1865, Federal troops increasingly targeted the homes and property of white southern women for theft and destruction. Perhaps they did so because by that time commanders on either side recognized enemy households as the primary sources of supplies and military intelligence that sustained irregular troops in the field, as Matthew C. Hulbert and Andrew Fialka show us. Hulbert applies the concept of "household warfare" to reinterpret the infamous Lawrence Massacre as a series of individual massacres happening independently throughout the Kansas town (p. 265). Fialka applies his groundbreaking "spatiotemporal" methodology to argue persuasively that General Thomas Ewing's infamous General Orders No. 11 successfully eradicated guerrilla resistance in the western Missouri border counties by depriving rebel irregulars of their most vital source of supplies and military intelligence: rebel households (p. 10). [End Page 761]

Aside from their focus on households, Hulbert and Fialka share an emphasis on the purposefulness of irregular warfare that depicts escalating guerrilla violence as the result of deliberate choices by rational actors. Likewise, in his examination of guerrilla violence in Appalachia, Brian D. McKnight describes how guerrilla service appealed to the self-interest of individual partisan fighters, which in most cases became the underlying motive behind their decisions to become guerrillas. In his profile of Unionist guerrilla leader David "Tinker Dave" Beaty in East Tennessee, Aaron Astor uses innovative new tools of social network analysis to demonstrate that the pro-Union irregulars usually fought with Beaty because of kinship, vengeance, and personal protection.

Barton A. Myers and Stephen Rockenbach emphasize how governments contributed to escalating guerrilla violence. Myers describes how Confederate military authorities, who initially supported "partisan ranger" companies, gradually came to view them as a "self-inflicted wound" that caused havoc on the Confederate home front while draining manpower...

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