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  • The Terror of Kentucky:Sue Mundy's Highly Gendered War against Convention
  • Joseph M. Beilein Jr. (bio)

There was something queer about the way the Civil War was playing out in Kentucky, or at least George D. Prentice thought so. On October 11, 1864, the longtime editor of the Louisville Daily Journal published a story that reported on the most peculiar element of Kentucky's decidedly irregular war. Prentice wrote that one of the pro-Confederate guerrillas terrorizing the state was a beautiful young woman named Sue Mundy. According to the article, this woman was "possessed of a comely form," sported the gray uniform of the Confederacy, and went by the name "Lieutenant Flowers"—a fitting and witty sobriquet for a lovely, female bushwhacker. Prentice described her as "a bold rider and a daring leader." Indeed, he told his readers, "She is a dangerous character" to be feared as much, if not more, than any man in the guerrilla ranks. Prentice had painted a picture of the gender-bending, unconventional fighter who was apparently born of the maelstrom of confusion and violence of the guerrilla war, threatening not only the lives of soldiers and noncombatants alike but also taking aim at their very identities as men and women.1

Sue Mundy began as something of a hoax. Both scholars and amateur historians agree that she was the fictional creation of Prentice, [End Page 157] a known satirist and humorist, but his reasons for creating her and keeping her alive in his writing remain unclear. A native of Connecticut, Prentice moved to Louisville in 1830 to establish the Louisville Journal. During the war, he was an avowed Unionist but his sons joined the Confederate army. His son Courtland, in fact, was killed in 1862 at a small engagement in Augusta, Kentucky, while serving under the command of partisan leader John Hunt Morgan. In his well-researched and detailed book Confederate Guerrilla Sue Mundy, Thomas Shelby Watson outlines the possible motivations for Prentice writing this belle bushwhacker into his coverage of the war. It was possible that Prentice wrote about the girl guerrilla in an effort to emasculate Union general Stephen G. Burbridge. He disapproved of Burbridge's handling of the guerrilla war and would have his readers believe that this general and his thousands of soldiers were not man enough to catch a little girl. Another theory held that Prentice created Sue Mundy to humiliate Union colonel Marcellus Mundy whose command was rumored to include several women who, unbeknownst to their commanding officer, had cross-dressed as men to join the ranks. Union officers fighting against guerrillas were apparently so inept, they could not tell a man from a woman. One more theory regarding the creation of "Sue Mundy" was that Prentice was inspired by a woman named "Susan Munday" who had been arrested as a supporter of William Clarke Quantrill's guerrillas in 1863. She was kept in the women's prison in Kansas City, Missouri, with several other women until it collapsed, killing some women and hurting the others. From this reading, Sue Mundy was a ghastly apparition stalking through the night, avenging her fallen sisters by attacking the Union army wherever they targeted women.2

Regardless of Prentice's motivations for creating her, Sue Mundy took on a life of her own. The gendered disorder that Prentice saw in Kentucky's war during the fall of 1864 was not only confirmed but taken a step further when the men who were fighting as guerrillas [End Page 158]


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As editor of the Louisville Daily Journal, George D. Prentice created the legend of Sue Mundy, the girl guerrilla, in 1864. George D. Prentice, Poems of George D. Prentice (Cincinnati, 1880), frontispiece.

embraced Sue Mundy as one of their own. Although she was presumably created to taunt and shame men, after October 1864 certain guerrillas operating in the state proudly proclaimed that they rode with Sue Mundy or rode in "Sue Mundy's Gang." More intriguing still was that multiple guerrillas claimed to be Sue Mundy. One man in particular, Marcellus Jerome Clarke, a native of Simpson County, [End Page 159] Kentucky, came to...

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