Punitive War: Confederate Guerrillas and Union Reprisals

Clay Mountcastle focuses on the Union army reaction to Confederate guerrillas and develops the thesis that guerrilla warfare forced soldiers and their commanders to adopt hard war against Confederate civilians. Union soldiers, he writes, were driven to desperation by guerrilla attacks and retaliated with more summary executions and house burnings than scholars have heretofore recognized. This punitive war contributed to the Union victory because it convinced Robert E. Lee and the southern people to surrender. Traditionally, historians have regarded the Confederate guerrilla war as a sideshow that had no significant impact on the outcome of the war. But Mountcastle's book supports an outpour of recent studies that have presented the interpretation that the Confederate guerrillas changed the nature of the war.

One of the first books to describe the Union's change in policy from conciliation to punishment was Stephen V. Ash's When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861–1865 (1995). Benjamin Franklin Cooling, in Fort Donelson's Legacy: War and Society in Kentucky and Tennessee, 1862–1863 (1997), demonstrates that Confederate raider John Hunt Morgan and other guerrillas inspired by his example caused Union commanders to retaliate against civilians with harsh measures that approached total war. The guerrillas caused Ulysses S. Grant and other Union officers to shift from conciliation to the goal of totally subjugating southern civilians, Cooling writes.

Mountcastle's book complements Daniel E. Sutherland's pathbreaking A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War (2009), the first book to study the entire scope of guerrilla warfare in the Civil War and analyze its impact on southern civilians and military strategy on both sides. Sutherland points out Confederate guerrillas' great power and potential starting early in the war. In Kentucky and Tennessee, Morgan raided behind enemy lines, sinking a steamboat in Union-occupied Nashville, capturing a train in Cave City, Kentucky, and making headlines in the newspapers. Morgan became famous as the "Francis Marion of the War." The surge in guerrilla attacks by fall 1862 had caused the Union army on the border to terminate the policy of conciliation to civilians and was eventually pervasive. However, Confederate leaders failed to control the guerrilla movement; it spun out of control, leading to local retaliation and a breakdown of law and order. Southern morale declined and people blamed their state and central government for not protecting them. While Sutherland discusses the Union shift to hard war, he emphasizes the Confederate irregulars and how they contributed to Confederate defeat.

Mountcastle's major contribution is in calling attention to examples of harsh retaliation that have heretofore almost been ignored, including several that developed spontaneously among the men in the ranks. When bushwhackers fired on Union soldiers in Keetsville, Missouri, the men retaliated by burning nearly every home in the area. An Iowa infantry man wrote in his diary that the burning was justified because the people had "harbored rebels who practiced their murderous warfare" (37). Mountcastle comes to the same conclusion as Sutherland and other scholars. But with new evidence based on primary research, he reveals new and valuable details on the Union army's frustration with the guerrillas, how soldiers abandoned conciliation and adopted punitive war.

Both Sutherland and Mountcastle suggest that further research in this fertile area will probably reveal additional examples of punitive warfare. The study of who the Confederate guerrillas were and what motivated them has barely begun, and several questions about the guerrilla warfare in Kentucky and other states remain unexplored. Neither book mentions the proposed burning raid against Confederate partisan ranger John Singleton Mosby organized by Winfield S. Hancock at the end of the war. Hancock prepared a punitive raid against Mosby's civilian supporters to begin on the morning of April 15, 1865. His raiders were under orders to lay waste to "Mosby's Confederacy" in Loudoun and Fauquier Counties, Virginia, burning the homes of Mosby's supporters, confiscating all livestock, and arresting all able-bodied men. At 1:00 a.m. that day, Hancock received word of Abraham Lincoln's assassination and canceled the raid. Mountcastle's valuable, well-organized, and well-written book strengthens the revision under way that guerrilla warfare contributed vitally to Union victory in the Civil War.