The Devil Knows How to Ride: The True Story of William Clarke Quantrill and His Confederate Raiders, and: Bloody Bill Anderson: The Short, Savage Life of a Civil War Guerrilla (review)

BOOK REVIEWS165 places the campaign into the context of all aspects of the war and he explains its significance. He discusses topics as varied as the Confederate bread riots, the Union Committee on the Conduct of the War, Union and Confederate soldier looting, the weather, and the impact of politics on strategy. All these issues had impact on this campaign, and Sutherland demonstrates this fact clearly. In many ways, Sutherland tells a familiar story. Lincoln, frustrated with George McClellan, put Ambrose Burnside in his place. Burnside understood well that the nation's political leaders expected action, and he tried to give it to them at Fredericksburg. The disastrous attack on Marye's Heights was followed by the embarrassing Mud March. The result was a demoralized Union army, then literally resuscitated by the brilliant administrative skills ofJoe Hooker. When Hooker ordered a wide flanking movement against Lee's army and seemed to be on the verge ofa great success, however, Lee split his force and StonewallJackson"crossed Hooker's T." The Confederates won a resounding victory at Chancellorsville. The book is full of interesting insights demonstrating the irony of war. Although Lee clearly won at Chancellorsville, he was upset at his inability to destroy Hooker's army. Although Hooker clearly lost the battle, theArmy ofthe Potomac remained in place opposite the Confederates. More than a few Union officers and men fighting on that side of the Union line away from Jackson's attack believed they had won the battle. After all, they had swept up the same Marye's Heights that they had so disastrously failed to take in the earlier battle. Lee was, indeed, frustrated enough, Sutherland points out, to decide to move north again. Within two months, he experienced horrible defeat on the ridges and in the valleys of Gettysburg. Sutherland has done an excellent job in explaining the tactics of the campaign , and he places it clearly within the overall war effort. His descriptions of the impact of the conflict on white and black non-combatants makes the campaign more understandable, while his exposition of the plundering that soldiers on both sides perpetrated should dispel, yet again, the lingering romantic mists surrounding the Civil War. Sutherland has given the Great Campaigns of the Civil War series an excellent start. John F. Marszalek Mississippi State University The Devil Knows How to Ride: The True Story ofWilliam Clarke Quantrill and His Confederate Raiders. By Edward E. Leslie. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998. Pp. xxii, 534. 17.95.) Bloody BillAnderson: The Short, Savage Life ofa Civil War Guerrilla. ByAlbert Castel andThomas Goodrich. (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1998. Pp. ix, 170. $24.95.) The guerrilla war of 1861-65 is experiencing a renaissance, both in the amount of attention it has received and in the sophisticated analysis it has inspired. We l66CIVIL war history have moved beyond the 1950s and 1960s, when most historians were content to recount the exploits of men like William C. Quantrill and John S. Mosby, to the 1980s and 1990s, when scholars like Don R. Bowen, Phillip Shaw Paludan, Michael Fellman, Stephen V. Ash, Ralph Mann, Kenneth W. Noe, B. Franklin Cooling, and Noel Fisher have sought to measure the military importance and societal impact of the guerrilla war. The two biographies reviewed here tend toward the older brand of history, yet each one also contributes to a broader understanding of guerrilla warfare in its most savage setting, Missouri. Edward E. Leslie has written the most detailed biography available on Quantrill. Originally published in 1996, this "anecdotal history" (xxii) of the notorious guerrilla chieftain's life and times is packed with vivid accounts of butchery and brutality on the western border. Leslie describes every military action engaged in by Quantrill, as well as those associated with his major henchmen , like George Todd and William T. Anderson. Indeed, the book's subtitle is quite accurate in this respect, for Leslie often deserts his main character to pursue the adventures of other raiders or the operations of their Federal opponents. He even devotes a chapter to the postwar careers of the most notable survivors of Quantrill's band, despite the fact that their leader had died in June...