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  • A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War
  • Gregory J. W. Urwin
A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War. By Daniel E. Sutherland. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Pp. 456. Cloth $35.00.)

The number of books published on Civil War military operations remains prodigious. Most of them delineate major campaigns and pitched battles and collectively cast this conflict as an Americanized version of Napoleonic warfare. These works also perpetuate the naïve belief that victory is simply something that skillfully led armies secure on the battlefield. That flawed paradigm not only distorts the true nature of the Civil War, but it has caused later generations of American policy makers and soldiers to misunderstand and mishandle several crucial conflicts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War, Daniel E. Sutherland, a professor of history at the University of Arkansas, offers a broader and more mature view of the bloody contest the preserved the Union and destroyed the Confederacy. He decries that those who study the Civil War tend to consider it "a clash of mighty armies," and dismiss the [End Page 80] role played by guerrillas as a mere "sideshow" (ix). Such interpretations miss one of the war's most pervasive and important dimensions.

The Union armies that advanced into the rebellious South faced both a conventional war and a widespread and particularly vicious popular insurgency. Confederates had grown up believing that their ancestors had won the American Revolution by whittling down George III's red-coated regiments with partisan tactics. Reared to admire the likes of Francis "Swamp Fox" Marion, it was only natural that many southern boys spurned traditional army discipline and the prospect of meeting the enemy on open ground in closely packed battle lines. They preferred the loosely ordered, rough-and-tumble life of the irregular, which prized surprise over self-sacrificing tenacity and allowed them to strike at times and places of their own choosing.

In a richly detailed narrative laced with cogent analysis, Sutherland traces the spontaneous rise of guerrilla bands in those parts of the South initially threatened by Union forces and the spread of this form of resistance to nearly every corner of the Confederacy. Sutherland argues that guerrillas were devoted primarily to home defense. Outraged by the threat that invading Federals posed to their society, property, and loved ones, Rebel irregulars frequently made good on their promise to chastise the foe with "savage retaliation" and Indian-style combat. Union troops soon grew tired of this terrorism, and they adopted escalating policies of counterterrorism that came to include house burnings and summary executions.

Although irregular warfare dramatically hiked the price the Union army had to pay to hold and pacify Confederate territory, guerrillas eventually became a plague on their own people. The incessant raids, ambushes, assassinations, and sabotage intensified the animosities and violence that accompanied the Civil War, creating a chaotic atmosphere that permitted gangs of ordinary outlaws, deserters from Rebel armies, and white southern unionists to prey on the Confederate populace. In addition to these scourges, the reprisals Union troops meted out for guerrilla attacks undermined civilian support for irregular outfits and the cause they served. The means of defense that white southerners had embraced with such fervor in 1861 actually hastened their descent into war weariness and left them ready to embrace defeat by 1865.

Sutherland has devoted nearly two decades of his career to researching the Civil War's guerrillas, and he has acquired a mastery of the subject that shows on every page of this well-researched and elegantly written book. He clearly demonstrates that guerrilla tactics exacerbated the war's darker tendencies [End Page 81] and increased its bloodletting. While guerrillas may have prolonged the Confederacy's existence, they also pushed Union forces into adopting more effective strategies and occupation policies. Irregular warfare also weakened the Confederacy by eating away at its people's morale and unity. For spelling out these lessons and painting a harrowing portrait of the Civil War that speaks to Americans enlightened by the...

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