The Civil War Guerrilla: Unfolding the Black Flag in History Memory, and Myth ed. by Joseph M. Beilein Jr. and Matthew C. Hulbert (review)

Guerrillas long stood at the margins of Civil War history, shadowed by the notoriety of their brutal no-quarter tactics. Recent decades, however, have brought greater scholarly attention to this war fought under the “black flag.” Most notably, Michael Fellman’s pathbreaking Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War (1989) and Daniel Sutherland’s A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War (2009) established a more prominent place for irregular fighters within the prevailing narrative of the Civil War. The eight cogently argued essays in The Civil War Guerrilla represent a welcome extension of this development, as they enrich our understanding of the people who fought as guerrillas, the environments in which they lived, and the meanings of irregular violence in late nineteenth-century America.

Many of the collection’s authors explore the complex motivations of guerrillas, challenging Fellman’s characterization of these fighters as sociopathic or nihilistic. In their introduction, editors Joseph Beilein Jr. and Matthew Hulbert contend that the guerrilla was neither a “bloody monster” nor a “merciless, apolitical fiend,” but a self-constituted warrior driven by a constellation of factors (3). Christopher Phillips persuasively shows that collective ideological motives, particularly opposition to emancipation and conscription, explained the explosion of irregular fighting in Kentucky and Missouri after 1862. David Brown and Patrick Doyle’s comparative analysis of the Carolina piedmont also underscores such political dimensions, tracing how tepid secessionism and hostility toward the Confederate state sharpened an “inner civil war” between deserters, guerrillas, and Confederates in North Carolina (80).

Important contributions from Andrew Fialka and Megan Kate Nelson highlight fascinating possibilities for the future of guerrilla studies. Breaking with scholarship that emphasizes the disorganized and unpredictable nature of irregular violence, Fialka uses digital mapping to illuminate the spatial logic of guerrillas who operated in central Missouri. These pro-Confederate fighters, he writes, were opportunists who “mainly operated in locations previously occupied by small outfits of Union troops,” while avoiding places, such as Saint Louis, where the continual presence of Union troops was much stronger (44). Megan Kate Nelson, meanwhile, usefully frames irregular violence within the wider lens of western history and Anglo-Americans’ decades-long war for empire. She argues that the tactics of Native American raiders—ambush, attack, and evade—were not merely a temporary response to the Confederate invasion of the desert Southwest but instead long-standing practices used to thwart the Spanish, Anglos, and rival Native groups.

John Inscoe and Rod Andrew Jr. deconstruct the literature and leg-ends that sprang from the guerrilla war and show that stories rooted in reality took on pointed political meanings. Inscoe analyzes three fictionalized narratives of guerrilla violence, all set in the southern highlands, that emerged during and soon after the Civil War. He describes playwright John Dabney McCabe Jr. and authors John Townsend Trowbridge and Edmund Kirke as highly partisan and suggests their romanticized accounts served as “important forms of patriotic propaganda” for contemporary readers and viewers (147). Evidence that the black flag remained an intelligible political metaphor during Reconstruction can be found in Andrew’s case study on Manse Jolly, an elusive former Confederate who waged a much-mythologized one-man war against occupying U.S. troops near Anderson, South Carolina. Andrew concludes that the legend of Jolly said more about the social and political goals of southern whites than it did about the man himself, as postwar letters from the real Manse Jolly revealed a man, now living in Texas, who was eager to leave behind an outlaw past.

Thoughtful individual pieces from the collection’s editors look beyond 1865 toward the fierce contest over the guerrilla war’s place within public memory. Hulbert examines the remarkable published memoir of Thomas Goodman, the only federal soldier whose...