The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West by Matthew Christopher Hulbert (review)

This informative and thoughtful book demonstrates that Civil War remembrance continues to offer promising themes for fresh research. Matthew Christopher Hulbert does not propose to survey the entire field of guerrilla memory. He sensibly focuses on the bushwhackers and Jayhawkers of Missouri and Kansas, from which emerged the gory legends of William C. Quantrill, "Bloody Bill" Anderson, and Jesse James, as well as a classic semiautobiographical reflection on the war, Mark Twain's "Private History of a Campaign That Failed." Hulbert examines several memoirs as records of individual trauma, which in Twain's narrative took the form of responsibility for murder and in many other cases took the form of horrific suffering. Mostly, however, Hulbert emphasizes the ways in which remembrance and forgetting of guerrilla warfare reinforced changing social values. Much as the book version of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War excluded Twain's humorous recollection of the Marion Rangers and his swift decision to skip the war, The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory shows that new norms of martial commemoration modified the partisan saga and eventually moved its setting from the Civil War to the wild West.

Hulbert identifies outstanding landmarks for each phase of this development. The early postwar publications that culminated in John Newman Edwards's Noted Guerrillas, or, the Warfare of the Border (1877) did not hesitate to describe bushwhackers as superior to regulars or Confederate officials. That emphasis shifted as veterans and their allies successfully promoted the soldier as a model of citizenship. Hulbert traces the realignment most thoroughly in the adoption of Lost Cause tropes and organizational patterns, such as celebration of faithful slaves, effective working relations with women's organizations, and reunions that brought former guerrillas together with former regulars, but he notes that Jayhawker remembrance of James Lane followed a similar trajectory. The apotheosis of the common soldier opened bushwhackers to vigorous criticisms like William Elsey Connelley's Quantrill and the Border Wars (1909), the reunion of Lawrence massacre survivors at the semicentennial anniversary in 1913, and Minnie E. Blake's The Quantrill Raid (1929). Meanwhile, remembrance of Jesse James after his death in 1882 opened a new western prospect for guerrilla memory. Hulbert creatively shows how the legend of Jesse James intertwined with the legend of Billy the Kid and inspired dime novels like The Jesse James Stories, a series begun by Street and Smith in 1901 that invented adventures in Texas, Arizona, and Nevada. Jesse's brother contributed to this rebranding through the 1903 formation of the Cole Younger and Frank James Wild West Company, which the former Missouri bushwhackers modeled on "Buffalo Bill" Cody's traveling shows. After an early film that starred Jesse James's son, Hollywood consistently contrasted depraved guerrillas with upright soldiers and pushed bushwhackers toward the cowboy genre in several movies from World War II to the mid-1960s. When Vietnam called into question the moral distinction between guerrillas and regulars, bushwhackers became the subject of sympathetically ambivalent films like The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and Ride with the Devil (1999).

Hulbert recognizes the guerrilla theater as not merely a neglected aspect of the Civil War but as a fundamental challenge to the conceptual framework the war bequeathed in matters like the meaning of home. His closing ramble across commemorative sites is less a conclusion for this book, which scarcely mentions the development of the memorial landscape until the epilogue, than a prospectus for another study. Scholars will find similarly fertile suggestions at many points in this useful monograph.