Guerrillas in the Archive: Kentucky's Irregular War through the Governor's Eyes

The Civil War was no stranger to atrocity. Americans remain disgusted over the Confederate massacre of African American soldiers at Fort Pillow, General William Tecumseh Sherman's scorched-earth policy in Georgia and South Carolina, and the horrific images of starved prisoners of war at Andersonville prison. The war's worst atrocities arguably came at the hands of guerrillas. For instance, "Bloody Bill" Anderson's guerrilla band ambushed 150 Union troops on September 27, 1864, in Centralia, Missouri, and the guerrillas' treatment of their dead enemies "became a scene of murder and outrage at which the heart sickens. Most of them were beaten over the head, seventeen of them were scalped, and one man had his privates cut off and placed in his mouth. Every man was shot in the head. One man had his nose cut off."¹ Citing such violence, past scholars deemed irregular warfare—and therefore irregular fighters—as essentially anarchic, a microcosm and intensification of war's worst qualities. A major problem with this interpretation is that it implies that regular warfare alone embodied war's best qualities—valor, duty, and sacrifice among them. My assessment of irregular war renders this dichotomy problematic.² Guerrillas acted savagely, yes. But randomly, or out of some bestial desire to kill for killing's sake? Not necessarily. War is hell, and General Sherman's somber assessment reached every facet of the Civil War: regulars, irregulars, the battlefield, the homefront, flanking maneuvers, ambushes, artillery bombardments, and the Union's antiguerrilla policies. For some scholars to isolate war from its unexceptional and inhumane qualities by forcing only guerrillas to bear the grimmest burdens of war's hell is to distract us from a truer understanding of war's nature. Wars with just ends—abolishing slavery, for example—may still come at a terrible price: unjust means to meet those ends. Killing to end slavery still violates the seventh Commandment—thou shalt not kill. Or maybe God justified this killing, as President Abraham Lincoln mused in his second inaugural address:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."³

All types of war contained unjust elements and our conception of irregular violence should tack closer to regular violence despite the debate over what was worse, "to lose twenty thousand [regular soldiers'] lives on a predetermined field under a national flag [or] … for a band of guerrillas to kill a teenager and burn down a house."⁴ Guerrillas were cruel, yet calculated; they were brutal, yet they operated with clear ideological underpinnings. Real differences exist between regular and irregular warfare, but that does not mean we should ignore their similarities.

My tenure with the National Park Service at the Fredericksburg National Military Park in Virginia first planted the seed of doubt in my acceptance of some guerrilla historians' description of irregular violence. Park rangers (along with historians and military theorists) use maps to see order in the chaos of conventional battle. I wondered if the same logic applied to Missouri's unconventional theater would yield similar results. Consequently, I conducted a spatiotemporal analysis—digital maps built in ArcGIS—of Civil War Missouri's guerrilla war, wielding automated methods to encompass the irregular war's vast size and scope.⁵ The findings reflected what we see when we take a spatial approach to conventional battles: guerrilla warfare had an order to it. While guerrillas' colt revolvers, mounted raids, and selective barbarity embodied irregularity, their targets and strategy did not; guerrilla violence wreaked havoc in the wake of temporary Union occupational locations and along a particular network of Rebel households. In response, the...