The Uncivil War: Irregular Warfare in the Upper South, 1861-1865 (review)

In recent years many military writers have branched out from traditional battle studies featuring highly detailed (indeed, sometimes mind-numbing) tactical minutiae to explore important, if lesser-known, facets of the American Civil War. Such is the work under review here.

Robert Mackey offers us a general study of "irregular warfare in the Upper South," by which he means Arkansas, Virginia, and the Kentucky-Tennessee area. He begins with a survey of nineteenth-century military thought about irregular warfare and its legal status and follows it with a brief survey of how that warfare has been portrayed in Civil War literature. He then presents sections describing each type of irregular warfare waged by the Confederates, the conditions conducive to its success, and—especially important—the Federal response to each Rebel effort.

The Confederates, Mackey writes, employed three types of unconventional warfare: guerrilla warfare (small, self-constituted bands with no real ties to conventional forces), partisan warfare (small, elite units, parts of a uniformed conventional army, assigned unconventional roles), and raiders (conventional units temporarily assigned an unconventional role such as a raid behind enemy lines).

Many people—then and now—have misused these terms, labeled all such activities "guerrilla warfare," and thus confused and misunderstood the various phases and types of irregular warfare and the Union response to each.

Mackey's case study of guerrilla warfare focuses on Arkansas and the small bands called out there in 1862 to operate independently against the invading Yankees. The section on partisan warfare is devoted to John S. Mosby and his rangers who operated in northern Virginia under the Rebels' Partisan Ranger Act and in conjunction with the Army of Northern Virginia. John Hunt Morgan and Nathan Bedford Forrest represent the raiding warfare of 1862-63. In all three cases, Mackey shows, Federal officers were eventually able to develop methods that defeated the Confederates' efforts. Such methods included patrols, counter-raiding expeditions, retributive burning, blockhouses, the use of naval vessels where appropriate, and so on. For the Yankees, the key was to use the method(s) that worked against each type of conventional warfare. What succeeded against guerrillas, for example, would be of little use (could, indeed, be counter-productive) against partisans or raiders. Once the Federals developed and implemented appropriate responses to each type of irregular warfare, they were able to win the unconventional conflict just as they won the conventional war.

Mackey's writing sometimes veers toward stilted, military staff prose (he is, after all, an army officer working in the Pentagon), and the text and notes contain numerous and annoying, if unimportant, errors. The book, however, is full of provocative ideas that students of the Civil War's military campaigns should ponder. What, for example, do Mackey's conclusions about the failure of irregular (raiding) warfare in Tennessee and Kentucky in 1862 and 1863 imply for the great Confederate debate in 1864 about using Rebel cavalry to attack the railroads that supplied the Yankees in the Atlanta Campaign?