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American Civil War Guerrillas

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Unconventional Warfare from Antiquity to the Present Day

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Abstract

The irregular conflict that formed part of America’s Civil War (1861–65) became a surprisingly volatile and complex struggle. It also played a crucial role in deciding the outcome of that war. Both the Union and Confederacy used guerrillas, but rebel irregulars eventually proved to be more hindrance than help to their side. Their insistence on independent operations frustrated the Confederate government, and their ruthless attacks on both Union soldiers and pro-Union civilians drew a harsh response from the Federals. As combatants and non-combatants on both sides became trapped in a vicious cycle of retaliation and counter-retaliation, and as some guerrilla bands turned to simple outlawry, Confederate citizens lost faith in their irregular fighters and, not coincidentally, abandoned their nation’s cause.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Albert O. Marshall, Army Life: From a Soldier’s Journal, ed. Robert G. Schultz (1883; Fayetteville, Ark., 2009), 103.

  2. 2.

    Quoted in Virgil Carrington Jones, Gray Ghosts and Rebel Raiders: The Daring Exploits of the Confederate Guerillas (1956; New York, 1998), vii. For fuller historiographical discussions, see Daniel E. Sutherland, ‘Sideshow No Longer: A Historiographical Review of the Guerrilla War’, Civil War History, 46 (2000), 3–23, and Sutherland, ‘Afterword’, in The Guerrilla Hunters: Exploring the Civil War’s Irregular Conflict, eds. Barton A. Myers and Brian D. McKnight (Baton Rouge, La., 2017).

  3. 3.

    Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War (New York, 1989), xviii. Fellman eventually interpreted the Confederate guerrilla war as a species of terrorism in In the Name of God and Country: Reconsidering Terrorism in American History (New Haven, Conn., 2010), 57–96. The most recent work on the guerrilla war, besides the Myers and McKnight volume mentioned above, includes The Civil War Guerrilla: Unfolding the Black Flag in History, Memory, and Myth, ed. Joseph M. Beilein Jr. and Matthew C. Hulbert (Lexington, Kty., 2015), and Hulbert, Irregular Recollections: Civil War and Guerrilla Memory in the Missouri-Kansas Borderlands (Athens, Ga., 2016).

  4. 4.

    A useful survey of early warfare in America is John Morgan Dederer, War in America to 1775: Before Yankee Doodle (New York, 1990).

  5. 5.

    For partisan warfare in the South during the American Revolution, see Anthony James Joes, America and Guerrilla Warfare (Lexington, Kty., 2000), 5–49; Walter Edgar, Partisans and Redcoats: The Southern Conflict That Turned the Tide of the American Revolution (New York, 2001).

  6. 6.

    US War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 128 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1880–1901), ser. 1, vol. 2, 834 (hereafter OR).

  7. 7.

    Carl von Clausewitz, On War, eds. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, N.J., 1976), 6–7, 479. For an excellent recent analysis of Clausewitz’s thinking, see Hew Strachan, Carl von Clausewitz’s ‘On War’: A Biography (London, 2008).

  8. 8.

    National Archives (hereafter NA), Washington, D.C., US War Department Collection of Confederate Records (hereafter CR), Letters Received by Confederate Secretary of War, Record Group 109, letter of McQueen McIntosh to LeRoy Pope Walker, 26 June 1861.

  9. 9.

    Ibid, W. T. Harris to Walker, 9 July 1861.

  10. 10.

    George Fitzhugh, ‘The Times and the War,’ DeBow’s Review, 31 (1861): 2–4.

  11. 11.

    Mary C. Simms Oliphant et al. (eds.), The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, 6 vols. (Columbia, S.C., 1952–82), vol. 4, 364.

  12. 12.

    NA, CR, letter of George W. Gwin to Leroy Pope Walker, 10 May 1861. See also Megan Kate Nelson, ‘Indians Make the Best Guerrillas: Native Americans and the War for the Desert Southwest, 1861–1862,’ in Beilein and Hulbert. eds., The Civil War Guerrilla, 99–122.

  13. 13.

    George T. Maddox, Hard Trials and Tribulations of an Old Confederate Soldier, ed. Richard T. Norton and J. Troy Massey (1897; Springfield, Mo., 1997), 9.

  14. 14.

    T. Lindsay Baker, ed., Confederate Guerrilla: The Civil War Memoir of Joseph Bailey (Fayetteville, Ark. 2007), 39–40.

  15. 15.

    Duke University Libraries (hereafter DU), Durham, North Carolina, William L. Broaddus Papers, letter of William L. Broaddus to wife, 21 July 1861.

  16. 16.

    Missouri Historical Society (hereafter MHS), St. Louis, James Edwin Love Papers, letters of James E. Love to Molly, 9, 20, 23 July 1861.

  17. 17.

    Quoted in Charles J. Esdaile, Fighting Napoleon: Guerrillas, Bandits and Adventurers in Spain, 1808–1814 (New Haven, Conn., 2004), 35.

  18. 18.

    Virginia Historical Society (hereafter VHS), Richmond, Pendleton Family Papers, letter of John B. Pendleton to wife, 7 July 1861. See similar remarks in Ruth C. Carter, ed., For Honor, Glory, and Union: The Mexican and Civil War Letters of Brigadier General William Haines Lytle (Lexington, Kty. 1999), 78–79; West Virginia University Libraries, Charleston, West Virginia Regional History Collection, Roy Bird Cook Collection (No. 858), letter of W. M. McKinney to cousin, 25 July 1861; Charles Richard Williams, ed., Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, 5 vols. (Columbus, Ohio, 1922–26), vol. 2, 64; Evelyn A. Benson, comp., With the Army of West Virginia, 1861–1864: Reminiscences and Letters of Lt. James Abraham (Lancaster, Penn., 1974), 65.

  19. 19.

    William Kauffman Scarborough, ed., The Diary of Edmund Ruffin, 3 vols. (Baton Rouge, La., 1972–89), vol. 2, 109, 157–58.

  20. 20.

    Quoted in Esdaile, Fighting Napoleon, 130–31.

  21. 21.

    OR, ser. 1, vol. 3, 432.

  22. 22.

    MHS, Bates Family Papers (hereafter BFP), letter of Julian Bates to Edward Bates, 15 July 1861.

  23. 23.

    MHS, Hamilton R. Gamble Papers, Edward Bates to Hamilton R. Gamble, 16 July 1861.

  24. 24.

    Daniel E. Sutherland, ‘The Absence of Violence: Confederates and Unionists in Culpeper County, Virginia’, in Sutherland, ed., Guerrillas, Unionists, and Violence on the Confederate Home Front (Fayetteville, Ark., 1999), 75–88. One of the more insistent arguments in support of class divisions is David Williams, Rich Man’s War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley (Athens, Ga., 1998).

  25. 25.

    Mark W, Geiger, Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War, 1861–1865 (New Haven, Conn., 2010).

  26. 26.

    Richard Nelson Current, Lincoln’s Loyalists: Union Soldiers from the Confederacy (Boston, 1992), 133–57; Margaret M. Storey, Loyalty and Loss: Alabama’s Unionists in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Baton Rouge, La., 2004), 37–55; John Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney, The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War (Chapel Hill, N. C., 2000), 86–92.

  27. 27.

    Quoted in Hila Appleton Richardson, ‘Raleigh County, West Virginia, in the Civil War,’ West Virginia History, 10 (1949), 227–29.

  28. 28.

    LeRoy P. Graf et al., eds, The Papers of Andrew Johnson, 16 vols. (Knoxville, Tenn., 1967–2000), vol. 4, 48–49.

  29. 29.

    OR. ser. 1, vol. 15, 519–21.

  30. 30.

    For Missouri, see Clay Mountcastle, Punitive War: Confederate Guerrillas and Union Reprisals (Lawrence, Kan., 2009), 21–40.

  31. 31.

    See, generally, Daniel E. Sutherland, A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerillas in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill, N. C., 2009), 20–25, 57–60. Quoted is MHS, BFP, letter of Barton Bates to Edward Bates, 8 September 1861.

  32. 32.

    Daniel E. Sutherland, ‘Guerrilla Warfare, Democracy, and the Fate of the Confederacy’, Journal of Southern History, 68 (2002), 275–76.

  33. 33.

    Daniel E. Sutherland, American Civil War Guerrillas: Changing the Rules of Warfare (Santa Barbara, Calif., 2013), 50–52, 113–23.

  34. 34.

    Ibid. 52–53. See generally for the development of Lieber’s Code, John Fabian Witt, Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History (New York, 2012).

  35. 35.

    Sutherland, A Savage Conflict, 93–94, 99–101; Esdaile, Fighting Napoleon, 39–40, 160–63; OR, ser. 3, vol. 2, 304.

  36. 36.

    Louisiana State University Libraries, Baton Rouge (hereafter LSU), Ezekiel John and Thomas C. W. Ellis Papers, letters of E. J. Ellis to sister, 29 July 1862; University of North Carolina Libraries, Chapel Hill, Southern Historical Collection, Samuel A. Agnew Diary, 1, 6–7, 9, 12–13, 18, 25–27 August, 11–12, 22, 24, 27–28 September 1862; Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, John J. Pettus Papers – Mississippi Governors’ Papers, letter of Freeman Jones to John J. Pettus, 24 December 1862.

  37. 37.

    University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville, James Wilson Peel Papers, letter of James W. Peel to Lizzie, 21 January 1862.

  38. 38.

    LSU, Thomas O. Moore Papers, letter of A Soldier’s Sister to Thomas O. Moore, 9 August 1862.

  39. 39.

    OR, ser. 1, vol. 33, 1081–82.

  40. 40.

    David Williams et al., Plain Folk in a Rich Man’s War: Class and Dissent in Confederate Georgia (Gainesville, Fla., 2002), 164, 168–74.

  41. 41.

    Editors, ‘A Warrensburg Family during the Civil War’, Missouri Historical Review 38 (1944): 452–53.

  42. 42.

    Antoine Henri de Jomini, The Art of War, trans. G. H. Mendell and W. P. Craighill (Philadelphia, 1862), 29.

  43. 43.

    Clausewitz, On War, 482–83.

  44. 44.

    OR, ser. 1, vol. 39, pt. 3, 357–58, 378.

  45. 45.

    Quoted in Lisa M. Brady, War Upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War (Athens, Ga., 2012), 107.

  46. 46.

    Philip H. Sheridan, The Personal Memoirs of Philip H. Sheridan (New York, 1888), 266.

  47. 47.

    Quoted in Jeffry D. Wert, Mosby’s Rangers (New York, 1990), 262.

  48. 48.

    Sheridan, Personal Memoirs, 265–67.

  49. 49.

    OR, ser. 1, vol. 39, pt. 2, 480, 503.

  50. 50.

    OR, vol. 17, pt. 1, 39–40.

  51. 51.

    Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, Robert R. Kellogg Papers, letters of Sarah Bevens Kellogg to Sister Eva, 29 February 1864, 4 April 1864.

  52. 52.

    Quoted in Malcolm C. McMillan, ed., The Alabama Confederate Reader (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1963), 439.

  53. 53.

    DU, Charles S. Brown Papers, letter of Charles S. Brown to Etta, 26 April 1865.

  54. 54.

    OR, ser. 2, vol. 8, 325.

  55. 55.

    VHS, Meade Family Papers, letter of Edmund Fontaine to Richard H. Meade, 23 April 1865.

  56. 56.

    Daniel E. Sutherland, ‘Memories of a Rooted Sorrow: The Legacy of the Guerrilla War,’ Civil War History 62 (2016), 8–35; Cole Younger, The Story of Cole Younger By Himself (1903; Houston, Tx., 1955), 56.

  57. 57.

    Quoted in Sutherland, ‘Memories of a Rooted Sorrow’, 30.

  58. 58.

    Quoted in Gary Sheffield, ‘On Five Fronts’, Times Literary Supplement, No. 5832, 9 January 2015, 8.

  59. 59.

    William B. Feis, ‘Jefferson Davis and the “Guerrilla Option:” A Reexamination’, in The Collapse of the Confederacy, eds. Mark Grimsley and Brooks D. Simpson (Lincoln, Neb., 2001), 104–28; OR, ser. 1, vol. 47, pt. 3, 823–24.

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  1. University of Arkansas, Arkansas, US

    Daniel E. Sutherland

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Correspondence to Daniel E. Sutherland .

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  1. University of Exeter , Penryn, United Kingdom

    Brian Hughes

  2. Trinity College Dublin , Dublin, Ireland

    Fergus Robson

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Sutherland, D.E. (2017). American Civil War Guerrillas. In: Hughes, B., Robson, F. (eds) Unconventional Warfare from Antiquity to the Present Day. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49526-2_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49526-2_6

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