Guerrilla warfare, democracy, and the fate of the confederacy.

ONE OF THE MOST ENDURING EXPLANATIONS FOR WHY THE CONFEDERACY lost the Civil War asserts that the Rebels were too democratic. First proposed by David H. Donald as a variation on a theme by Frank L. Owsley, it has survived, with some modification by recent scholars, as a viable part of most multicausal explanations of Confederate defeat. To date, the argument has rested largely on the supposed political blunders of the central government, in its indelicate handling of issues that infringed on personal liberties or that injured the sensibilities of powerful state politicians, to demonstrate the disruptive effect of Confederate individualism. Occasional references are also made to problems caused by the independent spirit of the Confederate soldier, but these discussions tend to convey a greater sense of pride or respect for this quality than rebuke. Little has been said about how military policy might have been influenced by an underlying tension in Confederate society between democracy and authority, between individualism and discipline, or between popular conceptions of the war and the government's conduct of the war. Conscription, probably the most divisive issue involving individual fights, cut across both social and military lines, but another pivotal military issue eclipsed even conscription: guerrilla warfare. Indeed, guerrilla warfare sparked sharp policy debates in both North and South that affected the outcome of the war in no small way. (1)

Large numbers of common folk assumed from the earliest days of the Confederacy that guerrillas would be an important component of their nation's military force. This is not to say they underestimated the role to be played by conventional soldiers, for even the least militarily knowledgeable Rebels sensed that independence could not be won by fighting an exclusively irregular contest. Rather, they believed that guerrillas could help win the war, and many men wished to contribute to Confederate victory in that way. They saw guerrilla warfare as a freewheeling, unfettered, grassroots style of fighting that suited southern tendencies toward individualism and localism. Like the Europeans who had associated the guerrilla style with "natural man" since the eighteenth century, Rebel advocates also thought of it as "natural," almost primordial. For Confederates, guerrilla warfare was not democratic: in any political sense, in that it was not based on philosophical musings about republican values, but it exemplified democracy in a social, Tocquevillian sense, whereby equality and individual action formed the impetus for a "people's war". (2)

Yet, for two reasons this popular enthusiasm for a democratic uprising ran amok almost from the start. First, the original guerrilla war produced a pair of nasty mutations--community vigilantism and outright outlawry--that made Rebel noncombatants the victims, rather than the beneficiaries, of this people's contest. Earlier advocates be came disillusioned when the guerrilla struggle, feeding off its own excesses, began to hurt those it was supposed to defend more than it helped them. Second, Confederate political and military leaders, tied to traditional, hierarchical forms of social and military organization, were suspicious of the guerrilla war's grassroots origins and feared the consequences of such an unregulated mode of fighting. In a sense, the transformation of the original guerrilla war from a useful means of local defense and voluntarism into a rapacious free-for-all justified their doubts and fears, but Confederate leaders added to the chaos by first underestimating and then failing to harness its passionate energy. (3)

None of this is to suggest, as have some historians, that the Confederacy fell because it failed to mount a more vigorous guerrilla contest. Yet the opposite position--that the guerrilla struggle was a mere "sideshow" that had little bearing on the outcome of the war--also misses the point. Scholars only began to appreciate the extensive social and political implications of the Confederacy's guerrilla war in the 1980s. Since then, they have presented increasingly sophisticated appraisals of the structure, organization, composition, and motivation of guerrilla bands, the roles of southern civilians in the irregular war, and the impact of guerrilla warfare on communities. The guerrilla war has emerged as a war unto itself, a war with its own rules, its own chronology, its own turning points, and its own heroes, villains, and victims. At the same time, it also formed part of the wider war. It influenced the strategy and logistics of conventional campaigns, the political culture, the morale of soldiers and civilians, the southern economy, and ultimately, the very nature of the conflict. Insofar as it evolved in unexpected ways and lurched out of the control of leaders and civilians alike, the guerrilla war weakened the Confederacy and became an important factor in Confederate defeat. (4)

The guerrilla war began almost spontaneously, as befits a people's war. The guns in Charleston harbor had scarcely cooled before Rebels from the Atlantic coast volunteered to lead "guerrilla," "partisan," "ranger," and "independent" companies against the enemy. One Rebel urged Confederate secretary of war Leroy Pope Walker to authorize "a guerrilla service" in western Virginia, where several bands of irregulars had already formed. "I am deeply interested not only in defeating the enemy," this man emphasized, "but in whipping him by any and all means and as speedily as possible." A Louisianian explained the advantages of posting "a regiment of mounted men, on the guerrilla order," in the southern parishes of his state. "I can get the sturdy men of our State, besides 100 or 200 Indians," he declared. An Alabamian asked Walker's permission to raise a company that would wage war "without restraint and under no orders." He reasoned, "We have a desperate enemy to contend with, and if necessary must resort to desperate means." Governors got the message, too. A Tennessean urged Isham G. Harris to wage a "guerrilla war" by flooding the countryside "with armed men to repel the enemy at every point." A "more deadly and destructive antagonism," he stressed, "could not be raised to repel the invaders." (5)

Even in the farthest reaches of the country, areas too often ignored by Civil War historians, Rebels prepared for a guerrilla conflict. In Colorado Territory, irregulars hatched plans during the summer of 1861 to stockpile weapons and launch raids against vulnerable minting establishments and ranches--gold and horses being of nearly equal value to the new Confederate nation. As the war progressed, these westerners attacked Union mail trains and expanded their activities into New Mexico. In California, Unionists begged U.S. secretary of war Simon Cameron for help in August 1861. Rebels--desperate men who were "never without arms"--controlled the state government, the petitioners wailed. The ruffians devoted all their energy to "plotting, scheming, and organizing," insisted the loyal citizens, and it would not be long before "[t]he frightful scenes ... transpiring in Missouri would be rivaled by the atrocities enacted upon the Pacific Coast." (6)

Everyone knew about Missouri, where the most bitter of all guerrilla contests had already broken out. In fact, the instinctive way in which Missourians and other westerners grabbed their muskets and squirrel rifles helps to explain the popularity of the guerrilla war. Some people saw this irregular activity as a brand of western warfare that grew from the region's frontier heritage. Many westerners, even in 1860, still lived beyond the effective rule of courts and legislatures. They had grown accustomed to settling their own feuds, and they were not squeamish about resorting to vigilante justice. Much has been written about the tendency of southerners generally toward violence, but southerners on the frontier--especially unmarried young men inhabited a world that exacerbated their aggressive tendencies. The Missouri-Kansas border war of the 1850s represented just one of the many "Wars of Incorporation"--including land wars, Indian wars, and open brigandage--waged west of the Mississippi River during the antebellum years. Indeed, this was one region where northern settlers, as demonstrated by the jayhawkers of Kansas, matched southern predilections for guerrilla fighting. (7)

Yet this spontaneous eruption of irregular warfare was not limited to the West. People all along the North-South border, in Kentucky, Tennessee, Maryland, and Virginia, embraced it. These states, like those beyond the Mississippi, had been up for grabs politically during the secession crisis. Virginia and Tennessee had been among the last states to join the Confederacy, while Kentucky and Maryland never did enter the fold. The border region thus came to represent a different sort of "frontier," unmistakably associated with the idea of guerrilla war in the eyes of new Confederates. Here is where they would have to rally and turn back the invading Federals: even guerrilla bands from the Deep South volunteered "for border service" during the spring and summer of 1861. A South Carolinian, for example, raised a hundred men "to be employed on the border" as "destructive warriors," and similar offers came from Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi. (8)

Most wars begin without the opposing sides knowing what to expect. Neither citizens nor even the soldiers can fully anticipate how a contest will be fought or what their roles will be. As a result, the spontaneous, sometimes desperate border clashes in the early months of hostilities quickly defined for most southerners the nature of the struggle. Journalist Murat Halstead reported from Baltimore, "Occurrences so suggestive of assassins behind the bushes, gives a smack of the excitement of real war.... "Another citizen confirmed the determination of Marylanders to strike at the Yankees by whatever means possible. "As soon as they begin the retreat through Maryland the people will rise upon them," he pledged. In Missouri Thomas C. Reynolds, the pro-Confederate lieutenant governor, informed Jefferson Davis that he and other "Southern men" vowed to throw Missouri "into a general revolution" and oppose the Federals in "a guerilla war," until sufficient numbers of Confederate troops reached the state. (9)

As Union armies pushed the border farther south, threatening communities and citizens with immediate violence, more Confederate citizens resisted. Edmund Ruffin, the quintessential Rebel, who legend says fired the first shot of the war at Fort Sumter, wrote from Virginia in late June 1861, "Guerrilla fighting has begun, & with great effect, near Alexandria & also near Hampton. Some of our people, acting alone, or in small parties, & at their own discretion, have crept upon & shot many of the sentinels & scouts. It is only necessary for the people generally to resort to these means to overcome any invading army, even if we were greatly inferior to it in regular military force." (l0)

When Federal troops menaced the coast of his beloved South Carolina, the novelist and poet William Gilmore Simms recommended that the army assign ten men from each company to guerrilla operations. "[H]ave them ... painted and disguised as Indians," Simms urged the local Confederate commander, and arm them with "rifle, bowie knife & hatchet." Plenty of men in the army, he assumed, were familiar with Indian warfare. "If there be any thing which will inspire terror in the souls of the citizen soldiery of the North," reasoned the poet-strategist, "it will be the idea that scalps are to be taken by the redmen." The fifty-five-year-old Simms, too old and sedentary to embark on active service himself, nonetheless urged all Confederates to join the fray in some fashion. "Every body is drilling and arming," he observed with satisfaction on July 4, 1861. "Even I practise with the Colt. I am a dead shot with rifle & double barrel.... Our women practise, & they will fight, too, like she wolves." (11)

The widespread excitement had become palpable by that first summer of the war. "All persons that feel inclined to go into guerrilla or independent service," declared an Arkansas newspaper in July 1861, "will rendezvous at Little Rock." Volunteers should be prepared for immediate action, with "a good horse, a good double-barrel shot gun, and as well supplied with small arms as possible." That same month, recruitment posters went up in Hanover County, Virginia, for the Virginia and North Carolina Irrepressibles. "We are to WEAR CITIZENS' CLOTHES and to use such arms as we can furnish ourselves," promised the notice, "to serve during the war ... without pay." De Bow's Review predicted that, in addition to its magnificent armies, the Confederacy must be prepared "on proper opportunities to pursue that desultory partisan method of warfare before which invading armies gradually melt away." Indeed, De Bow's insisted that should the war prove to be a long one, with the enemy gaining ground in the South's interior, the nation's "chief reliance must be on irregular troops and partisan warfare." (12)

American history also shaped thinking about the type of war to expect. Southerners justified secession in 1860 by insisting that northerners had abandoned the governing principles forged in the American Revolution and the spirit of government defined in the U.S. Constitution. Similarly, the secession movement and the creation of a Rebel government inspired comparisons between the Confederate straggle for independence and the war waged by England's American colonies some fourscore years earlier. Confederate editorialists, orators, and pamphleteers used this theme time and again to rally the populace. "Who can resist a whole people, thoroughly aroused, brave to rashness, fighting for their existence?" asked a Virginian. "This revolution is not the work of leaders or politicians," elaborated a Tennessean. "It is the spontaneous uprising and upheaving of the people. It is as irresistible as the mighty tide of the ocean...." (13)

For many Rebels the Revolutionary heritage of a "People's War," as they were calling the current conflict by October 1861, included guerrilla fighting. Southerners, like most mid-nineteenth-century Americans, believed that their ancestors had defeated Great Britain not with the well-drilled, well-disciplined Continental army, but with the ragtag, defiant militia that operated in critical situations as irregulars. Although modern historians have shown that this was not the case, ardent Rebels had their own version of the past. "The scenes attendant upon the retreat of the British army from Concord and Lexington in the days of the Revolution should be reenacted to the last degree," insisted one Confederate. "Every man, woman, and child should rise in arms along the line of the retreating foe, and enforce by terrible illustration the lesson to the frightened outlaws how fearful the vengeance of a people armed in the holy cause of liberty...." (14)

American colonists had fought as "partizans"--the common name for guerrillas in the eighteenth century--in every theater of their war for independence but nowhere with more success or deadly effect than in the South. The exploits of Francis Marion, Thomas Sumter, Daniel Morgan, and Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee had become legendary by 1860. Both Yankees and Confederates saw themselves as the heirs of Revolutionary "minutemen," a tradition that most often played itself out, as it had during the War for Independence, with amateur soldiers forming conventional armies. As the South braced for an invasion by vastly superior numbers--again, just as in 1776--the intangible association of amateur minutemen with partisan resistance had a particularly dramatic impact on Confederate assumptions about how to fight. (15)

The spirit of those Revolutionary partisans entered southern mythology and shaped the region's consciousness, especially through the work of nineteenth-century authors, poets, and playwrights. Simms, the "representative writer" of the Old South, published both a biography of Francis Marion the "Swamp Fox" and a series of historical romances in the 1830s and 1840s that celebrated the South's partisan war. Lesser known works, like Mary Moragne's British Partizan, had a similar theme. When Nathaniel Beverley Tucker published The Partisan Leader: A Tale of the Future, a novel that predicted the creation of a southern confederacy, he selected a Virginia guerrilla chief as the story's hero. So striking was Tucker's apparent power of prophecy that his novel, originally published in 1836, was reprinted in both New York and Richmond after the war started. Poets, like Simms, Henry Timrod, and S. Teackle Wallis, paid tribute in verse to Confederate guerrillas and partisans during the war, and the first original Confederate drama performed on the Richmond stage was The Guerrillas, by James Dabney McCabe Jr. (16)

Many Confederates embraced their inheritance. "Would that the days of Sumter and Marion were come again!" exclaimed an anxious Georgian. Southerners proclaimed Meriwether Jeff Thompson, the earliest Missouri guerrilla leader to gain prominence, "the Marion of this Revolution." Later in the war a Confederate woman christened the dashing John Hunt Morgan, who would lead a series of raids through Kentucky and the Middle West, "our second Marion." A Louisiana guerrilla wished to serve the Confederacy "as Francis Marion did in the days of the revolution," and other would-be partisans christened their bands "Marion Men" and "Swamp Fox Rangers." It is likely that South Carolina-born Captain John W. Pearson, who led a band of guerrillas in the vicinity of Tampa, Florida, had been raised on the legends of Marion and Sumter, although he also witnessed a very practical application of irregular tactics when fighting against the Seminoles in the 1830s. (17)

Parts of the South more newly settled than the original coastal colonies called on more recent but no less powerful traditions. The Texas legislature passed a "Minute Men Law" just days after the state seceded, but military leaders also summoned recruits by exploiting images from their own revolution of the 1830s. "Remember the days of yore," came a typical appeal, "when your own red right hands achieved your independence." Texans must fight once again "to keep [their] soil free from the enemy's touch.... Let every man, then, clean his old musket, shot-gun, or rifle, run his bullets, fill his powder-horn, sharpen his knife, and see that his revolver is ready to his hand, as in the trying but glorious days when Mexico was [his] foe." The Texas Ranger tradition also gained wide appeal across the South. The exploits of a band known as the "Red Rangers" in Kentucky caused a Louisville newspaper to hail its captain as "another Ben McCulloch," a well-known Texas Ranger who had already applied "the partisan mode of warfare" to the Trans-Mississippi. Other Texans, like Benjamin F. Terry, volunteered to raise guerrilla units or offered companies to serve as "irregular cavalry on the northern border from Cairo [Illinois] to [the] mouth of the Potomac." In Louisiana people found inspiration in the War of 1812 (the Second American Revolution), when Andrew Jackson's backwoodsmen had leveled "the veterans of the British army on the plains of Chalmette." (18)

Guerrilla service also appealed to Confederates in several ways at a very personal level. Most important, it permitted the sort of "self-organized combat," as one historian has called it, favored by many southerners. Rebel irregulars detested the conventional, or paper, army with its discipline, rules, and regulations. "That kind of warfare did not suit me," explained an Arkansan in justifying his desertion from the volunteer forces to enter guerrilla service. "I wanted to get out where I could have it more lively; where I could fight if I wanted to, or run if I so desired; I wanted to be my own general." He and his friends were fighters, not soldiers, and they acknowledged no formalities of war or restrictions on how, when, or where they might strike the enemy. Another Confederate found the guerrilla style of warfare exhilarating. "It is very exciting to be in the enemy's country not knowing what moment we will be attacked," he cavalierly informed his worded wife. "When we camp, we hunt for a swamp and then move before day." (19)

The independence of irregular service also allowed men to fight where it most mattered to them, near their homes. Although President Davis pledged himself publicly to local defense, preservation of territory, and maintenance of the geographical integrity of the Confederacy, the government could not possibly provide the blanket of security implied by his rhetoric. Consequently, thousands of Rebels had either to flee their homes or live under Union occupation. Rebel soldiers serving in places distant from their own troubled neighborhoods became convinced that they could not rely on the government to protect their families while they were away; if they deserted official service, they could defend hearth and home by organizing local guerrilla bands. This line of reasoning gained credence as more communities fell prey to invading armies and enemy marauders. The governor of Arkansas saw fit to remind Jefferson Davis, "[S]oldiers do not enter the service to maintain the Southern Confederacy alone but also to protect their property and defend their homes and families." Both local defense and independent service seemed to be on the minds of some Texans who rebelled when the local Confederate commander tried to convert their irregular band into a formal cavalry regiment. "This created a great deal of dissatisfaction amongst the boys," recalled one man; "for service in a local Partizan Regiment, for which they had enlisted, was very different from that in a regular corps." (20)

Unfortunately, local defense had another, more troublesome connotation. The initial enthusiasm for guerrilla warfare reflected a desire to catch the Federals on the border, thump them soundly, and end the war. Guerrillas, reasoned their advocates, could function in this capacity as a valuable military tool. Had this remained the only role played by Rebel guerrillas, they would have rendered valuable service to the Confederate cause; but early in the war--virtually from the beginning in places like Missouri and western Virginia--guerrillas also operated as something other than organized military forces, and the value of the guerrilla system broke down accordingly. This second function of guerrilla warfare, inherent to yet at odds with the first, turned neighbor against neighbor and destroyed the unity of the border region's home front.

Some scholars have suggested that the North's determination to preserve the Union derived in no small part from a desire to maintain the rule of law and order. Southerners embraced guerrilla warfare in similar fashion, as a means of community control. In addition to protecting homes against rampaging Union armies, local defense also meant preserving the peace against internal enemies. Divisions between Unionists and secessionists ran deep in some parts of the Confederacy, and long before conventional troops collided in those regions, irregular bands formed to keep wrongheaded neighbors in check. Both sides considered themselves arbiters of justice whose mission it was to restore order to communities in chaos by forcing the "enemy" either to submit or flee. It had all happened before. During the American Revolution, Tories and patriots had squared off in the same way, and at least some Confederates recognized this type of conflict as another part of their Revolutionary heritage: "The tory Bushwhackers from East Tenn, and some from the county and neighboring ones, are doing a great deal of mischief.... [T]hey are going to have such a state of things as existed during the Revolution, when the Tories and Indians were so mischievous." (21)

Border warfare in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia became such a brutal business because Rebel guerrillas, in addition to disrupting Union communications and bushwhacking enemy troops, preyed on Lincolnite noncombatant neighbors. Tennessee was "alive" with "Wild Gorillas," testified a Yankee officer, "& Union men have to keep very quiet, & soldiers are not safe out of camp." The Rebels in western Virginia, a horrified northern journalist reported, had "degenerated into assassins.... Not only the Union volunteers, but their own neighbors, who peaceably and quietly sustain the cause of the Union, are the victims of their malice and blood-thirsty hate.... They shoot down their neighbors, daytime and at night, and bum their property to ashes." Confederate guerrillas had committed to fight a war for national independence and for states' rights, too, but they would also protect their homes and families. Had conventional armies never entered this border region, its people would still have waged a guerrilla war against each other. (22)

As the war spread, bands of Unionist and Rebel guerrillas faced off wherever southern civilians had divided over secession or had grown ambivalent about the wisdom of the war. The bloodletting started even before the armies arrived, and it persisted after the armies had passed, or overflowed into places where armies never appeared. Much of the violence was gratuitous and mean-spirited, what one historian has termed "blood sport," and it often led to the sort of personal vendetta that can make the guerrilla war appear to be little more than banditry. Yet much of the mayhem had a purpose. As guerrillas, they struck back at neighbors who had chosen the wrong side in the war or waged family feuds that had nothing to do with patriotic issues like "union" or "independence." "The large majority of these who joined the guerrilla bands," explained one of their officers, "had deadly wrongs to avenge and this gave to all their combats that sanguinary which yet remains part of the guerilla's legacy [sic]." (23)

The dual--and very conflicting--dynamic of the guerrilla war put Confederate political and military leaders in a quandary. On the one hand, as a strategic military force, guerrillas had proved quite effective in disrupting Union communications, destroying railroads, and plundering supply trains; and most leaders eventually recognized the popularity of this style of fighting. As a result, some of them even turned a blind eye when it suited their interests, or when, as became the case in some places, they simply lacked the influence to control independent local bands. On the other hand, the Confederate leadership, who had always worried about the potentially negative effects the individualistic character of guerrilla warfare had on the morale of the armies and on the conduct of military operations, became equally aware of the havoc guerrillas played on the home front. By the spring of 1862 the leaders faced a much broader set of problems, defined largely by their own perceptions of guerrilla warfare and the Union's reaction to the irregular war. (24)

Central to their dilemma was the fact that many of the Confederacy's leaders had been educated in military academies, most notably West Point, but also the Virginia Military Institute, the Citadel, and similar southern state schools. As these men organized the Confederate nation's armies and reviewed its strategic options, their formal military training--all of it aimed at winning wars with grand, climatic battles--dictated that they think in terms of conventional armies and traditional tactics. Everything they knew about victorious generals, from Julius Caesar to Napoleon Bonaparte, forced them to this position, which was far removed from the partisan combat favored by their untutored countrymen. Military doctrine positively discouraged the use of guerrillas, or even militia, as an independent force. The standard manuals stressed that armies should be disciplined and trained in conventional tactics. (25)

At West Point, for example, cadets had been much influenced by the tactical doctrines of Swiss military theorist Antoine Henri de Jomini; but Jomini, who had fought with Napoleon against Spanish guerrillas in 1808-13, disapproved of guerrilla warfare. "The spectacle of a spontaneous uprising of a nation is rarely seen," he cautioned; "and, though there be in it something grand and noble which commands our admiration, the consequences are so terrible that, for the sake of humanity, we ought to hope never to see it." Any cadet who happened upon William Napier's magisterial account of the Peninsular War would have been just as impressed by that British officer's disdain for guerrillas, even despite the fact that the Duke of Wellington had shown the value of properly utilized irregulars. Most other post-Napoleonic military manuals that discussed partisan warfare, including Carl von Clausewitz's On War, had been published only in German, French, Italian, and Polish and therefore were largely inaccessible to the army's future Confederate leaders. (26)

Amateur soldiers, however, feared that the products of such an education could jeopardize the Rebel cause. Robert A. Toombs, the Georgia politician, moaned that the conventional army, led by such incompetents, might not survive the first winter of the war. The "epitaph" of the Confederacy, he predicted, would be "died of West Point." Toombs did not necessarily advocate a partisan war, but he did believe that anyone associated with the "old army" was incapable of developing a military strategy audacious enough to achieve victory. Similarly, an Alabama planter warned that the war would not be won by reading books and manuals. "[T]heir contents are known to military men," he pointed out wryly, "and but little good has been the result." De Bow's Review pleaded with young army officers not to become "martinets, adopting on all occasions the tactics of the schools, but [to be] ready ... to pursue ... [the] partisan method of warfare." (27)

Despite these jabs about book-learning, the West Pointers' theoretical concerns about guerrilla warfare had been validated by their experiences fighting Indians and Mexicans in the antebellum years. Native American warriors in Florida and Texas had long waged guerrilla wars of raids and ambushes on army posts and civilians alike. The Mexicans had fought a conventional war in 1846-48 on most occasions, but they had also used irregular troops. Freshest in memory was the "war" against Juan Cortinas and his Mexican bandits in 1859-60. The U.S. Army had mixed success with these varied foes, but in every case American soldiers came to associate guerrilla combat not with the romantic knights of the American Revolution but with uncivilized peoples. The warlike Comanches and Kiowas of the Texas frontier might have been fierce and courageous, but they were also seen as heathen and barbaric. Robert E. Lee thought them "hideous" and less than human. Nor were "half-civilized" Catholic "greasers" much better in the eyes of many men. Mexican "Guerilleros" were nothing but thieves and cowards, said Lee, "who had not courage to fight ... lawfully." (28)

Civilians and amateur soldiers, in contrast, warmed to this sort of fighting precisely because it was so ruthless. A no-holds-barred guerrilla contest was what pillaging Yankees and southern Unionists deserved, these Rebels insisted. But while the amateurs were out for blood, most professionals remained restrained by the "rules" and "laws" of war, especially as impressed upon them by their heroes and mentors. Chief among these was Winfield Scott. "He is a great man," Lee asserted during the Mexican War. "Confident in his powers & resources, his judgement is as sound as his heart is bold and daring." No wonder, then, that Lee's opinion of guerrillas closely reflected Scott's views. The "atrocious bands called guerillas or rancheros," who "violate[d] every rule of warfare observed by civilized nations," wrote Scott of Mexican irregulars, were no better than thugs and murderers and should be given no quarter when captured. (29)

Jefferson Davis, the central figure in determining Confederate military policy, shared Lee's prejudices. Davis, too, had been educated at West Point; and, while he had not followed the career of a professional soldier, he had been battle-tested in Mexico. The "guerilleros," Davis believed, were scavengers and thieves that no true soldier should emulate. The Confederate president had been influenced not by Scott but by his own father-in-law, Zachary Taylor: "Fuss and Feathers" had crossed military and political paths with "Old Rough and Ready" too often for Davis to think highly of Lee's hero. Yet on the issue of guerrillas, at least, the two older men agreed. Taylor also counted guerrilla warfare as "barbarism," and he had impressed upon Davis that no soldier's reputation could be enhanced by engaging in that lowly form of combat. To be honorable, insisted Taylor, war must be waged by organized armies. When one of Davis's nephews, Jefferson Davis Bradford, resigned from the Confederate army to raise a partisan band in Louisiana, the president regretted that Bradford had not followed a "path more likely to lead to professional distinction and future promotion." (30)

Conflicting notions of democracy loomed large in all this, from the popular enthusiasm for guerrilla warfare to the leadership's scorn for it. Historians of the Confederacy have long agreed that leaders in both the government and the army were, at the very least, ambivalent about the benefits of democracy. Many seceded states tried to eliminate democratic political and legal initiatives of the antebellum years, even white male suffrage. Some Rebels advocated a monarchy, and John C. Calhoun's fears about the tyranny of the majority had long been a cornerstone of southern political thought. Other Confederates feared the national government reined in democracy too forcefully. It used its considerable power, these critics charged, to bully plain folk and restrict personal liberties--creating the tensions that served as evidence for the original "died of democracy" thesis. Of course, some restriction of individual freedom is almost inevitable in wartime, even in democratic countries. Nations in arms tend to modify whatever democratic or republican tendencies they might otherwise champion, a situation that applied as much to Abraham Lincoln's government as to the one in Richmond. Whatever the depth of the aristocratic or elitist inclinations of Confederate officials, it could only be exaggerated by the threat of invasion and the exigencies of war. Yet Rebel leaders envisioned a Confederacy, even in peacetime, spared of the bumptious, chaotic political culture of the North. They instead would promote a limited democracy and an ordered liberty. (31)

A degree of "barracks-style democracy," as one historian has described it, nevertheless did creep into the army. Tocqueville saw this outcome as inevitable in "democratic armies," and American militia and volunteer soldiers, individualistic and republican to the core, had always insisted on carrying their civilian rights of self-governance into the military world. Most notoriously, the Confederate government allowed enlisted men to elect company officers, a practice that alarmed professional soldiers. "I have seen a company rendered inefficient for months because of the opportunity of exercising the elective franchise in the choice of a lieutenant," fumed one officer. Still, aristocratic principles eventually prevailed, just as they did in the political world. The officer corps insisted on order and discipline, largely as a matter of military necessity, but also because their social prejudices had conditioned them to keep a wary eye on the middle- and lower-class citizens who served in the ranks. And if men in the conventional armies had to be held in check, how much greater the need to control independent guerrilla bands. (32)

It has been suggested by some historians that southern elites, both in and out of the army, feared that to give too large a role to the guerrillas would undermine their own authority, damage the prestige of the ruling class, tarnish southern ideals of honor and manhood, and perhaps even permit backwoodsmen and crackers to take credit for Confederate victory. One need not accept the most extreme of these concerns to appreciate the general anxiety. Virginia's colonial gentry had voiced similar misgivings about the influence of "democratically organized `Independent Companies of Volunteers'" on traditions of hierarchy and deference in 1776. Similarly, it could not be expected that someone like Robert E. Lee, who had been as appalled by the implications of Jacksonian democracy as by the treacherous military tactics of the Mexicans, would put much faith in a guerrilla-driven people's war. When Rebel leaders complained about the independence, lack of discipline, and unpredictability of guerrillas, they spoke in apprehensive voices. (33)

Despite such strong prejudices, the Davis administration responded belatedly to the spreading guerrilla war, evidently believing it could minimize the peril with no great effort. The government could not hope to--and perhaps did not really want to--prohibit spontaneously formed bands of bushwhackers from harassing Union pickets or ambushing small patrols, but it did intend to neutralize those bands that volunteered officially for Confederate service. Needing to muster as many able-bodied men as possible, the War Department accepted volunteer companies for guerrilla service as long as they had the minimum number of sixty-four men, furnished their own weapons, and enlisted for twelve months. These conditions alone, especially the last one, caused many potential units to disband. Even more importantly--and revealingly--the government nearly always refused to grant these companies the "independent" status they sought. Volunteers had to serve where and how they were needed, which precluded the sort of freewheeling operations envisioned by most of the men. Davis told a potential guerrilla captain in mid-June 1861 that his company would not be accepted "if the term guerilla implies independent operations." The War Department informed another group that they would be "attached to a command deemed proper by the Government.... [A]n Independent Company is altogether inadmissible." (34)

When the number of requests for guerrilla service became unmanageable, and as more bands sought permission to operate exclusively in their own communities, Congress passed an act "for local defense and special service" in August 1861. The act did not mention "guerrillas" specifically, but everyone understood its intent. President Davis would have the power to accept "volunteers of such kind" as might be needed "for the defense of exposed places or localities" and for "such special service" as he deemed "expedient." This and similar legislation gave cavalry regiments operating under men like Turner Ashby and John Hunt Morgan "large discretionary powers" to drive out Union invaders. Davis and the War Department hoped this endorsement would settle the matter. They would allow limited guerrilla activity without calling it such. (35)

Still, numerous local guerrilla bands continued to operate without the government's permission, and their rough-and-tumble style brought the issue to a head. Federal authorities soon protested the lawless behavior of guerrillas, in part because they, like their Confederate counterparts, genuinely abhorred this style of warfare, but also because Rebel irregulars could be terribly effective. Chaos reigned wherever they gained a foothold, and Federal commanders started to retaliate. Confronted with rampaging guerrillas in western Virginia in June 1861, General George B. McClellan ordered that they be "dealt with in their persons and property according to the severest rules of military law." (36)

While McClellan's threats remained somewhat vague, his counterparts in the Trans-Mississippi, including John C. Fremont, Henry W. Halleck, and John Pope, imposed martial law in Missouri. Here, announced the western generals, citizens would pay for any damage inflicted on Federal property by bushwhackers in their neighborhoods. People who assisted guerrillas would have their own property confiscated or be forced to house, clothe, and feed Unionists who had been driven from their communities. Suspected guerrillas would be court-martialed; if found guilty, they would be shot. By the end of 1861 an exasperated Halleck finally declared that guerrillas were simply "murderers, robbers, and thieves," subject to execution without trial. The U.S. Army had adopted similar policies when combating the "inconclusive, unpopular guerrilla combat" of Native Americans, and Taylor and Scott had used like measures in Mexico. (37)

Confederate leaders sputtered in amazement and pointed to the equally disagreeable activities of Kansas jayhawkers, but they could not help but be embarrassed. Enthusiasm for the cause and patriotic fervor were fine, even desirable, but the Confederate government sensed a clear danger in becoming too closely associated with its bushwhacking friends. Guerrilla warfare, if it continued as it had evolved, would undermine Confederate hopes for foreign recognition. The new government, which needed desperately to be accepted abroad as a legitimate state, would be perceived as barbaric rabble, no better than Mexicans or Comanches, and certainly not fit to be recognized as a civilized nation. (38)

Although the Davis government stubbornly refused to apologize for the excesses of Rebel guerrillas, it did reassert its disapproval of irregular operations during the last half of 1861. General Lee informed his subordinates that the recruitment of guerrillas was "not deemed advisable by the President." The War Department warned an Alabamian who had volunteered to raise a partisan company that his men "must conform strictly to the laws and usages of civilized nations." Davis himself declared in early December that because the Union army was led "by men of military education and experience in war," southerners should anticipate that the conflict would be fought "on a scale of very different proportions than that of the partisan warfare witnessed during the past summer and fall." Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin, hoping to discourage the flow of letters that still urged guerrilla operations, and perhaps seeking to placate the U.S. government, stated flatly toward the end of the year, "Guerrilla companies are not recognized as part of the military organization of the Confederate States." (39)

As Federal protests and retaliation against guerrillas mounted in early 1862, the Confederate Congress tried to remedy the problem by instituting the Partisan Ranger Act. Introduced in the Senate by Henry C. Burnett of Kentucky as a means of "raising ... guerrilla companies for the war," this legislation sought to control irregular bands, to spruce up their image, and to eliminate the excesses of unrestricted guerrilla fighting. It gave President Davis exclusive power to commission officers and authorize partisan units. These units, composed only of "such numbers as the President" approved, would "be subject to the same regulations as other soldiers." To discourage indiscriminate looting of private property and to keep the men focused on legitimate military targets, partisans would also receive the monetary value of all "arms and munitions of war captured from the enemy." (40)

But even this proposal, the firmest endorsement given by Confederate leaders to guerrilla warfare, went farther than Davis wanted it to go, and his allies in Congress resisted its passage. Normally a friend of Davis, Burnett broke ranks on this issue because his state teetered dangerously toward total Union domination by April 1862. Anticipating the arguments of opponents, supporters of the bill promised that their government-sponsored partisans would be strictly controlled, "mustered into the regular service," and "held for detached service," but that was not good enough for opponents. Edward Sparrow of Louisiana, who had consulted with Davis about the bill, insisted that the salvation of the nation rested in a large traditional army. Walter Preston of Virginia, a timid legislator who shunned precipitous or radical action, suggested that "[t]he law regulating local defence," under which officers like Ashby and Morgan already operated, was "ample" for supplying irregulars. In any case, Preston added, "All the forces must be subject to the same military laws." (41)

The week-long debate reached its climax when Burnett, while again conceding that the "war must be always carried on by regular army system," insisted that "West-Pointism had already done great injury to the country." Applause erupted from the galleries in response to this challenge, which, in turn, prompted opponents of the bill to insist that the chamber be cleared of spectators. An angry Louis T. Wigfall of Texas, at this time in the war still a Davis supporter, led the opposition, but Alabama's old tire-eater William Lowndes Yancey, who had already become suspicious of the "military dictator" Davis, leaped up to defend the right of the people to voice their opinions. "I approve of the sentiment that `something should be pardoned to the spirit of liberty,'" he proclaimed. John Bullock Clark, a Missourian who supported partisan bands, defused the situation with a lame joke. The bill passed in late April, although opponents successfully removed a provision that would have paid partisans a bounty of five dollars for every enemy soldier they killed. (42)

Unfortunately, Confederates did not respond to the Ranger Act in the proper spirit. The government had intended to limit the numbers and regulate the operations of guerrillas, but its legislation produced opposite effects. Congress erred by passing the bill at the same time that it established national conscription. Untold numbers of southerners objected to the draft. Men who had not yet joined the army insisted that family or professional considerations compelled them to remain near their homes; volunteers who had already suffered the dangers and hardships of active campaigning resented the fact that conscription extended their enlistments. Both groups saw the Ranger Act as the solution to their woes. While partisans would be governed by the same "regulations" as the rest of the army, potential recruits assumed that they would retain some latitude in how, when, and where they served. Such flexibility made guerrilla service very attractive to conscripts, who joined irregular units rather than serving in the conventional army, and to men already in service whose original enlistments had expired. The government listed the latter group as deserters when they left their old regiments to become partisans, but in truth, these men had only gone off to fight the enemy as they had always wished to engage him. The army reacted in June and July 1862 by prohibiting transfers from volunteer service to partisan units, forbidding eligible conscripts from joining the rangers, and setting the minimum age for partisan service at thirty-five years, but the inherent problems continued. (43)

This old passion for local defense, becoming pervasive in 1862 and 1863, confounded the government's hopes of coordinating the irregulars and employing them as it chose. At the start of the war, with all attention focused on the border, even men from the Deep South had been eager to operate as guerrillas in Virginia and Kentucky. As the war now threatened their own neighborhoods, priorities changed. Colonel William C. Falkner (great-grandfather of the twentieth-century novelist William Faulkner) enlisted an entire regiment of partisans in less than a month to operate in northern Mississippi. Another Mississippian, whose neighborhood was "nearly in the hands of the Federals," announced that he would "abandon the Army" to operate as an independent guerrilla if not allowed to form a partisan band. A Floridian sought permission to organize partisan rangers in defense of Nassau County. "The enemy ...," he explained, "can at any time Come ... & plunder, steal our ... cattle & insult our women." General Thomas C. Hindman, when recruiting partisans in the Trans-Mississippi, specified that all his companies would "serve in that part of the district to which they belong[ed]." (44)

The expanding home-front struggle between Unionists and secessionists also heightened concern over local defense. Again, unlike guerrilla companies that had formed in 1861 to confront Federal troops on the border, bands of partisan rangers rallied in 1862 and 1863 to defend their neighborhoods against armed Unionists. A resident of Tazewell County, Virginia, informed the War Department, "[A] guerrilla company [is needed] for the protection of the county, and more particularly for chastising the Union bands, who have become very daring, insolent and troublesome." A North Carolinian reported that the entire western end of his state--an area coveting thirteen counties--was "dangerously infested with marauding bands of Tories & Bushwhackers." He volunteered to form a partisan company "to range this particular locality, & keep on the heels of the Bushwhackers." Georgians told Governor Joseph E. Brown that they must be allowed to protect themselves against the "[i]nsurrection or insubordination" of neighborhood tories. "[G]ive us the right of reprisal," urged one man. (45)

By 1863 the Davis government had a real mess on its hands. Efforts to restrict guerrilla service only drove more men to it. Lee complained to the president that the number of men deserting to become partisans "endangered" the future success of his army. The Ranger Act also angered and alienated Lee's men, who resented the license enjoyed by partisans and believed that the government, in limiting access to partisan ranks, had denied them an opportunity to defend their communities. What was more, the supposedly disciplined rangers often behaved as outrageously as common bushwhackers--"more formidable and destructive" to the Confederate people, as an alarmed secretary of war James A. Seddon decided, than they were to the enemy. The citizens of a Georgia county, for example, petitioned for protection from "so caled Partizan rangers [sic]" who, having organized "in order to keep from the conscript law," were stealing horses and corn from local farmers. (46)

Worse still, the partisan and conscription acts in combination soon produced a third, unanticipated form of guerrilla warfare, perhaps the most destructive of all: outlawry. The original hope of Rebel guerrillas--to injure enemy soldiers and retard the invasion of the South--had been at least partially realized. Even a guerrilla war for community control, while betraying a worrisome tendency to get out of hand, had generally benefited Rebels because of their superior numbers in these local contests. But as guerrilla bands proliferated, as the collapse of law and order affected ever more communities, and as more men deserted the armies or turned against the war, many malcontents--army deserters, genuine outlaws, thieves, and bullies--exploited the upheaval to loot, pillage, murder, and destroy. "The whole country is infested with small squads of these miscreants," reported a Union cavalryman from Tennessee, "belonging to no regular organization & living by plunder." Such bands often claimed to be in service to either the Union or Confederacy, but that was all a dodge. They subverted the legitimate use of the irregular war and sent the relatively contained pre-1862 guerrilla contest careening out of control. (47)

Some of the most dramatic evidence of the rapidly deteriorating situation could be found in communities where Unionist and secessionist "noncombatants" did battle. Confederate deserters who had become disillusioned by the war, as well as "outliers" who "took to the bush" to avoid conscription, joined existing bands of Unionists or formed their own guerrilla enclaves. Many of these groups only wanted to be left alone, but others aimed brutal attacks at Confederate troops and civilians. In Alabama, as loyal Rebel Thomas B. Cooper complained, bands of tories and deserters who claimed to be "Confederate scouts" scoured the countryside, "stealing horses, driving off cows and calves, robbing, burning & stealing whatever they find valuable." In Virginia one hundred citizens of Lee County reported in October 1862 that a new "species of warfare" had descended upon them. They had become accustomed early in the war to warding off Tennessee and Kentucky Unionists who invaded their county, but now they also faced raids by "bandits." "These marauders are in the mountains all along our border ...," read their petition for relief, "and they threaten to lay waste by fire & sword our county from Jonesville to Cumberland Gap." (48)

The entire South became infected by this new plague, but North Carolina, with the highest number of deserters from the Confederate army, may have suffered most. Rebel guerrillas in the state had actively engaged local Unionists and dealt with Union invasions from East Tennessee since the start of the war. However, like the citizens of Lee County, they faced a new threat in the autumn of 1862. "[T]he Western Counties are in danger of being over run by deserters and renegades who by the hundred are taking shelter in the smoky mountains," William H. Thomas, who led a mixed band of Cherokee and white partisans, reported to Governor Zebulon Vance. A Confederate officer similarly observed, "[Deserters] organize in bands, variously estimated at from fifty up to hundreds .... These men are not only determined to kill in avoiding apprehension ... but their esprit de corps extends to killing in revenge...." Confederate troops arrived to reinforce home guards and local militia in apprehending or killing these desperadoes (the "massacre" at Shelton Laurel, where soldiers executed thirteen Unionist guerrillas in January 1863, being the most infamous such incident); but Governor Vance saw a larger problem: "The warfare between scattering bodies of irregular troops is conducted on both sides without any regard whatever to the rules of civilized war or the dictates of humanity." (49)

The final and most telling consequence of the Confederacy's people's war was the bitter mood of retaliation it instilled in the military policies of both North and South, beginning in the summer of 1862. Soldiers and the policies that governed them became less restrained and more vindictive, with both the Lincoln and Davis governments contributing to the deterioration. Historians have frequently noted this shift in policy, but they have not fully appreciated the extent to which the guerrilla war, in all its phases, inspired it. As explained earlier, the civility of the war began to sour quite soon in places like Missouri and western Virginia, where Federal commanders first protested the Confederacy's use of guerrillas. The words partisan and ranger in the Ranger Act, as opposed to guerrilla, bushwhacker, or some other pejorative variation, represented a bid for legitimacy by the Rebels, but the North would not buy it. Politicians and generals on both sides became embroiled in a ferocious debate about the rules of war that engaged in incredible flights of rhetoric and exaggeration. The debate eventually ranged far beyond guerrillas to address such issues as deprivations by the traditional armies and the treatment of noncombatants, but the guerrilla war remained the essence of the thing. (50)

The U.S. War Department tried to settle the issue in April 1863 with General Order No. 100, eventually known as the Lieber Code, for the Columbia University law professor--Francis Lieber--who drafted it at the army's request. The directive offered broad guidelines for the treatment of prisoners of war and of the persons and property of noncombatants. Yet it grew from a far more focused policy, recommended by Henry W. Halleck a year earlier, that sought to clarify existing laws governing guerrilla forces. The new rules avoided the word guerrilla altogether, referring to such men, instead, as robbers, pirates, armed prowlers, and war-rebels, and denying them the rights of legitimate soldiers if captured. The order acknowledged only partisans as a lawful part of the enemy's army, and it was extremely vague about their military role. In practice, the Union army acknowledged the right of partisan rangers to disrupt "lines of connection and communication ... in the rear and on the flanks of the enemy," but this meant the Federals would continue to regard nearly all Rebel guerrillas, including government-sponsored partisans, as outlaws. (51)

Confederate leaders bristled at such arrogance. Did the Federals really think they could dictate how the war would be fought? It was an outrageous presumption, protested Jefferson Davis, as he cited instances where Union troops had behaved far more barbarously than the worst Rebel bushwhackers and irregulars. As the Federals dealt ever more harshly with both guerrillas and the citizens who harbored or assisted them, Davis found himself in the awkward position of defending the guerrilla war he had always deplored. Union retaliation against guerrillas only inspired more ferocious partisan resistance, which, in turn, brought new Federal reprisals, until the entire war--not just the Rebel "people's war"--became something ugly and brutish. "We find ourselves driven by our enemies by steady progress towards a practice which we abhor and which we are vainly struggling to avoid," Davis complained to Lee in July 1862. The Union's "savage war," he continued, fought under the black flag of "no quarter," was forcing the Confederacy to follow suit. The next month, Congress considered "retaliatory measures consistent with the law of nations and the usages of civilized warfare" against the "atrocities and brutal conduct perpetrated by the enemy ... upon the property and persons of the citizens and soldiers of this Confederacy." The "soldiers" now included partisans. (52)

And so the sheer violence unleashed by this multifaceted guerrilla struggle became a crippling liability for the Confederacy in two ways. First, it injured public support for the government and the Confederate cause. By 1864, and far sooner in some places, people had lost confidence that the government could protect them against Unionist guerrillas, brigands, Federal soldiers, or even their own partisans. In Missouri, which had suffered the longest, one resident lamented, "I behold a fearful sight. People of every political opinion and all ages, fleeing from their homes. The guerillas prowling into the country and the Federals ravaging towns. Murder, arson of daily occurrence. Fights rendered horrible by their ferocity. No quarter being given, no mercy shown. It is horrible." Elsewhere, people reflected that the entire South seemed in danger of becoming "one vast Missouri," with "a protracted guerilla war as the condition of final successes." (53)

Second, the Union army's new retaliatory policy against civilians, based to a significant extent on its experience against Rebel guerrillas, led to a sweeping Federal offensive strategy that devastated the South. The new policy has been characterized in many ways--as total war, absolute war, destructive war, hard war, relentless war, and Davis's "savage war" could apply as well--but by whatever name, it evolved into a coordinated strategy of exhaustion against Confederate armies and resources in 1864-65 that wore out the Rebels to the point of surrender. William T. Sherman's destructive Georgia campaign, David Hunter and Philip H. Sheridan's devastation of the Shenandoah Valley, and numerous deadly cavalry raids through Virginia, Alabama, and Mississippi formed part of the new design that bore a striking resemblance to the North's earlier counter-guerrilla operations. More than that, the new strategic policy was fashioned and directed by the same men who had retaliated during the first half of the war against Rebel guerrillas and the civilian communities that harbored them. Sherman, Hunter, and Sheridan, not to forget Ulysses S. Grant and Henry Halleck, who together directed all Union armies by 1864, were among those commanders who had faced formidable guerrilla opposition in Missouri, Kentucky, western Tennessee, northern Mississippi, and northern Arkansas, and along western rivers. (54)

By then, the Confederate government had already cut its losses in the partisan war. The possibility of reining in the rangers by placing them more directly under the control of local military commanders had been debated as early as August 1862, and Congress finally repealed the Ranger Act in February 1864. Lee and his generals played no small role in the latter action. In January 1864 they advised President Davis that even formal partisan bands lacked "order" and "discipline," and Lee told James Seddon point-blank, "I recommend that the law authorizing these partisan corps be abolished. The evils resulting from their organization more than counterbalance the good they accomplish." Seddon, who had been the administration's most vocal critic of the partisan system, drafted the legislation and had the influential South Carolina congressman William Porcher Miles, who always backed the president's military policies, submit it to Congress. Some debate followed, but even most early congressional supporters of partisan warfare had come to fear its unpredictable tendencies. Lee expressed relief: "Experience has convinced me that it is almost impossible ... to have discipline in these bands of partisan rangers, or to prevent them from becoming an injury instead of a benefit to the service...." (55)

Not that abolishing the rangers did any good. Dozens of guerrilla bands ignored the edict. The internal war of neighbor versus neighbor, not to mention swarming bands of deserters and outlaws, disrupted the southern home front for the remainder of the war. Indeed, some of those bands would be the last Confederates to surrender. Some scholars have argued that Jefferson Davis finally intended to wage a guerrilla war when he announced in April 1865 that the Confederate nation had "entered upon a new phase" of its struggle; but given his wartime experiences, this seems doubtful. Virtually every member of his cabinet advised him against it. Besides, guerrillas cannot win wars single-handedly. Guerrilla movements--returning to where this discussion began--are born of the people they serve. Irregulars must have the active support of the civilian population to survive, and most Confederate civilians appear to have lost their stomach for war by the spring of 1865. (56)

So if it can be said that the Confederacy died of democracy, its death must be attributed in some part to the disruptive force of the guerrilla war. Whether or not the Rebel government could ever have controlled its lethal power is problematic. One authority believes that even within a single state, Missouri, the irregular war became so confused and contradictory that the government could establish no viable policy. (57) Many common folk decided early in the conflict that guerrilla warfare suited their inclinations and needs, but they ran up against the hard realities of military doctrine, class bias, and political priorities. Democracy ran amok when the guerrilla war, despite the government's efforts to control it, generated lethal mutations and inspired a Union policy of retaliation that helped to destroy the Confederacy from within and without.

(1) David Donald, "Died of Democracy," in David Donald, ed., Why the North Won the Civil War (Baton Rouge, 1960), 77-90; Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Still Jr., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens, Ga., and London, 1986), 7-8, 356. Frank Lawrence Owsley, "Local Defense and the Overthrow of the Confederacy: A Study in State Rights," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 11 (March 1925), 490-525, which served as Donald's point of departure, actually hit close to the mark, but Owsley still saw the conflict between government and individual as largely political. Useful summaries of current historiographical thinking on this issue--although the epicenter of the debate has shifted from "democracy" to questions of social class and nationalism--may be found in Bradley G. Bond, "Southern State and Local Politics," 494-504, and Bill Cecil-Fronsman, "Southern Social Conditions," 530-43, both in Steven E. Woodworth, ed., The American Civil War: A Handbook of Literature and Research (Westport, Conn., and London, 1996); and in Emory M. Thomas, "Rebellion and Conventional Warfare: Confederate Strategy and Military Policy," 36-59, and James L. Roark, "Confederate Economy and Society," 201-27, both in James M. McPherson and William J. Cooper Jr., eds., Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand (Columbia, S.C., 1998). The author would like to thank Stephen V. Ash, Benjamin Franklin Cooling, Michael Fellman, Noel C. Fisher, Perry D. Jamieson, and the anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Southern History for their helpful comments and suggestions. He also wishes to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, lot their financial support of his research.

(2) Piers Mackesy, "What the British Army Learned," in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Arms and Independence: The Military Character of the American Revolution (Charlottesville, 1984), 197-99, discusses the eighteenth-century European fascination with "natural man" as the embodiment of la petite guerre, or "little war," an expression generally meant to imply guerrilla warfare. See, too, Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War (New York and Oxford, 1989), vi. This preference for guerrilla warfare was based largely on experience, as opposed to a scientific study of the issue. Yet the conduct of the Confederacy's guerrilla war--and Union responses to it--closely paralleled the strategies advocated by modern military writings on this subject, including those by such diverse authorities as Charles E. Callwell, T. E. Lawrence, Mao Tse-tung, and Che Guevara. Two good modern reviews of the literature are John Ellis, From the Barrel of a Gun: A History of Guerrilla, Revolutionary and Counter-Insurgency Warfare, from the Romans to the Present (Mechanicsburg, Pa., and London, 1995); and Anthony James Joes, Guerrilla Conflict before the Cold War (Westport, Conn., and London, 1996). It should be stressed that not every "people's war" is necessarily waged as a guerrilla war, and certainly not every one is based on democratic values. See John M. Gates, "People's War in Vietnam," Journal of Military History, 54 (July 1990), 327-29. For the perspective of Alexis de Tocqueville see Democracy in America, edited by Phillips Bradley (2 vols.; New York, 1945), II, book 2, chap. 1.

(3) Other scholars have pointed to this tug-of-war in Confederate thinking, but no one has fully explored its origins, complexities, and implications. See, for example, Robert L. Kerby, "Why the Confederacy Lost," Review of Politics, 35 (July 1973), 326-45; Fellman, Inside War, 97-112; and B. Franklin Cooling, "A People's War: Partisan Conflict in Tennessee and Kentucky," in Daniel E. Sutherland, ed., Guerrillas, Unionists, and Violence on the Confederate Home Front (Fayetteville, Ark., 1999), 113-32. For the debate over guerrilla warfare as a viable Confederate military option see Gary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1997), 120-27.

(4) Our modern appreciation of the guerrilla war began with Phillip Shaw Paludan, Victims: ATrue Story of the Civil War (Knoxville, 1981); and Fellman, Inside War. For an analysis of this considerable literature see Daniel E. Sutherland, "Sideshow No Longer: A Historiographical Review of the Guerrilla War," Civil War History, 46 (March 2000), 5-23.

(5) The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (70 vols. in 128; Washington, D.C., 1880-1901), Ser. IV, Vol. I, 415 (first and second quotations), 475 (third and fourth quotations), 505 (fifth quotation), 506 (sixth quotation); hereinafter cited as Official Records; A. O. W. Lattern to Isham G. Harris, June 14, 1861, Isham G. Harris Papers, Papers of the Governors of Tennessee (Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville) (seventh and eighth quotations).

(6) Duane Allan Smith, "The Confederate Cause in the Colorado Territory, 1861-1865," Civil War History, 7 (March 1961), 71-75; Daniel Ellis Conner, A Confederate in the Colorado Gold Fields, edited by Donald J. Berthrong and Odessa Davenport (Norman, Okla., 1970), 145, 162-63; Morris F. Taylor, "Confederate Guerrillas in Southern Colorado," Colorado Magazine, 46 (Fall 1969), 304-23; Leo P. Kibby, "Some Aspects of California's Military Problems During the Civil War," Civil War History, 5 (September 1959), 253-57; Official Records, Ser. I, Vol. L, Pt. I, 590 (quotations).

(7) Dickson D. Bruce Jr., Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South (Austin, Tex., and London, 1979), 3-20, 89-113, 196-211; Elliott J. Gorn, "'Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch': The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry," American Historical Review, 90 (February 1985), 18-43; Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (Tuscaloosa and London, 1988), 146-70; David T. Courtwright, Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1996), 26-49; Richard Maxwell Brown, Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (New York, 1975), 98-103, and Brown, "Western Violence: Structure, Values, Myth," Western Historical Quarterly, 24 (February 1993), 6-7 (quotation on p. 6); Gary L. Cheatham, "'Desperate Characters': The Development and Impact of the Confederate Guerrillas in Kansas," Kansas History, 14 (Autumn 1991), 144-61; Albert Castel, Civil War Kansas: Reaping the Whirlwind (Lawrence, Kans., 1997), 37-64; Kristen A. Tegtmeier, "The Ladies of Lawrence Are Arming! The Gendered Nature of Sectional Violence in Early Kansas," in John R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold, eds., Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America (Knoxville, 1999), 215-35. This tendency toward violence should not be confused with the frequently mentioned "martial spirit" of the South. The two are not the same, and in any case, historians have fairly well qualified the supposed prevalence of southern militarism. See Bruce, Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South, 161-77; and R. Don Higginbotham, "The Martial Spirit in the Antebellum South: Some Further Speculations in a National Context," Journal of Southern History, 58 (February 1992), 3-26.

(8) Edward Conrad Smith, The Borderland in the Civil War (New York, 1927), 367; Benjamin Franklin Cooling, Fort Donelson's Legacy: War and Society in Kentucky and Tennessee, 18621863 (Knoxville, 1997), 67-69; Noel C. Fisher, War at Every Door: Partisan Politics and Guerrilla Violence in East Tennessee, 1860-1869 (Chapel Hill and London, 1997), 41-43; John F. Marszalek, ed., The Diary of Miss Emma Holmes, 1861-1866 (Baton Rouge and London, 1979), 35; Levi W. Lawler to Leroy Pope Walker, June 17, 1861, in Letters Received by the Confederate Secretary of War, War Department Collection of Confederate Records, Record Group 109, Microform 437 (National Archives, Washington, D.C.), reel 4, frame 286 (first quotation), hereinafter cited as RG 109, M-437; William James Smith to Walker, June 3, 1861, RG 109, M-437, reel 3, frame 472 (second and third quotations). For other offers of service see I. W. Garrott to Walker, June 5, 1861, reel 3, frame 1110-11; J. T. Kirby to Jefferson Davis, June 7, 1861, reel 3, frame 1174; Stephen H. Rushing to Walker, May 30, 1861, reel 3, frame 1038; and D. M. Washington to Davis, May 19, 1861, reel 2, frame 1273; all in RG 109, M-437.

(9) Donald Walter Curl, ed., "A Report from Baltimore," Maryland Historical Magazine, 64 (Fall 1969), 281 (first quotation); Anna Bradford Agle and Sidney H. Wanzer, eds., "Dearest Braddie: Love and War in Maryland, 1860-61, Part I," Maryland Historical Magazine, 88 (Spring 1993), 83, 86 (second quotation); Lynda Lasswell Crist et al., eds., The Papers of Jefferson Davis (10 vols. to date; Baton Rouge and London, 1971-), VII, 188 (Reynolds quotations).

(10) William Kauffman Scarborough, ed., The Diary of Edmund Ruffin. Vol. II: The Years of Hope: April, 1861-June, 1863 (Baton Rouge, 1976), 51-52 (quotation on p. 52).

(11) Mary C. Simms Oliphant et al., eds., The Letters of William Gilmore Simms (6 vols.; Columbia, S.C., 1952-82), IV, 364 (first, second, and third quotations), 369 (fourth and fifth quotations). Interestingly, antebellum abolitionists sometimes invoked the image of the "savage" Indian warrior in their "war" against slavery. See John Stauffer, "Advent among the Indians: The Revolutionary Ethos of Gerrit Smith, James McCune Smith, Frederick Douglass, and John Brown," in McKivigan and Harrold, eds., Antislavery Violence, 236-73.

(12) Little Rock Arkansas True Democrat, July 18, 1861, p. 2, c. 6; "Irrepressibles" notice in Folder 158, Ruffin, Roulhac, and Hamilton Family Papers #643 (Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; hereinafter cited as SHC); George Fitzhugh, "The Times and the War," De Bow's Review, 32 (July 1861), 2-3.

(13) Emory M. Thomas, The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971), 1, 44 46; Robert F. Durden, "The American Revolution as Seen by Southerners in 1861," Louisiana History, 19 (Winter 1978), 33-42; George C. Rable, The Confederate Republic: A Revolution Against Politics (Chapel Hill and London, 1994), 44-48; William C. Davis, "A Government of Our Own": The Making of the Confederacy (New York and other cities, 1994), 83; Jon L. Wakelyn, ed., Southern Pamphlets on Secession, November 1860-April 1861 (Chapel Hill and London, 1996), 114, 177, 327; Dwight Lowell Dumond, ed., Southern Editorials on Secession (New York and London, 1931), 505 (first quotation), 507 (second and third quotations), 515.

(14) J. B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital (2 vols.; Philadelphia, 1866), I, 87 (first quotation; emphasis in original); Robert K. Wright Jr., "'Nor Is Their Standing Army to Be Despised': The Emergence of the Continental Army as a Military Institution, in Hoffman and Albert, eds., Arms and Independence, 50-74; Charles C. Jones Jr. to Mrs. C. C. Jones, April 8, 1862, in Robert Manson Myers, ed., The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven and London, 1972), 872 (second and third quotations); Cooling, Fort Donelson's Legacy, 65-69. Cooling notes the mixed inheritance that pushed southerners toward a "people's war," although his starting point is Carl yon Clausewitz's strategic framework of "the People in Arms" (pp. xi-xv; quotation on p. xi).

(15) Modern historians of British America have also stressed the democratic nature of the colonial minutemen's frequent clashes with the authoritarian elites that controlled the militia, as well as the negative British response to partisan warfare and the fragmentation of irregular war. The similarities of these aspects of the colonial story to the 1860s are striking. Mark V. Kwasny, Washington's Partisan War, 1775-1783 (Kent, Ohio, and London, 1996), xi-xv; Clyde R. Ferguson, "Functions of the Partisan-Militia in the South During the American Revolution: An Interpretation," in W. Robert Higgins, ed., The Revolutionary War in the South: Power, Conflict, and Leadership: Essays in Honor of John Richard Alden (Durham, 1979), 239-58; Charles Royster, Light-Horse Harry Lee and the Legacy of the American Revolution (New York, 1981), 20-39; Don Higginbotham, "Military Leadership in the American Revolution," 84-105, esp. 90-91, "The American Militia: A Traditional Institution with Revolutionary Responsibilities," 106-31, esp. 114-15, 118-23, and "Reflections on the War of Independence, modern Guerrilla Warfare, and the War in Vietnam," 153-73, all in Higginbotham, War and Society in Revolutionary America: The Wider Dimensions of Conflict (Columbia, S.C., 1988). For the rambunctious nature of colonial minutemen and the "internal" guerrilla war that erupted on the Revolutionary home front, especially in the South, see Hoffman and Albert, eds., Arms and Independence; Ronald Hoffman, Thad W. Tate, and Peter J. Albert, eds., An Uncivil War: The Southern Backcountry during the American Revolution (Charlottesville, 1985); John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (rev. ed.; Ann Arbor, 1990); and Michael A. McDonnell, "Popular Mobilization and Political Culture in Revolutionary Virginia: The Failure of the Minutemen and the Revolution from Below," Journal of American History, 85 (December 1998), 946-81. Proslavery and antislavery forces in Kansas had similarly appealed to the traditions of the Revolution during their guerrilla war of the 1850s. See Michael Fellman, "Rehearsal for the Civil War: Antislavery and Proslavery at the Fighting Point in Kansas, 1854-1856," in Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman, eds., Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists (Baton Rouge and London, 1979), 297-98, 301-7.

(16) C. Hugh Holman, The Roots of Southern Writing: Essays on the Literature of the American South (Athens, Ga., 1972), 16 (quotation), 76; William Gilmore Simms, The Life of Francis Marion (Boston, 1856); Simms, The Partisan: A Tale of the Revolution (New York, 1835); Karen A. Endres, "Mary Moragne's The British Partizan," in James B. Meriwether, ed., South Carolina Women Writers (Spartanburg, S.C., 1979), 27-39; Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, The Partisan Leader: A Tale of the Future, introduction by C. Hugh Holman (Chapel Hill, 1971), vii-xxiii, esp. xix; Carla Waal, "The First Original Confederate Drama: The Guerrillas," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 70 (October 1962), 459-67. For a few of the many examples of guerrilla-inspired poetry see Henry Timrod, "A Cry to Arms," 49-51, and S. Teackle Wallis, "The Guerrillas," 146-49, in William Gilmore Simms, ed., War Poetry of the South (New York, 1867); "The Mountain Partisan," in H. M. Wharton, comp., War Songs and Poems of the Southern Confederacy, 1861-1865 (Philadelphia, 1904), 275-76; and William Gilmore Simms, "The Guerrilla Martyrs," in Esther Parker Ellinger, The Southern War Poetry of the Civil War (1918; New York, 1970), 102.

(17) Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865 (Cambridge, Eng., and other cities, 1995), 18-19; Charles C. Jones Jr. to Rev. C. C. Jones, November 27, 1861, in Myers, ed., Children of Pride, 804 (first quotation); Jay Monaghan, Swamp Fox of the Confederacy: The Life and Military Services of M. Jeff Thompson (Tuscaloosa, 1956); M. J. Solomons scrapbook (Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.), p. 85 (second quotation); Marszalek, ed., Diary of Miss Emma Holmes, 164 (third quotation); E. E. Kidd to Jefferson Davis, June 1, 1861, reel 3, frames 1078-79 (fourth quotation), G. B. Latigue to Leroy Pope Walker, June 21, 1861, reel 4, frames 235-36 (fifth quotation), and H. V. Keep to Walker, July 15, 1861, reel 5, frames 623-24 (sixth quotation), all in RG 109, M-437; Zack C. Waters, "Florida's Confederate Guerrillas: John W. Pearson and the Oklawaha Rangers," Florida Historical Quarterly, 70 (October 1991), 133-49.

(18) David Paul Smith, Frontier Defense in the Civil War: Texas' Rangers and Rebels (College Station, Tex., 1992), 3-20, 57-58 (first quotation); Official Records, Set. I, Vol. IV, 115-16 (second and third quotations); Solomons scrapbook, p. 60 (fourth and fifth quotations); Thomas W. Cutrer, Ben McCulloch and the Frontier Military Tradition (Chapel Hill and London, 1993), 257-61; Scarborough, ed., Diary of Edmund Ruffin, II, 60, 62, 65; Crist et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson Davis, VII, 219; B. F. Terry to P. G. T. Beauregard, July 2, 1861, reel 4, frame 1064, A. H. Canedo to Leroy Pope Walker, April 30, 1861, reel 2, frame 681 (sixth quotation), William D. O'Daniel to Jefferson Davis, June 17, 1861, reel 4, frame 513, all in RG 109, M-437; C. W. Raines, ed., Six Decades in Texas, or Memoirs of Francis Richard Lubbock (Austin, Tex., 1900), 314-17, 324-25; Dumond, ed., Southern Editorials on Secession, 513 (seventh quotation).

(19) Fellman, Inside War, vi (first quotation); Robert L. Kerby, Kirby Smith's Confederacy: The Trans-Mississippi South, 1863-1865 (New York and London, 1972), 46; George T. Maddox, Hard Trials and Tribulations of an Old Confederate Soldier (Van Buren, Ark., 1897), 11-12 (second quotation); Joseph M. Bailey, "Memoirs of Captain J. M. Bailey," typescript (Special Collections Division, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville); Drury Connally to Ann Kilgore Connally, June 28, 1862, War Letters of Drury Connally, Trans-Mississippi Research Group Collection (Special Collections Division, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville) (third quotation); Daniel E. Sutherland, "Guerrillas: The Real War in Arkansas," in Anne J. Bailey and Daniel E. Sutherland, eds., Civil War Arkansas: Beyond Battles and Leaders Fayetteville, Ark., 2000), 136.

(20) Crist et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson Davis, IX, 10 (first quotation); R. H. Williams, With the Border Ruffians: Memories of the Far West, 1852-1868, edited by E. W. Williams (London and New York, 1907), 303 (second quotation). This stated desire to defend homes and families supports the "relative deprivation" theory of Don R. Bowen, "Guerrilla War in Western Missouri, 1862-1865: Historical Extensions of the Relative Deprivation Hypothesis," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 19 (January 1977), 30-51, although Bowen's emphasis on prosperous, slaveholding families would not fit all parts of the South. Stephen V. Ash, Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 1860-1870: War and Peace in the Upper South (Baton Rouge and London, 1988), 148-51, also stresses the role of guerrillas as protectors of their neighborhoods. Here, too, is where Owsley's emphasis on "local defense" provides some insight, although by stressing the efforts of the states to hoard arms and raise "regular" troops, Owsley misses the vital role assigned to individuals in irregular forces. For example, in looking at Arkansas, he cites the pages of a report that emphasized the struggle between Richmond and Little Rock over control of troops in the state, but he fails to consider the section of that same report devoted to the operations of Confederate guerrillas. Compare Owsley, "Local Defense and the Overthrow of the Confederacy," 501-2, to Official Records, Set. I, Vol. XIII, 29-32 and 33-36.

(21) Phillip S. Paludan, "The American Civil War Considered as a Crisis in Law and Order," American Historical Review, 77 (October 1972), 1013-34; Sarah Ann Tillinghast to brother, July 31, 1863, Tillinghast Family Papers (Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.) (quotation). For the case of the American Revolution see the following essays in Hoffman et al., eds., Uncivil War: Jeffrey J. Crow, "Liberty Men and Loyalists: Disorder and Disaffection in the North Carolina Backcountry," 125-78; Emory G. Evans, "Trouble in the Backcountry: Disaffection in Southwest Virginia during the American Revolution," 179-212; and Edward J. Cashin, "`But Brothers, It Is Our Land We Are Talking About': Winners and Losers in the Georgia Backcountry," 240-75. For a band of Unionist guerrillas who thought in similar terms see Kenneth C. Barnes, "The Williams Clan: Mountain Farmers and Union Fighters in North Central Arkansas," in Bailey and Sutherland, eds., Civil War Arkansas, 155-75.

(22) Fellman, Inside War, 52-54, 62-65, 138-39, 184-92; Charles W. Andrews to Anna Robinson, June 23, [1861], Charles Wesley Andrews Papers (Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.) (first quotation); James E. Love to Molly, August 28, 1862, James Edwin Love Papers (Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis); Cincinnati Times, September 18, 1861, quoted in Richard O. Curry and F. Gerald Ham, eds., "The Bushwhackers' War: Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in West Virginia," Civil War History, 10 (December 1964), 418 (second quotation).

(23) Fellman, Inside War, 176 (first quotation); Stephen V. Ash, When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill and London, 1995), 125-27, 129-30; the several essays in Kenneth W. Noe and Shannon H. Wilson, eds., The Civil War in Appalachia: Collected Essays (Knoxville, 1997), and in Sutherland, ed., Guerrillas, Unionists, and Violence on the Confederate Home Front; "Discussion of Jayhawkers," Dandridge McRae Papers (Arkansas History Commission and State Archives, Little Rock) (second quotation). The theme of community control is most consistently applied outside the border states by Jonathan Dean Sarris in "`Hellish Deeds ... in a Christian Land': Southern Mountain Communities at War, 1861-1865" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Georgia, 1998).

(24) Fellman, Inside War, 97-112, offers an insightful description of the ambivalence displayed by Confederate leaders about the war in Missouri.

(25) William B. Skelton, An American Profession of Arms: The Army Officer Corps, 1784-1861 (Lawrence, Kans., 1992), 167-72; Russell F. Weigley, The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1991), 538; Bruce Allardice, "West Points of the Confederacy: Southern Military Schools and the Confederate Army," Civil War History, 43 (December 1997), 310-31; Higginbotham, "Martial Spirit in the Antebellum South," 16-19, 24-25; John K. Mahon, History of the Militia and the National Guard (New York and London, 1983), 78-96.

(26) Antoine Henri de Jomini, The Art of War, trans. G. H. Mendell and W. P. Craighill (Philadelphia, 1862), 29 (quotation); W. F. P. Napier, History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France (6 vols.; London and New York, 1828-1840); Jay Luvaas, The Education of an Army: British Military Thought, 1815-1940 (Chicago, 1964), 24-26; Beringer et al., Why the South Lost the Civil War, 39-52; Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (Urbana, Chicago, and London, 1983), 12-14, 21-24. For samples of antebellum military manuals and memoirs that treated guerrilla warfare see Walter Laqueur, ed., The Guerrilla Reader: A Historical Anthology (Philadelphia, 1977), 13-96; and Gerard Chaliand, ed., The Art of War in World History: From Antiquity to the Nuclear Age (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1994), 653-70. Christopher Bassford, Clausewitz in English: The Reception of Clausewitz in Britain and America, 1815-1945 (New York and Oxford, 1994), 50-57, challenges the old assumption that Clausewitz was unknown to antebellum Americans, but he acknowledges that the evidence is, at best, inconclusive. In any event, Clausewitz concluded his observations on guerrilla warfare, written in 1832, with this admission: "This discussion has been less an objective analysis than a groping for the truth. The reason is that this sort of warfare is not as yet very common." Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, 1976), 483.

(27) Ulrich B. Phillips, ed., "The Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb," in Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1911 (2 vols.; Washington, D.C., 1913), II, 577 (first quotation), 628 (second quotation); Crist et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson Davis, IX, 212 (third quotation); Fitzhugh, "The Times and the War," 2 (fourth quotation).

(28) John M. Gates, "Indians and Insurrectos: The US Army's Experience with Insurgency," Parameters: Journal of the U.S. Army War College, 13 (March 1983), 59-68; Emory M. Thomas, Robert E. Lee: A Biography (New York and London, 1995), 136-37, 167-68, 184 (first quotation on p. 167); Skelton, American Profession of Arms, 306-12, 318-25, 331 (second quotation), 345-46; James M. McCaffrey, Army of Manifest Destiny: The American Soldier in the Mexican War, 1846-1848 (New York and London, 1992), 194 (third quotation); Michael Fellman, The Making of Robert E. Lee (New York, 2000), 224-25; Gary W. Gallagher, ed., "`We Are Our Own Trumpeters': Robert E. Lee Describes Winfield Scott's Campaign to Mexico City," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 95 (July 1987), 369 (fourth quotation), 371 (fifth quotation).

(29) Gallagher, ed., "`We Are Our Own Trumpeters,'" 373-74 (Lee quotations); Winfield Scott, Memoirs of Lieut.-General Scott (2 vols.; New York, 1864), II, 574 (Scott quotations); Grimsley, Hard Hand of War, 21-22. The most recent biography of Scott emphasizes the general's largely successful efforts to contain the guerrilla war by pacifying Mexican noncombatants, but it does not discuss Scott's retaliation against the guerrillas themselves. See Timothy D. Johnson, Winfield Scott: The Quest for Military Glory (Lawrence, Kans., 1998), 167-69, 186-89, 194-95, 235.

(30) William J. Cooper Jr., Jefferson Davis, American (New York, 2000), 118-19; K. Jack Bauer, The Mexican War, 1846-1848 (New York and London, 1974), 220-24 (second quotation on p. 221); Grady McWhiney, "Jefferson Davis and the Art of War," Civil War History, 21 (June 1975), 105, 106, 108-9, 111-12; Crist et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson Davis, III, 203, 278 (first quotation), and VIII, 114-15 (third quotation on p. 115).

(31) E. Merton Coulter, The Confederate States of America, 1861-1865 (Baton Rouge, 1950), 62-67; Rable, Confederate Republic, 112-13, 120-21; Thomas, Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience, 16-17, 107-8; Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation: 1861-1865 (New York and other cities, 1979), 30-31; Fellman, Inside War, v-vi; Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge and London, 1988), 32-40; Paul D. Escott, After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism (Baton Rouge and London, 1978), 100-101; Mark E. Neely Jr., Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism (Charlottesville and London, 1999), 7-10.

(32) Thomas, Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience, 109-10 (first quotation on p. 109); Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II, book 3, chap. 23 (second quotation); Ricardo A. Herrera, "Self-Governance and the American Citizen as Soldier, 1775-1861," Journal of Military History, 65 (January 2001), 21-23, 35-39; Coulter, Confederate States of America, 329-30 (third quotation on p. 330 n. 49).

(33) George M. Fredrickson, Why the Confederacy Did Not Fight a Guerrilla War After the Fall of Richmond: A Comparative View (Gettysburg, Pa., 1996), 27-29; McDonnell, "Popular Mobilization and Political Culture in Revolutionary Virginia," 950, 955 (quotation); Thomas, Robert E. Lee, 79-80, 109-10, 172-73; Fellman, Making of Robert E. Lee, 218, 224-25.

(34) Official Records, Ser. IV, Vol. I, 117, 249, 765-67; Crist et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson Davis, VII, 201 (first quotation); A. T. Bledsoe to A. D. Prentiss, August 10, 1861, in Letters Sent by the Confederate Secretary of War, War Department Collection of Confederate Records, Record Group 109, Microform 522 (National Archives, Washington, D.C.) (second quotation), hereinafter cited as RG 109, M-522. Volunteers, such as Benjamin Terry, were occasionally allowed to operate as independent "scouts" but never as guerrillas or partisans. For the frustration these restrictions caused men who expected to be turned loose against the enemy, see the correspondence involving Boykin's Independent Company of Mounted Rangers of South Carolina: William Burdell and others to Alexander H. Boykin, July 28, 1861, and Alexander H. Boykin to wife, July 6, 1861, both in Folder 16, Boykin Family Papers #78, SHC.

(35) Official Records, Ser. IV, Vol. I, 579 (first five quotations); John Q. Winfield to wife, June 30, 1861, in John Q. Winfield Papers #1293, SHC (sixth quotation); James A. Seddon to Thomas Ball, June 15, 1863, RG 109, M-522.

(36) Official Records, Ser. I, Vol. II, 195-97 (quotation on p. 196). See also Curry and Ham, eds., "Bushwhackers' War," 416-33.

(37) Official Records, Set. II, Vol. I, 234-35, 237, 242-43 (Halleck quotation); Skelton, American Profession of Arms, 318-25 (second quotation on p. 320); Bauer, Mexican War, 223-24, 269, 334-35.

(38) Kerby, "Why the Confederacy Lost," 327-30, 340-43; Gallagher, Confederate War, 144-46. Some historians also suggest that the chaos attendant to a guerrilla war would have played havoc with slavery, and that for this reason, too, Confederate leaders rejected the strategy. However, as reasonable as this sounds, no one has produced any evidence to support the theory. See William L. Barney, Flawed Victory: A New Perspective on the Civil War (New York and Washington, D.C., 1975), 18; Reid Mitchell, "The Perseverance of the Soldiers," in Gabor S. Boritt, ed., Why the Confederacy Lost (New York and Oxford, 1992), 124-25; Gary W. Gallagher, "How Should Americans Understand the Civil War?" North & South, 2 (March 1999), 16-17; and Gallagher, Confederate War, 148-50. Michael Fellman, the only historian to treat the subject in a substantial way, seems to agree that guerrilla warfare would have disrupted slavery, but he does not distinguish between the interaction of slaves and guerrillas and the fate of slavery in Rebel-occupied areas. Fellman, Inside War, 65-73. Investigation of the subject warrants more attention than it can receive here, but one could argue that slavery was most seriously threatened when Union troops entered an area unopposed; and some evidence suggests that guerrillas and local units, like home guards and militiamen, could serve as effective policing agencies. See Crist et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson Davis, VIII, 263, 451, IX, 320, and X, 87; Thomas Ball to Jefferson Davis, May 28, 1863, RG 109, M-437, reel 82, frames 917-19; Armstead L. Robinson, "In the Shadow of Old John Brown: Insurrection Anxiety and Confederate Mobilization, 1861-1863," Journal of Negro History, 65 (Autumn 1980), 286-87; John K. Bettersworth, Confederate Mississippi: The People and Policies of a Cotton State in Wartime (Baton Rouge, 1943), 64-65.

(39) Carl E. Grant, "Partisan Warfare, Model 1861-65," Military Review, 38 (November 1958), 42 (first quotation); Official Records, Ser. IV, Vol. I, 532 (second quotation); Crist et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson Davis, VII, 434 (third and fourth quotations); Albert Castel, "The Guerrilla War, 1861-1865," Special Issue, Civil War Times Illustrated, 13 (October 1974), 9 (fifth quotation).

(40) "Proceedings of First Confederate Congress: First Session Completed, Second Session in Part," Southern Historical Society Papers, 45 (new ser., 7) (May 1925), 122 (first quotation); Official Records, Ser. IV, Vol. I, 1094-95 (subsequent quotations on p. 1095). The Federal protest against "rebel barbarities" by guerrillas became complicated in spring 1862 by a U.S. congressional hearing into the mistreatment of Union prisoners and the wounded by Confederate soldiers and the desecration of the Union dead and graves after the battle of First Bull Run. Then, too, reports circulated after the battle of Pea Ridge that Cherokee Indians, fighting under the Rebel flag, had employed the "tomahawk, war-club, and scalping knife" against Union troops. Senate Reports, 37 Cong., 3 Sess., No. 108: Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War (3 vols.; Serials 1152-54, Washington, D.C., 1863), III, 449-57 (first quotation on p. 449); William L. Shea and Earl J. Hess, Pea Ridge: Civil War Campaign in the West (Chapel Hill and London, 1992), 320 (second quotation).

(41) "Proceedings of First Confederate Congress," 122, 128-29 (quotations); Ezra J. Warner and W. Buck Yearns, Biographical Register of the Confederate Congress (Baton Rouge, 1975), 38, 195, 230.

(42) "Proceedings of First Confederate Congress," 153, 160-61 (first, second, and fourth quotations); Warner and Yearns, Biographical Register of the Confederate Congress, 49-50, 256-57, 265 (third quotation).

(43) Official Records, Ser. IV, Vol. I, 1151-52, Vol. II, 26, 71-72, 113. Interestingly, Federal conscription sometimes contributed to the Rebel guerrilla force, too. A Federal naval commander complained that the number of guerrillas in eastern Kentucky mushroomed when the U.S. government attempted to conscript men in that region. "They ... say if they must fight at all they will fight for Jeff Davis," he reported; "consequently they have run from the draft and gone into the guerrilla service." Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (30 vols.; Washington, D.C., 1894-1922), Ser. I, Vol. XXVI, 384. Ash, When the Yankees Came, 48, believes deserters strengthened guerrilla bands in all parts of the South.

(44) Andrew Brown, "The First Mississippi Partisan Rangers, C.S.A.," Civil War History, 1 (December 1955), 375; W. S. Compton to George W. Randolph, June 7, 1862, reel 38, frame 1193-96 (first and second quotations), E. G. Clay to Randolph, September 24, 1862, reel 40, frame 333 (third quotation), John O. Sullivan to Randolph, August 17, 1862, reel 72, frame 313-14, all in RG 109, M-437; Official Records, Ser. I, Vol. XIII, 835 (fourth quotation). Ash, When the Yankees Came, 48, suggests that partisans were more firmly attached to the army than to their communities, but the strength of those ties seems to have depended heavily on the threat to those communities.

(45) J. A. Cross to George W. Randolph, April 8, 1862, reel 38, frame 178-79, Samuel L. Graham to Randolph, April 20, 1862, reel 93, frame 107-8 (first quotation), B. M. Edney to James A. Seddon, December 8, 1863, reel 90, frame 874 (second and third quotations), all in RG 109, M-437; W. A. Campbell to Joseph E. Brown, February 26, 1863, G. C. Carmichael to Brown, August 3, 1862 (fourth and fifth quotations), both in Governor's Correspondence (Georgia Department of Archives and History, Atlanta).

(46) James A. Ramage, Gray Ghost: The Life of Col. John Singleton Mosby (Lexington, Ky., 1999), 105-6; Official Records, Ser. I, Vol. XII, Pt. III, 952-53, Ser. I, Vol. XXIX, Pt. II, 649-50 (first quotation), Ser. IV, Vol. II, 1003 (second quotation); [Citizens of Whitfield County, Georgia] to Joseph E. Brown, December 2, 1862, Governor's Correspondence (third and fourth quotations). A Texan urged his brother to resign from McNeill's Rangers, in part, because of the low reputation of partisan bands. See Edward B. Williams, ed., Rebel Brothers: The Civil War Letters of the Truehearts (College Station, Tex., 1995), 131-32. Cooling, Fort Donelson's Legacy, 65, calls the failed Partisan Ranger Act "one of the Confederacy's missed opportunities."

(47) Eugene Marshall diary, May 8, 1863, Eugene Marshall Papers (Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.). For a similar phase in the South's partisan conflict during the American Revolution see Hoffman et al., eds., Uncivil War, especially Rachel N. Klein, "Frontier Planters and the American Revolution: The South Carolina Backcountry, 1775-1782," 37-69; A. Roger Ekirch, "Whig Authority and Public Order in Backcountry North Carolina, 1776-1783," 99-125; and Crow, "Liberty Men and Loyalists," 125-78. Grimsley, Hard Hand of War, 112, proposes four categories of Confederate guerrillas, three of which correspond roughly to the groups identified in this essay.

(48) Ella Lonn, Desertion during the Civil War (New York, 1928; reprint, Lincoln, Nebr., and London, 1998), 62-76; Thomas B. Cooper to Thomas H. Watts, June 13, 1864, Alabama Governor Papers (Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery); P. Hagan et al. [Citizens of Lee County, Virginia] to Jefferson Davis, October 22, 1862, RG 109, M-437, reel 53, frames 897-900. It is tempting to characterize this third guerrilla group as "social bandits," as defined by Eric J. Hobsbawm in Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (2d ed.; New York, 1963), 13-29, and Bandits (rev. ed.; New York, 1981), 17-29, but the "primitive" aspect of Hobsbawm's social banditry, particularly its association with class conflict, is not a comfortable fit for the United States. The fact is that all three manifestations of southern guerrilla warfare could be brutish under the fight circumstances. See Fellman, Inside War, 259-63, 308 n. 49; Don R. Bowen, "Quantrill, James, Younger, et al.: Leadership in a Guerrilla Movement, Missouri, 1861-1865," Military Affairs, 41 (February 1977), 42-48; Bowen, "Guerrilla War in Western Missouri," 30-51; and David Williams, Rich Man's War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley (Athens, Ga., and London, 1998), 141-50. A more likely framework might be found in Samuel Brunk, "`The Sad Situation of Civilians and Soldiers': The Banditry of Zapatismo in the Mexican Revolution," American Historical Review, 101 (April 1996), 331-53, which, while dealing with a very different culture from that of the American South and a very different "revolution" from that of the American Civil War, does downplay Hobsbawm's class dimension, adds an element of political awareness, and suggests roughly the same three types of guerrilla activity--with the appropriate overlapping between groups--presented here. See, too, Richard W. Slatta, ed., Bandidos: The Varieties of Latin American Banditry (New York, Westport, Conn., and London, 1987), esp. Miguel Izard and Slatta, "Banditry and Social Conflict on the Venezuelan Llanos," 33-47; Billy Jaynes Chandler, "Brazilian Cangaceiros as Social Bandits: A Critical Appraisal," 97-112; and Gonzalo G. Sanchez and Donny Meertens, "Political Banditry and the Colombian Violencia," 151-70.

(49) John C. Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney, The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War (Chapel Hill and London, 2000), 110 (first quotation), 125 (second quotation), 137 (third quotation), but see generally chap. 5. See also Wayne K. Durrill, War of Another Kind: A Southern Community in the Great Rebellion (New York and Oxford, 1990), 166-85; and Paludan, Victims, for Shelton Laurel.

(50) Ash, When the Yankees Came, 50-56, 63-67; Grimsley, Hard Hand of War, 111-19; Daniel E. Sutherland, "Abraham Lincoln, John Pope, and the Origins of Total War," Journal of Military History, 56 (October 1992), 567-86; Kenneth W. Noe, "Exterminating Savages: The Union Army and Mountain Guerrillas in Southern West Virginia, 1861-1862," in Noe and Wilson, eds., Civil War in Appalachia, 104-30. In a broader context, Weigley, Age of Battles, 500, stresses that guerrilla warfare inevitably leads to "breaking almost all the rules usually limiting the violence of war."

(51) Adjutant General's Office, General Orders Affecting the Volunteer Force, 1863 (Washington, D.C., 1864), 64-87, esp. 77-78; Official Records, Ser. III, Vol. II, 301-9 (quotation on p. 304); Burris M. Carnahan, "Lincoln, Lieber and the Laws of War: The Origins and Limits of the Principle of Military Necessity," American Journal of International Law, 92 (April 1998), 213-31; Paludan, Victims, 87-88; Fellman, Inside War, 81-97; Sutherland, "Abraham Lincoln, John Pope, and the Origins of Total War," 584-85.

(52) Official Records, Ser. I, Vol. XIII, 726-27, 769-70, and Ser. I, Vol. XV, 519-20; Crist et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson Davis, VIII, 310 (Davis quotations), and IX, 110-11, 229-30; "Proceedings of First Confederate Congress," 284 (last quotation).

(53) Sutherland, "Guerrillas," 144; Louis Fusz diary, August 4, 1864 (Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis) (first quotation); Frank G. Ruffin to Thomas Ruffin, December 2, 1863, in J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, ed., The Papers of Thomas Ruffin (4 vols.; Raleigh, N.C., 1920), III, 348 (second quotation).

(54) Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York, 1991), 107-9; Michael Fellman, Citizen Sherman: A Life of William Tecumseh Sherman (New York, 1995), 139-48; John F. Marszalek, Sherman: A Soldier's Passion for Order (New York and other cities, 1993), 194-96, 246-50; Roy Morris Jr., Sheridan: The Life and Wars of General Phil Sheridan (New York, 1992), 205-9, 229-31; Michael G. Mahon, The Shenandoah Valley, 1861-1865: The Destruction of the Granary of the Confederacy (Mechanicsburg, Pa., 1999), 110-12, 114-17, 126-27; James M. McPherson, "From Limited to Total War, 1861-1865," in McPherson, Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War (New York and Oxford, 1996), 66-86; Official Records, Ser. I, Vol. XVII, Pt. I, 144-45, and Pt. II, 261-62, 272-74, 279-81.

(55) Ramage, Gray Ghost, 134-36; "Proceedings of First Confederate Congress," 191, 253; "Proceedings of First Confederate Congress: Second Session in Part," Southern Historical Society Papers, 46 (new ser., 8) (January 1928), 4-8, 48, 184; Frank E. Vandiver, ed., "Proceedings of the First Confederate Congress: Fourth Session, 7 December 1863-18 February 1864," Southern Historical Society Papers, 50 (new ser., 12) (October 1953), 401,427-28, 440, 450; Official Records, Ser. I, Vol. XXXIII, 1081-83 (first and second quotation on p. 1081; third quotation on p. 1082), 1107, 1124, 1252 (fourth quotation); Official Records, Ser. IV, Vol. III, 194.

(56) Kerby, "Why the Confederacy Lost," 332-35; Dunbar Rowland, ed., Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers and Speeches (10 vols.; Jackson, Miss., 1923), VI, 530 (quotation); Anthony James Joes, America and Guerrilla Warfare (Lexington, Ky., 2000), 69-70, 97-101; William B. Feis, "Jefferson Davis and the `Guerrilla Option': A Reexamination," in Mark Grimsley and Brooks D. Simpson, eds., The Collapse of the Confederacy (Lincoln, Nebr., and London, 2001), 104-28; Jay Winik, April 1865: The Month That Saved America (New York, 2001), 146-64; William C. Davis, An Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government (New York, San Diego, and London, 2001), 80-83; Official Records, Ser. I, Vol. XLVII, Pt. III, 821-34. For Lee's thoughts on the futility of a post-Appomattox guerrilla campaign see Gary W. Gallagher, ed., Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander (Chapel Hill and London, 1989), 530-33; and Fellman, Making of Robert E. Lee, 223-27.

(57) Fellman, Inside War, 112.

MR. SUTHERLAND is a professor of history at the University of Arkansas.