Guerilla Warfare

Guerrilla Warfare, Slavery, and the Hopes of the Confederacy
Author(s): MARK E. NEELY JR.

Source: Journal of the Civil War Era , Vol. 6, No. 3 (SEPTEMBER 2016), pp. 376-412
Published by: University of North Carolina Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26070430
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mark e. neely jr.
Guerrilla Warfare, Slavery,

and the Hopes of the Confederacy
In 1861, on the very eve of the Civil War, Edmund Ruffin published a
speculative novel titled Anticipations of the Future: To Serve as Lessons
for the Present Time, in the Form of Extracts of Letters from an English
Resident of the United States, to the London Times, from 1864 to 1870.1
It has never quite enjoyed the attention from historians that it deserves.
Ruffin did fairly well in anticipating the future. He foresaw urban riots
in the North during a civil war with the South, though he thought they
would arise from class consciousness rather than objections to conscrip-
tion. He predicted that the states of the Old Northwest would eventually
cleave to the southern confederacy, and indeed anxieties about that possi-
bility were often expressed during the actual Civil War of 1861–65. On his
most important point, namely, that guerrilla warfare would lead to south-
ern independence, he was proved wrong, but he looked hopefully to see its
embrace by Confederate society throughout the war.2
What is most significant about the book is simply that Ruffin was think-
ing about the future in 1861, about what might happen if the South really
seceded, trying to figure out how the slave states might gain independence
despite the North’s great military advantages. It is difficult to find any sub-
stantial consideration of those questions in books or pamphlets published
in the South on the eve of secession; arguments over the constitutional-
ity of the act of secession itself dominated the polemical literature of the
day. Emory M. Thomas, after writing many works on the Confederacy, still
wonders at the lack of foresight displayed in the immediate origins of the
Civil War and raises the question, “Both sides, it seems, decided to go to
war because they could not—or would not—calculate the cost of their deci-
sions.”3 Thus Ruffin stands out. Say what one will about his amateurish
exercise in futurist fiction, he was thinking about the apparently unthink-
able: what would happen if the South really did secede from the Union
and faced a war with the North, which was obviously greatly superior in
population, transportation, and manufacturing. The dangerous resort to
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secession needed some plausible strategy for success, and Ruffin had at last
figured out what it was: guerrilla warfare.
To read the confident prose Ruffin dreamed up to show how guerrilla
warfare would work for southern independence is doubly surprising,
coming as it did from the pen of an ardent proslavery apologist. Current
wisdom on the subject suggests something altogether different, that the
Confederacy did not dare consider a self-conscious adoption of guerrilla
warfare as a strategy for military victory from fear for the security of slav-
ery amid the disorder of irregular war. The most forthright statement of
that view comes from Gary W. Gallagher, but other historians agree, and
all who have considered the idea have at the very least taken it seriously.
“The threat of such chaos in a slave-based society,” Gallagher argued, “stood
as the most important obstacle to a Confederate policy of guerrilla war.”
“Both late antebellum fears of insurrection,” he added, “and behavior when
confronting Union invaders during the war strongly suggest that white
southerners would not have countenanced a national guerrilla strategy in
1861.” Guerrilla warfare defied “the models of earlier wars to which white
Southerners looked for guidance.” Guerrilla warfare was only “marginally
related to their martial tradition.” “Announcement of such a strategy in
1861,” he said, would not “have prompted an enthusiastic response.”4
The proposition has attracted the attention of some of the most impor-
tant writers on the war: in addition to Gallagher, George M. Fredrickson,
Reid Mitchell, and the writing team of Herman Hattaway, Richard
Beringer, Archer Jones, and William N. Still. Considering why the
Confederacy lost the Civil War, Reid Mitchell, in 1992, said, “In 1861 the
Confederacy did not choose to fight a guerrilla war—because, in large part,
it did not seem possible to fight a guerrilla war and keep slavery intact.”
Coauthors Hattaway, Jones, Beringer, and Still, in a five-hundred-page
consideration of Why the South Lost the Civil War, pointed to several fac-
tors in the rejection of guerrilla warfare as a strategy for victory. In the end
there was no embrace of it as a last-ditch option because, “whether suc-
cessful or not, a prolonged guerrilla war presented the specter of a popu-
lation of former slaves slipping all remaining bonds of social control and
would inevitably involve black participation in some form.” Even surren-
der seemed better than that. George M. Fredrickson took the proposition
very seriously. In 1996 he explained Why the Confederacy Did Not Fight a
Guerrilla War After the Fall of Richmond: A Comparative View, examin-
ing South African and Confederate history together. He began with the
ready assumption that “it might appear . . . that the racial anxieties of the
Boers were at least as acute as those of the Confederates and that they had
equally strong reasons to eschew guerrilla warfare on the ground that it
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would offer increased opportunities for the blacks to escape from white
control and threaten the security and property of their former masters or
overlords.” And yet the Boers scattered into the bush in the end to resist the
British, and the Confederates did not do so in the end to resist the Yankees.
Fredrickson saw the variable in class and not race. The haughty planter
elite feared turning the slaveless yeomanry loose to wage war without firm
control from above. The middle-class Boers, naturally, were not fearful of
class warfare.5
Obviously the reason the Confederacy did not adopt a systematic grand
strategy of guerrilla warfare is that the generals did not order the armies
to do so. There was a vast gulf between the expectations of the romance-
reading public and the practical decisions of the military command. The
most important of the military brass had been schooled at West Point, and
the U.S. Military Academy did not prepare its officer corps for careers in
bushwhacking. Military theory was not a major focus of the curriculum
(engineering was), and what the cadets learned about strategy was static
for decades. As the historian of the academy expresses it, Dennis Hart
Mahan “was the nation’s leading theorist of war. To his official title, profes-
sor of civil and military engineering, Mahan often added the words ‘and of
the Art of War.’ His brief text, Advanced Guard, Outpost and Detachment
Service of Troops with the Essential Principles of Strategy, commonly
known simply as Outposts, guided the military thought of two generations
of America’s professional soldiers.”6
Mahan was an American citizen as well as a military theorist, and he
left a place for the traditions of men who fought in irregular ways. Mahan
called them “riflemen,” for his book was published before the whole army
was equipped with rifles instead of smoothbore muskets. He distinguished
them from “infantry” and said that they partook, “when properly construed,
more of the character of partisan than of regular troops; being chosen only
from that portion of a population whose habits lead them to a daily use of
fire-arms, and give them an unerring aim.” In certain situations, he said,
they were valuable and struck fear of “this lurking, and often invisible foe”
into the enemy.7
That was all, apparently. By the time of the Civil War, the American
officer class was unprepared in theory or practice for extensive partisan or
guerrilla warfare. That was readily evident in the North. After Gen. Henry
W. Halleck, who himself wrote a treatise on military theory, encoun-
tered guerrilla warfare when in command in Missouri, he returned to
Washington understanding the want of familiarity with the subject among
America’s military officers. He asked Francis Lieber to prepare a paper on
the legal concept of guerrilla warfare, and the resulting Guerrilla Parties
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Considered with Reference to the Laws and Usages of War appeared in
August 1862. It covered legalities only; Lieber was no military tactician
or strategist. For the American officer corps, northern and southern alike,
guerrillas were a problem, not an opportunity.8
Ruffin, however, had no fears over, distaste for, or inhibitions about
guerrilla warfare, and he was not alone. There was a powerful tradition
of imaginative fiction written before the war and abundant expressions of
opinion printed in newspapers during the war as well as other evidence to
show the South’s infatuation with partisan warfare as a way of evening the
odds against the North. Those who expressed these opinions appear never
to have worried about the effects of such a strategy on slavery.
When such visionaries expressed their fond dreams of the success of
guerrilla warfare, they were not spelling out alternative grand strategies
as in a working white paper or a staff memo. It would not have done them
much good, given the outlook of the generals. Still, what the visionaries
and others who had high but dreamy hopes for irregular and partisan war-
fare revealed is important to history. Their hopes were expressions and
embodiments of Confederate nationalism. It was not simply that they
were hopeful of success but that they saw irregular warfare as their way to
success. That myth of the partisan or militia tradition trusted to the ordi-
nary farmer with a rifle to prevail over Europe’s military professionalism
and discipline, to embody the best of America’s individualistic and demo-
cratic frontier experience, to honor the South’s version of Revolutionary
tradition, to rely with confidence on the sturdy yeomanry to defend their
white republic, and thereby to spurn authoritarian answers or aristocratic
traditions. Underneath the myth of partisan warfare lay a nationalist
tradition of particular and, to some modern readers perhaps, unfamiliar
Confederate values.
The names of the early writers who established a tradition of mythic
confidence in irregular warfare for the South read like an honor roll of
antebellum southern intellectuals. Indeed, they constitute the heart of the
“Sacred Circle” of proslavery intellectuals first identified and described by
historian Drew Gilpin Faust: William Gilmore Simms, Nathaniel Beverley
Tucker, and Edmund Ruffin.9
William Gilmore Simms, the South Carolina literary sectionalist, wrote
a novel, The Partisan, published in 1835, and a biography of Francis
Marion, published in 1844.10 Together, these works helped create a vigor-
ous southern myth of partisan warfare.
Simms’s novel was a romance, what we would call today historical fic-
tion. It featured real characters and events from the American Revolution,
adding an elaborate structure of fictional plot and characters to make the
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history more palatable. Simms dealt with the events of the year 1780, after
the British had moved the war to the South and occupied South Carolina.
The historic characters were Francis Marion, the South Carolina parti-
san who gained legendary fame as the “Swamp Fox”; the American gen-
eral Horatio Gates, of whom Simms was sharply critical; and the enemy
Banastre Tarleton, the great leader of the southern back country Tories.
Most of the book is set in the Cypress Swamp, where South Carolina parti-
sans, led by the fictional Maj. Robert Singleton, fight the British and await
the arrival of the Continental American forces from the North, under Gates.
Although the Continental regulars are not great in number, it is assumed
that their presence will cause a general uprising against the British and
Tories in South Carolina.
Meanwhile, Major Singleton resists and perseveres. The partisans he
leads are common men and not regularly enlisted, but Singleton is not
himself one of them, exactly. Singleton “is a gentleman in the commis-
sion of Governor Rutledge.” He is embittered by the loss of his planta-
tion, “Hills,” to Tory incendiarism. Slaves and slavery are present in the
novel, but not as a problem. The partisans, for example, have an African
American cook.11 The British and their Tory allies steal slaves; the slaves
are not said to run away to join them. When plantations are disrupted by
enemy attack, it appears that most slaves flee to the countryside. Fear of
slave uprising amid the confused and disorderly circumstances seems not
to be a concern of the South Carolinians in this romance.
Simms makes clear what brought victory to the patriot cause in the
South: “This sort of warfare, small though it may appear, was at last trium-
phant. The successes of the whigs, during the whole period of the revolu-
tionary contest in the South, were almost entirely the result of the rapid,
unexpected movement—the sudden stroke made by the little troop, famil-
iar with its ground, knowing its object, and melting away at the approach
of a superior enemy, like so many dusky shadows, secure in the thousand
swamp recesses which surrounded them.” Simms tried to keep the level
of combat depicted in the book above that of savagery, and there were
“gleams of chivalry thrown athwart this somber waste of strife and blood-
shed, worthy of the middle ages.”12
Still, it is the ragged and common partisans, not the Continentals under
Horatio Gates, who save the day for South Carolina. The hero of Saratoga,
Gates has become overconfident and rash. He spurns the services of
Francis Marion, whom he sends off into the swamps on a side mission, and
marches his army into shattering defeat at the hands of Lord Cornwallis at
Camden. Since the book ends with this historical defeat, Simms promised
more volumes to come, but he repeated at the very end of this volume his
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attribution of victory to “the long and perilous warfare of the swamps—
kept up as it was, until, step by step, beaten to the Atlantic shores, the
invader fled to his ships, and left the country.”13
The lesson the southerners could take from this version of the American
Revolution in the South was not one that celebrated the lower social
classes, exactly. Their leaders are crucial, and the leaders get along with
the commoners but never cross the class line, as Simms made clear in a
scene in Singleton’s camp in the swamp:
The partisan commander had his word for all in the swamp—a word of
kind remark and pleasant encouragement. There were none unnoticed
by him in some way or another. . . . To all, the same information was con-
veyed—the same degree of confidence, seemingly, with nothing with-
held, was duly given; and the friendly bearing of the captain towards
his men, was rather that of an equal than of a superior. Yet there was
no familiarity between the parties. A certain calm, equable temper of
reserve, on his side, invariably restrained obtrusiveness. He smiled, but
never laughed with them. He stood, when he spoke to them; and always
rose for that purpose, if he had previously been sitting. His was that due
consideration of man, as an animal, that never permitted him to assume
any position which might expose him to the free embraces of those over
whom he had command.14
Along with this quiet retention of social distance came the imposition of
chivalry and restraint, and the novel is replete with instances in which sol-
diers are schooled in sparing their prisoners of war.
The most important lesson for secession, of course, was the lesson of all
successful guerrilla warfare, the accomplishment of military victory with
inferior numbers and resources. That was the important point made in
Simms’s description of Colonel Marion himself, as “the subtle ‘Swamp Fox,’
who, slender of form, and having but little confidence in his own physical
prowess, was never seen to use his sword in battle; gaining by stratagem
and unexpected enterprise those advantages which his usual inferiority
of force would never have permitted him to gain otherwise.”15 The parti-
sans are always outnumbered in their ambushes of the enemy. In short,
the South could win victories by partisan warfare despite inferior numbers
and resources, and, though it proved bloody and destructive of farms and
homes, the officers could keep that warfare well above the level of savagery.
Slavery remained generally secure.
Over the years, Simms’s romances on the American Revolution in
South Carolina, of which The Partisan was the first volume to appear, have
been variously interpreted, but one central point has been consistently
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overlooked: Simms meant to describe and celebrate partisan warfare.16
The introduction to the first edition of the book put it plainly: “The minor
events—the little ambuscade and sortie—the plans of fight—of forage—
of flight and safety—are all familiar features of the partisan warfare; and
the title of the work, indeed, will persuade the reader to look rather for a
true description of that mode of warfare, than for any consecutive story
comprising the fortunes of a single person.”17 In other words, whatever the
ambitions in the fictional and the mythical and even quasi-political realm
of sectionalism, Simms’s book was centrally concerned with partisan war-
fare, and that proved to be his most lasting and deeply ingrained contribu-
tion to southern mythology.
Nathaniel Beverley Tucker’s book, The Partisan Leader, first published
in 1836, was less artful than Simms’s, but it was written directly to the
purpose of proving the feasibility of independence after secession and war.
Indeed, a later edition, published in New York after the war began, saw
Tucker’s pioneering book as A Key to the Disunion Conspiracy.18 Tucker’s
purpose was more overtly political than Simms’s. And Tucker was not
much interested in history: he was interested in the future. He cast the
book in the future and gave it on the title page a fictitious publication
date of 1856. Thus The Partisan Leader told the history of a future event,
Virginia’s secession and successful struggle for independence from the
United States of many-term President Martin Van Buren. Simms’s book
was only pro-southern; Tucker’s was secessionist. From the perspective of
the Civil War, however, the books have a similar intellectual impact: they
make confidence in the utility of partisan warfare in the South a regional
commonplace and an explanation for how an outnumbered and undersup-
plied country could win its independence.
Tucker’s partisan leader, a character named Douglas Trevor, is also a
gentleman like Simms’s Major Singleton, and he leads men who “were all
chiefly clad in half-dressed buckskin” and are described as mountaineers.
Political corruption is the real enemy targeted (elsewhere) in the book, but
in the military actions described, partisan warfare is the antidote to the
army of the United States. At one point, a character says, “It seems that
all you want is a Marion, a Sumpter, or a Pickens?” The reply is that the
Virginians have one already, Douglas Trevor.19 Tucker presented the cus-
tomary image of partisan warfare as in harmony with nature:
the whole population of that warlike district [near Lynchburg, Virginia,]
were placed under a sort of organization, so that, while they pursued
their occupations of hunting or farming, they were prepared, at any
moment, to join an expedition or to resist an attack.
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. . . Douglas . . . soon became an expert woodsman, and an active
mountaineer. His first care was to select a place for a stationary camp.
For this purpose he chose a position strong by nature, which he made
nearly impregnable. He next provided horses enough to mount a part
of his corps. For these the rich herbage of the mountains afforded abun-
dant subsistence during the summer months. . . . Of provisions he had
plenty, though wanting many things deemed necessary in a regular
army. But the pure air of the mountains and the exercise of hunting
and scouting, preserved the health of the men, without tents, or salt, or
vinegar, or vegetables of any kind. Venison and beef, dried in the sun,
or over the fire by the process called jerking, was prepared in the sea-
son of abundance for winter use, and proved the best sort of food for
a marauding corps. Light, compact, and nutritious, there is no diet on
which a man can travel so far or fight so hard.
The partisans who inhabited so natural an environment resembled in

some respects nature’s warriors in America, the Native Americans:
It is impossible to conceive a military array, with less of the “pomp and

circumstance of war.” The horses were, for the most part, substantial,
and in substantial order. . . . The only arms were the rifle, knife, and
tomahawk, with their appropriate accompaniments of powder-horn,
charger, and pouch. Douglas, indeed, had a sword, and the few sabres
taken from the dragoons [in a previous action] had been distributed
among the principal men. But they were all too wise to encumber their
persons with these weapons, which might have been troublesome in
their mode of warfare. A strong loop of thick leather, stitched to the
skirt of the saddle, in front of the left knee, received the sword, the hilt
of which stood up above the pummel.20
An old Indian fighter, a broadly comic lower-class character named

Schwartz, gives an officer a lesson in “tictacs” that made reference to the
key event in American history for the myth of partisan warfare.
“I’m telling our boys,” continued Schwartz . . .”some of the lessons I

learned among the Shawnees. You see . . . the Captain is a regular officer,
built plum from the ground up; but for all that, he knows that all this is
true; and, before now, when he and I have been setting over the fire, at
night, he has told me about one Gineral Braddock, I think they called
him, that got his men shot all to pieces, and himself too, just because he
would not believe that there was any other way to fight but just his way.
Now, you see, sir, the reason why he was taken at an onplush was, that

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he was fighting agin Indians. Well, suppose we fight Indian-fashion;
will not that be pretty much the same thing? May be we an’t exactly up
to that, but we must do the best we can; for as to fighting the riglars just
in their own way, why they’ll beat us as long as the sun shines.
Tucker rushed his book to press, unfinished. But he had made his point.
The final action in the book, an ambush, is but a skirmish, but it shows the
way to the future and to southern independence. “Marksmen” described
as “mountaineers” play the key role in the rebels’ victory, ambushing the
enemy emerging from a defile in the mountains.21Tucker did not live to see
Virginia and other states attempt their independence. He died almost a
decade before secession. But The Partisan Leader spoke to the new age: an
edition of his book was published in Richmond in 1862.22
Edmund Ruffin’s rich descriptions of guerrilla warfare, written a quar-
ter century after The Partisan Leader, were fully the equals of Simms’s
and Tucker’s. Anticipations of the Future, which appeared in Richmond
just before the war began, has as its hero “a guerrilla officer,” identified
only as “J.M.” The action takes place in the future, during the presidency of
William H. Seward, who succeeds Abraham Lincoln and whose term com-
mences in 1865. After suffering years of northern tyranny and corruption,
southern states secede and war ensues. The plot hinges on the subsequent
military action. Though a guerrilla and in command of a small force, J.M.
is a West Point graduate and conducts his operations according to the rules
and customs of war in terms of taking prisoners. He is, however, also a
West Virginian (a native of Wheeling) and not a member of a first family
of Virginia from the Tidewater aristocracy. The action he conducts is not
a military set-piece in open field with glories attendant but an ambush,
pure and simple, made possible by treachery and insider information.
The battle takes place at night and involves derailing troop trains invad-
ing Virginia, a feat made possible by J.M.’s previous peacetime position
in management in the railroad company. The odds are very great against
the southerners in terms of numbers, but the exploitation of the mountain
terrain and surprise render the vastly larger and well-disciplined Union
forces subject to great slaughter. In short, the focus of the military action
in the book is on “extensive guerrilla operations” on the part of the South
against the northern invaders.23
When the scene in the book shifts to the West, the nature of warfare
depicted remains the same: guerrilla war waged against the advancing
United States army , in this instance at the Ohio River:
On the third day of the march . . . when the [United States] army had
advanced only twenty-five miles, altogether, enemies began to be felt,
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though they were rarely seen. The reports of the rifles were heard, as if
of single marksmen, from every place of concealment within the most
distant rifle range of the line of march. Unless of the very distant shots,
but few missed, and many were of deadly effect. Most of the balls so
sent were evidently from the rifles in ordinary use by the hunter of this
country, and were most probably then used by private individuals and
practiced hunters, who were shooting at soldiers for excitement and
pleasure, as they were accustomed to shoot deer, or bears and wolves.
To the influence of this excitement, and love of dangerous adventure,
were added the promptings of patriotism, and, to some extent also, the
love of gain. The improved military rifles of the best kind, which can be
aimed to good purpose at a man half a mile distant, and can kill at more
than a mile were highly prized and greatly coveted by all the hunters of
this country. There was no toil or service they would not go through to
obtain one of these much valued weapons. And among the most ready
means, one was to shoot the straggling federal soldier who carried a
rifle; and another, to join a volunteer company, and so to be armed with
such a rifle.24
In scenes like this one, Ruffin joined his vision of the future of the South to
familiar American myths of military superiority. The myth of the hunters
of Kentucky, whose rifles and marksmanship had been celebrated as the
key to Gen. Andrew Jackson’s victory over the British at New Orleans in
1815, proved readily adaptable to southern nationalism from the start.25
Ruffin was less concerned than Simms and Tucker with the aristocratic
qualifications of the officer leading the partisans. He paid attention to dis-
tinguishing social characteristics for the common soldiery. Here is a scene
from his imagined military campaign in Virginia:
The late temporary cessation of firing, and of all annoyance of the
invading army had been made by order of the commander of the mili-
tia army, and which order it was very difficult to persuade the hunter-
riflemen of the neighboring country to obey. The destruction of bridges,
and the show of offering battle, had been used to draw the regular army
into the most difficult ground, where its superiority in discipline, and its
artillery, would be of no value. And as soon as these ends were reached,
the whole power of the irregular force was put in action. No regular
battle, on open ground, was to be offered, or accepted, by any party of
the Virginians, whether large or small. But, on their march, every cover
or place of concealment was to be made use of for ambush, or to make
advantage of for firing on the enemy. The riflemen occupied every such
place along the line of the march of the regular army; and those of the

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organized companies who were armed with the improved rifles, could
make deadly shots at distances of more than half a mile. The rifles of the
regulars were all of this best kind, and could strike as far. But these were
usually fired from open and exposed positions, and directed against
adversaries rarely visible, and generally sheltered by rocks or trees. Such
generally was the kind of warfare carried on through every succeeding
day, if on the march. . . . [T]he Virginian General judged it proper to
avail himself of all his advantages; and if ever so sure of success in open
and regular conflict, he would not have so made the necessary sacrifice
of the valuable lives of his citizen soldiers, in a contest on equal terms
against the regulars, who, however useful as soldiers, were men of the
lowest and most worthless conditions.26
Ruffin thus differentiated the common soldiers of the two armies by a

southerner’s myth, a sort of military version of Thomas Jefferson’s pasto-
ralism. The southern soldier was a yeoman right out of Jefferson’s Notes
on the State of Virginia rather than a mere mountaineer hunter hoping to
get a new rifle off the body of one of his Federal victims. Now the yeoman
is armed with a rifle instead of the independent franchise alone. Ruffin
thus contrasted the Virginians in the army with the working classes of the
cities whom Jefferson had also feared. It was more important to Ruffin to
explain the trustworthiness of the southern irregular soldiery than to make
clear the social distance maintained by the officers from their men.
■ What Ruffin’s book and the others alert us to is the easy acceptance
of the idea of a guerrilla strategy from the very start of the Confederate
experiment—in popular imagination, that is, not in the minds of the West
Point generals who actually commanded Confederate armies.27 The idea of
guerrilla warfare enjoyed broad popular support in the Confederacy from
the very start—in so far as public opinion can be assessed from popular
printed works and from the newspapers. Despite natural fears of slave
revolt, always operative in southern society, there is evidence, at the begin-
ning of their national experiment at least, of willing and mythic identifica-
tion with guerrilla warfare in popular beliefs in the Confederacy. The point
here is not that the Confederacy might have gained its independence that
way. That is a hypothetical or counter-factual question for military histori-
ans to decide. The point is that, at the time, many southerners thought they
might win through guerrilla warfare or that guerrilla warfare would likely
be one of the ways they would win, among others, and that they apparently
had confidence that it would not greatly disturb slavery.28

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Faith in the tradition of partisan warfare was not, before the Civil War,
a southern phenomenon alone. It was a part of a great American military
tradition. As embodied in militia traditions, it was the very foundation of
national defense—somehow, good marksmen, without much military drill,
would be equal to the task of defeating any traditional European army,
should the need arise. At its broadest, it was a faith in patriotic but undrilled
men to win wars against organized and disciplined regular armies on
the European model. Tactically, it was faith in guerrilla-style operations,
unconventional and individualistic tactics, practiced marksmanship in the
tradition of the backwoods hunter, camouflage, and imitation of what were
commonly thought to be the tactics of indigenous Americans. The specific
terms used—besides militia tradition and citizen soldier, also “partisan”
and “guerrilla” but others as well—lacked precision, as they were employed
in the popular press and in popular fiction, and will leave careful military
historians a little frustrated. In popular imagination and usage, the mili-
tary tactics so imagined by the time of the Civil War ranged from buckskin
ambushes to lightning cavalry raids behind enemy lines.
Historically, the heroes of this American tradition happened to be south-
erners mostly. We can readily see evidence of that in popular visual sources
from the antebellum era. William Ranney’s painting of Marion, Crossing
the Pee Dee was copied in an engraving by C. Burt, printed by J. Dalton,
and distributed by the American Art Union, in Boston, in 1851. That, in
turn, provided a model for a popular lithograph published later by Currier
& Ives (fig. 1). John Blake White’s painting of General Marion Inviting a
British Officer to Share His Meal, with a background figure in a coonskin
cap and with a slave depicted as well, was copied in a mezzotint engraving
by John Sartain in 1840 (fig. 2). Tellingly, the image of this mythical sweet
potato dinner in the woods appeared on Confederate money, on the ten-
dollar bill issued in 186129 (fig. 3). It is well known that the Confederacy
comfortably assumed the legends and imagery of the American Revolution
as its own.30 Images of partisan warfare proved as comfortable a fit as any.
Those who had great hopes for irregular warfare did not think of the
informal organizations and tactics as embodiments of “terrorism.” Terror
was widely believed to be a feature of the French Revolution and anarchy.31
No one imagined that the French Revolution would supply the model for
the way the Confederacy gained its independence, and these dreams of vic-
tory did not include assassination or the deliberate slaughter of innocent
old men, women, and children. For the purposes of this article, I adopt the
wide-ranging definitions of one of the principal students of guerrilla war-
fare in the Civil War, Daniel Sutherland. It is loose enough to comprehend

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Figure 1
Marion’s Brigade Crossing the Peedee River, S.C., 1778. On Their Way to Attack the
British Force under Tarleton. The popular lithography firm of Currier & Ives based
its image of this historic moment on a superior American Art Union engraving of
1852. Such near-piracy in printmaking provides vivid testimony to the popularity of
the image of Marion in the swamp. Thus, Marion’s feats of guerrilla warfare enjoyed
broad national mythic status well into the 1850s. (Library of Congress Prints and
Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-3606)
John Hunt Morgan, on the one hand, and bushwhackers and sadists like
William Quantrill, “Bloody Bill” Anderson, and other Missouri guerrillas,
on the other hand.32
As for the national American myth of partisan warfare, a widespread
belief in American superiority in fighting in ways learned from wars with the
Native Americans and often believed to have been employed successfully
against the disciplined redcoats in the American Revolution informed the
American conception of military history. The trend was greatly accelerated

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Figure 2
Gen. Marion in His Swamp Encampment Inviting a British Officer to Dinner. This
mezzotint engraving by John Sartain after John Blake White’s painting was published
by the Apollo Association for the Promotion of Fine Arts in New York in 1840. The
image, embodying the myth of the triumph of partisan warfare over the British army
in the Revolution, obviously had national appeal. But it also contained very specific
southern content: lovingly and accurately depicted sweet potatoes and a slave, clad
in rags, acting as cook. The image also embodied a chivalric side to guerrilla warfare,
rather than the tomahawk and Bowie knife side. (Library of Congress Prints and
Photographs Division, LC-DIG-pga-04107. USZ62-110272)
by the myths surrounding the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, which cele-
brated the role played by Kentucky and Tennessee riflemen—again against
disciplined redcoats—at precisely the moment that American nationalism
was most obviously forged.33 Always the idea was that the way Americans
fought was superior for its individualism, marksmanship, and camouflage,
and could be readily contrasted with the ways of warfare in Europe.

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Figure 3
Confederate Currency. This lithographic plate, published by William Lee, MD, in
1875, illustrated types of Confederate currency. The ten-dollar bill at lower left features
the image of Marion and the British officer preparing to eat sweet potatoes. It proved
easy for the Confederates to incorporate what had been a powerful American national
myth focusing on Francis Marion into a sectional one to boost southern independence
because of the prominence of partisan and guerrilla warfare in the South during the
American Revolution. Examining the other forms of currency, we can see that the
guerrilla myth ranked in symbolic prestige with slavery itself ( featured in the image
on the ten-dollar bill at right) or trading freely on the high seas ( featured in the twenty
at upper right). Historian Ian Binnington has revealed to us how we can probe the
symbolism of Confederate currency for important nationalist meanings. (Library of
Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-110272)

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The myth of American superiority at irregular warfare even attached
itself improbably to the historical reputation of George Washington,
because he had been present as a volunteer aide at the defeat of Gen.
Edward Braddock in western Pennsylvania in 1755. Slaughtered by Native
Americans and their French allies in the wilderness (now the site is near
Pittsburgh), the British forces (a select group from two regiments with some
American militia and camp followers) had tried to fight in the dense forest
the way they had on the open fields of Europe. George Washington, ironi-
cally, actually learned nothing about tactics from the incident and instead
decided that more discipline and not less was what his armies needed to
avoid defeat. Nevertheless, as military historian Fred Anderson expresses
it, “the extent to which the debacle . . . could be blamed on Braddock himself
was a matter of intense concern to contemporary Americans, who searched
the event for its meanings and generally concluded that a mindless adher-
ence to European tactics had caused his downfall. In their conclusion lay
the origins of the myth that Americans were uniquely fitted for fighting in
the wilderness, and by extension the belief in the superiority of American
irregular troops (no matter how poorly trained) over European regulars.”34
Mason Locke Weems, who fixed other powerful myths to Washington’s
reputation (such as the cherry tree story), was largely responsible for this
wrongheaded one as well.35 A version of it also became associated with
the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, Andrew Jackson.36 Since the myth
had its origins well before the term “guerrilla” came into common usage—
as a result of the Napoleonic campaigns in Spain in 1807–09—the use
of the term “guerrilla” to encompass the imagined lessons of Braddock’s
defeat in 1755 (as well as other developments in irregular warfare) further
compounds the problem of want of military precision in nomenclature or
idea.37 Sometimes identified as a myth of the West or of the frontier, the
idea that American superiority at war derived from individualistic tactics,
marksmanship, woodlore, camouflage, and a little cunning had an espe-
cially powerful appeal in the South.38 Washington and Jackson were both
southerners and slaveholders, and the mythical riflemen of Tennessee and
Kentucky hailed from slave states.
It must not be forgotten that there was a competing, and powerfully
institutionalized, ideal, that of the professional army. Its origins came with
the very origins of the republic and are famously embodied in powerful lan-
guage in Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist paper number 26, where he said
forthrightly that the “doctrine” that “the militia of the country is its natural
bulwark, and would be at all times equal to the national defense” was a
“doctrine, in substance that like to have lost us our independence.” “War,”

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Hamilton insisted, “like most other things, is a science to be acquired and
perfected by diligence, by perseverance, by time, and by practice.”39 West
Point, the military academy founded during the Jefferson administration,
became an institutional embodiment and reinforcement of that doctrine.
It was powerful among generals but often lacked the allure of the militia
myth of republican amateurism and patriotism and dislike for standing
armies. The two were not always seen as incompatible and were not at
war with each other necessarily: thus the southern writers could imagine
their genteel and West Point–educated officers at the head of armies of
men whose only training was hunting and trapping in the woods.
White people all over the South identified partisan war as a special south-
ern military legacy from the American Revolution. Runaway and restless
slaves and the special interests of slaveless whites, though very much on
their minds in other ways involving political decisions, nevertheless did
not interfere with enthusiastic hopes that partisan warfare might help the
Confederacy win its independence against the superior population and
resources of the North. The belief was a legacy from the antebellum intel-
lectuals and popular historians of the South and formed a powerful tradi-
tion. During the Civil War many leaders in forging Confederate nationalism
relied with confidence on some version of the myth. That included editors
of the Confederacy’s leading newspapers. It included as well some writers
of popular fiction, including Mary Rochester Ford. Perhaps only the clergy,
among the most important forgers of Confederate ideas of nationalism,
made little contribution to the myth of partisan warfare; the fact was, that
they had their hands full with mourning and sacrifice and criticism of war
profiteering and had little time left to weigh in on military strategy.40 The
antebellum intellectuals, the journalists, and the writers of popular fiction
wove their tapestries of belief in the efficacy of guerrilla warfare for the
southern cause as fully accepted members of a slave society, never doubt-
ing for a minute that southern superiority in battle would in any way be
incompatible with slavery. It never occurred to them to think that guerrilla
warfare would threaten the peculiar institution. In fact, major architects
of the proslavery argument, from Edmund Ruffin to George Fitzhugh,
endorsed guerrilla warfare as a hope for the Confederate cause.
Simms and Tucker alone would supply prestigious southern lineage for
the favorable reception of the idea of guerrilla warfare. But one would not
know it from the existing historical treatments of this prophetic tradition
in southern popular literature. These works of popular imagination have
recently attracted the attention of historians interested in Confederate
nationalism. But they have emphasized different themes found in the
works.

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Paul Quigley, for example, says the antebellum writers saw unity and
prosperity in the South’s future as an independent nation. The emphasis
on economic abundance, he argued, flowed naturally from their political
complaints about the impoverishment of the South at the hands of the
North’s protective tariffs. The prophetic works also described how the
southern nation “might come into being,” but Quigley did not explain.41
Robert E. Bonner, admitting that this odd branch of southern literature
lacked “particular literary merit,” asserted nevertheless that the authors
“showed how the region’s historical sensibility extended forward as well
as backwards, and was thus unlikely to dwindle into complacency or mere
romance. . . . [E]ach involved an effort to put the institution of slavery, and
those who bore the greatest responsibility for its continuance, within the
larger flow of an ongoing heroic tradition.” Although Bonner mentioned
that in fact Beverley Tucker and Ruffin described “tyranny . . . met on the
battlefield and from guerrilla hideouts by resolute southern fighters, sup-
ported by a loyal phalanx of slave retainers,” he did not call special atten-
tion to the allure of guerrilla warfare as an equalizer against otherwise fatal
odds. In short, Bonner noted the importance of “showing how proslavery
southerners might realize their destiny within historical time,” like pro-
slavery Marxists getting the ineluctable dialectics of history on their side.42
Ian Binnington sees the literature as a significant forerunner of
Confederate nationalism, adumbrating the themes he thinks most impor-
tant: the authors created an idealized “Worthy Southron” and his foil the
“Demon Yankee”; they depicted the “Silent Slave,” the epitome of slaves
allegedly loyal to the southern cause; and they saw the South as more truly
“American” than the North. Thus they were important “expressions of
Confederate Americanism.”43 Yet Binnington ignores their almost uncon-
sciously nationalistic fealty to a sectionalized myth of guerrilla warfare
in the American Revolution. By ignoring the work of William Gilmore
Simms as part of the same tradition, Binnington overlooks the strategic
theme of the works, their assurance that the South could compensate in
war for northern population and resources with the individualistic militia
and guerrilla tradition. The point was not only that the Southron would
defeat the Yankee Demon but how he would do it with a certain irregular
way of war.44
Thus, different historians have picked out historical inevitability, eco-
nomic abundance, and true fealty to American political virtue as themes
of significance, and so they are, but none noted that the almost delicious
depiction of guerrilla warfare itself revealed essential parts of white south-
ern national identity. It may well be “unlikely” that “these novels—with
the possible exception of The Partisan Leader—were widely read during

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the secession crisis,” as Binnington admits, but their easy adoption of the
militia-guerrilla myth of American military history as the South’s own is
a crucial signpost guiding us to the sources in Confederate publications,
especially in the popular press, that reveal the embrace of the myth in
popular opinion without any attendant fears of unleashing slave rebellion
when the countryside dissolved into guerrilla conflicts.45
Edmund Ruffin’s Anticipations of the Future is an essential document
to consider. Although other themes are reflected in his book, it is of critical
importance to understand that the central point of it is the utility of guer-
rilla warfare to save the South’s slave society from the military superiority
of the North. Ruffin himself carefully pointed out in his book exactly what
was critical to him. The author’s preface stated point-blank his two over-
riding goals for the book. There was a political purpose: Ruffin wanted
to overcome the argument that the South should await an overt act of
“unconstitutional power” on the part of the North before taking the leap
into secession. He believed the North could without violating the com-
mon understanding of the Constitution completely victimize and subju-
gate the South simply by the legitimate workings of a sectional majority
political party. There was also a military purpose: Ruffin wanted to reas-
sure hesitant southerners that “means for safe and perfect defence, and for
full retaliation of hostilities and injury, (if need shall be,) for achieving
independence, and for securing the subsequent preservation of peace, and
unprecedented prosperity—all will be as certain as can be any event of the
future, or as the most ardent southern patriots would desire.”46 The empha-
sis in that sentence is Ruffin’s. Writers on the literary tradition in general
and on Ruffin’s book in particular have largely ignored this second point.
In other words, they have ignored his proof that guerrilla warfare would
successfully defend the South until northern collapse came about through
working-class riots in northern cities and political disaffection and further
secession in the states of the Old Northwest.
Moreover, Ruffin’s appendix reveals the novelty of the guerrilla theme
for him in 1861. He had been thinking for years about how the South might
successfully accomplish secession. A long appendix to Anticipations of the
Future reprinted his considerations on the subject in articles he had writ-
ten years earlier, in 1856 and 1857, for the Richmond Enquirer and for
DeBow’s Review. Back then he had hit upon only a negative sort of argu-
ment: slave insurrection would not be a problem for the South, he assured
his readers in these serious articles, but he did not really explain how the
white South was to overcome northern superiority in men and supplies.
After those articles were written (and, presumably, while he remained
troubled by the problem of a southern military answer to the North in case

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of war), Ruffin reached a conclusion as to how the South might actually win
on the battlefields of the future. The evolution of his ideas likely had some-
thing to do with his reading of John Beauchamp Jones’s Wild Southern
Scenes: A Tale of Disunion! And Border War! Jones is best known to Civil
War historians as the author of a crucial diary, written when he served as
a clerk in the War Department in Richmond. But before that, he had been
a romance writer. In Wild Southern Scenes, amid the silly plot of a book
he did not admire, Ruffin may nevertheless have found his answer: guer-
rilla warfare would even the odds. Certainly, Jones’s romance had consid-
erable influence on Ruffin, despite his professions of dislike for the book.
Jones showed Ruffin a new medium for transmitting his vision of southern
independence—the futuristic romance. He described what Ruffin termed
“the supposed consequences of disunion.” Ruffin was obviously skeptical
of Jones’s truly wild scenes. He did not want the future of the South to
be wild.
The complicated plot of Jones’s romance, published in 1859, involved
rogue generals and armies, British support for a free-soil army invasion
of the South, an alliance between the president of the United States and
two southern armies in defense of the Union, a southern army composed
mostly of slaves, and romantic plots and humor to boot. At one point early
in the war, for example, amid anarchy in northern cities, the Unitarians
of Boston attack the Catholics, and the foreign-born end up controlling
the city. They packed Theodore Parker, Wendell Phillips, and William
Lloyd Garrison, along with Senators Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson
and “sundry masculine women” aboard a ship specially chartered to go to
Liberia. Intercepted at the African coast by a British ship, the Boston trou-
blemakers are returned to America, and create great disorder.47 Ruffin may
not have enjoyed a sense of humor, but he surely shared Jones’s dim view
of Boston’s abolition community. However, Ruffin did not, as an ardent
secessionist, admire a work that predicted such dire consequences to fol-
low disunion. Some of those consequences, it is true, Ruffin himself antici-
pated, namely, great disorder among the proletariat of the northern cities.
But still he wanted to make it clear that disunion would not be nearly the
“wild” calamity depicted in Jones’s improbable romance.
The wars described in Jones’s book are large and destructive but
involve conventional military and naval actions dominated by artillery.
Jones did reserve a modest role for partisans. A group called the Wild
Western Scouts, armed with tomahawks and knives (with which they do
scalp their victims) and led by a Captain Fink, operate successfully and in
unconventional ways, eventually kidnapping the British envoy, Lord Slysir,
who has connived to help the abolition army divide America.48 But Ruffin

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obviously did not draw his partisan inspiration entirely and directly from
Jones’s example: the Wild Western Scouts do not actually win the war, and
Ruffin wanted nothing to do with scalping as a symbol of guerrilla war-
fare. Still, the guerrilla example lay there for further exploration by a more
sober author.
At about the same time Ruffin reread the work of Hinton Rowan Helper.
Ruffin could recall from his initial reading and confirm by a new glance at it
that Helper’s Impending Crisis had as “one of its main objects . . . to estab-
lish the position that there exists hostility between the non-slaveholders,
& the slave-holders of the southern states.”49 In the diary where he records
this reading he does not directly link it to Anticipations of the Future, but
he was likely thinking about Helper at the same time he wrote the book.
Ruffin was fully aware of the possibilities of class warfare among white
southerners and especially conscious of the possibility when he began writ-
ing Anticipations of the Future, but he went ahead to advertise the likeli-
hood that guerrilla warfare could win independence for the South despite
the North’s superiority in population and resources. Anarchy, caused by
the urban working classes, would be the North’s problem, as he saw it,
and not the South’s; in the end, he seems to have had no worries about the
slaveless white yeomanry on the eve of secession and war. But it is clear
why Ruffin put more effort in describing the yeomanry than their officers.
In Simms, the ordinary guerrillas are clearly at a social distance from their
leaders. In Beverley Tucker, the ordinary guerrillas appear ungrammatical
hicks. In Ruffin, they appear more like citizen soldiers (though admittedly,
they were not above stealing a rifle off a dead enemy’s body). Guerrilla war-
fare waged by such men would not approach a wild terror on the model of
the French Revolution.
Nor did other famous proslavery thinkers find any problem with guer-
rilla warfare as a way to save a slave society from an enemy superior in
numbers and resources; neither slavery nor white social classes troubled
them in their speculations. George Fitzhugh fully voiced the myth of south-
ern partisan warfare early in 1862. “It is our true policy,” he said, “to decoy
the enemy into the interior, and then to cut them off as were Braddock,
and Burgoyne, and Cornwallis, and Ross, and Packenham, and our own
troops in the everglades of Florida.” Nothing could be more symbolic of
the effectiveness of irregular warfare than the defeat of Edward Braddock
in 1755 and the difficulties experienced by the United States Army fight-
ing the Seminoles in Florida in recent times. Fitzhugh saw that the only
way of beating the North was to avoid battle, “exhausting” the North and
awaiting the rising of the mobs in the North’s large cities and the tensions
between the East and the Old Northwest.50 J. D. B. De Bow, the editor of

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the famous southern magazine that bore his name, wrote a little later in
1862, “We should be ready for the regular battle or the partisan skirmish
. . . We must prepare ourselves for a guerilla war.”51 Proslavery writers of the
systematic sort quoted here, relied on descriptions of potential class war-
fare in northern capitalist society to prove the stable virtues of southern
slave society. They were alive to the dangers of class warfare, but they saw
it as a threat only to the North. They expressed no anxieties about rebel-
liousness of their own lower classes, white or black.
■ And neither did anyone else among the less systematic thinkers and
writers in the Confederacy. The beginning of the actual war in 1861 did
nothing to dampen the confidence of white southerners in the valuable
contribution that partisan warfare could make to Confederate indepen-
dence. Their hopes were loosely expressed in newspapers and even in the
popular names the eager volunteers took for their military units in 1861.
A remark of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s predicting that the outcome of the war
would be decided by very different means than partisan warfare provoked
one of the first affirmations of the usefulness of guerrillas. In May 1861
the press reported that Lee had said that the coming war would “be one
of artillery.” The editors of the Charleston Mercury refused to believe that
Lee had “committed himself to any such absurdity.” The “strength of the
South,” they insisted, “will consist in its cavalry and its riflemen, this is our
strength, and in its individuality of personal character, which involves the
whole secret of guerilla or partisan warfare.” These “attributes” had “made
the Southern a military people, par excellence.”52
The essence of the myth of guerrilla warfare in southern history lay in
confidence in the yeomen, when properly organized and guided by plant-
ers—just as it was depicted in the imaginary fiction of the antebellum
years. After all, surely the yeomen and not the cavaliers enjoyed the famil-
iarity with deer rifles and possessed the expertise in hunting and camp-
ing that made this sort of war successful in the swamps and mountains
of the South. Still awaiting the actual “invasion” of the South, the editors
of the Charleston Mercury in the next month termed the ideal defense
“what we may call extempore warfare, including what is called the war of
partisans and guerillas.” “These are simply the militia of a country,” they
explained, “seizing whatever weapon offers, and cutting off the advance,
the rear guards and the foraging parties of the foe.” Such a form of war
was specially suited to the “vast dense forests,” the “swamp retreats,” and
the “thousand defiles” of the South. The Mercury recalled the example of
“Marion’s Men” in the American Revolution and of the legendary “Robin
Hood,” and touted the efficacy of the “good old double-barrelled deer gun”

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against the modern rifle. It urged “our planters everywhere to organize
themselves into beats and companies” and injected a democratic element
by urging that “the men themselves” should take the initiative and rid their
organizations of holiday militia officers when they elected colonels and
brigadiers for these organizations.53
As the popular press reported on the possibilities of partisan warfare
for southern independence, its observations might have been derived
almost directly from the ultimate source of most American literature on
Marion, historical and fictional, Mason Locke Weems’s early biography
based loosely on information from one of Marion’s men, named Horry.
The Weems book, which the great historical popularizer himself admitted
verged on being a romance, included a so-called speech of Marion’s that
summarized his military philosophy:
Our country cannot expect us to cope with British regulars. War is an
art. . . . [W]e can know but little about it in comparison with our ene-
mies, who in discipline and experience have greatly the advantage of us.
But, thank God, we have our advantages too.—We are far better riders,
better woodsmen, and better marksmen than they . . . By cutting off
the enemy’s foraging parties, drawing them into ambuscades and falling
upon them by surprise, we shall, I hope, so harass and consume them, as
to make them glad to get out of our country.54
Edmund Ruffin had close connections with the Mercury of Robert

Barnwell Rhett Jr. Parts of Anticipations of the Future had been serialized
in the paper before the war.55
Moreover, in the matter of guerrilla warfare there was a broad agree-
ment across political factions in the Confederacy. The Mercury’s com-
petitor, the Charleston Courier, for example, also championed guerrilla
warfare. William Gilmore Simms had dedicated The Partisan to Richard
Yeadon, who became an editor of the Courier early in 1862, so the ties of the
Mercury’s competitor to a champion of partisan warfare were likely also
strong.56 The Courier applauded the youths who gathered at Institute Hall
in the city “for the purpose of organizing themselves into a Guerrilla corps.”
One corps of ninety men had already formed, the newspaper reported, and
the “movement,” the editors urged, “promises to be very popular.”57 A letter-
writer who called himself “MARION” informed the Courier that a corps
called “the Marion Men” was being organized to “be used as were Marion’s
men in the Revolution.” They were to be armed with repeating pistols and
sabre pikes or Mississippi rifles and sabre bayonets.58 A man named R.
J. Jeffords issued a call at about the same time for “a corps of Mounted
Riflemen, armed with double barrel shot guns and belt revolvers” who

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would be “very effective, especially in our thickly wooded, low country.”
Jeffords placed an advertisement in the paper calling for volunteers and
saying that the unit’s main purpose “will be to act as did Marion’s men
during the Revolution.”59 Meanwhile, the Marion men were successful in
recruiting more than three companies to be armed at first with navy pistols.
They would fight as light infantry until horses could be obtained, and some
of the men would be armed with shot guns for fighting in the dark—a time
when conventional forces went into camp to await the next day’s action.60
The colorful nicknames adopted by the early companies organized by
volunteers for Confederate service cannot go unnoticed and reveal atti-
tudes of common soldiers and recruiters. They suggested in a spontaneous
way the anticipations of the sort of warfare the men would fight and what
sort of warfare would be most effective. When the companies were finally
organized into regiments with numbers and without colorful names, the
companies retained at first their identities when first organized. Names
like the “Blues” signified only a pride in a distinctive uniform, and the
“Guards” harkened to European traditions, but others held special cultural
meanings.
Let us take, for example, the Fifteenth Alabama. Organized at Court-
land, Alabama, on August 15, 1861, it consisted of the following ten
companies from Franklin, Marion, Lawrence, Lauderdale, and Conecuh
Counties: Marion Guards, Sons of Dixie, Grandsons of ’76, Mountain
Rangers, Yankee Hunters, Stallworth Rangers, Franklin Hornets, Dixie
Rebels, Lawrence Guard, and Marion Sharp Shooters.61 The names are
quite revealing of Confederate purpose and self-conception, and what is
noticeable right away is the presence of the names indicating the expec-
tation of the effectiveness of irregular warfare: rangers and sharpshoot-
ers, especially. Most of the companies were raised in counties in northwest
Alabama and may have reflected in their cultural outlook that of an upland
rather than plantation region. But identification with the heritage of par-
tisan warfare showed up in many areas of the South. From the Savannah
area, for example, came the Chatham Guerrillas, forty men armed with
double-barreled shotguns, Colt navy revolvers, and Bowie knives.62 The
McIntosh Rangers and Burke Sharp-Shooters and Wayne Rangers hailed
from the Savannah area as well.63
Historian Earl J. Hess discovered that 18 percent of some 3,035
Confederate companies listed in Confederate Military Land Units, 1861–
1865 took the name “Rifles” (with another forty-six companies using
“Sharpshooter,” “Marksmen,” “Repeaters,” or “Targeteers”).64 These units
embraced the term that Dennis Hart Mahan used and that still rang with
a significance that it has largely lost in our own day. These were riflemen

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who carried a weapon and who embodied skills and instincts we think of
when we hear the term “Kentucky Rifle,” not ordinary infantrymen.
Around Savannah, as elsewhere in the Confederacy, the enlistment of
men with the expectation of fighting partisan warfare took place in the
very midst of signs of the instability of the slave system. While some men
enlisted to be dispatched where the government sent them to fight, others
remained to form home guards. They would “take up all suspicious persons
of suspicious character, white or black.”65 Committees of public safety were
being formed also in the belief that the northerners “will incite the slaves
of the South to insurrection and rapine.”66 Organizing partisans was by no
means seen as incompatible with the continuance of slavery during war.67
The extent of the expectation of irregular warfare as revealed in the local
company names of Confederate volunteer units can be quickly grasped
by looking at William Frayne Amann, ed., Personnel of the Civil War.68
Confederate unit names are listed alphabetically, and by looking only at A,
B, and C listings (containing a little over a thousand unit names), one can
quickly come up with units carrying telltale names like “rangers” or “sharp-
shooters” or “guerrillas” from every single Confederate state. Most of the
states have many units with such names listed. The evidence is impressive
in breadth and depth. The expectations of masses of Confederate volun-
teers is clear.
Although popular writers wrote of the “romance” of the raid, the arma-
ment of the Chatham Guerrillas (Bowie knives and shotguns) reveals that
the actual expectation of guerrilla warfare was not very romantic at all.
Such was the case with the Marion Men discussed above—and with other
military companies raised throughout the South in the early days of the
Confederacy. A captain named Laman was raising a “Double Barrel Shot
Gun Company” in the Savannah area in August. Bowie knives and shot-
guns were grisly and not heroic, in actuality.69
The attractive features of guerrilla warfare were evident also in states
that did not have a local tradition as powerful as Francis Marion. Ruffin, of
course, was thoroughly identified as a Virginia secessionist when he predi-
cated the success of secession on partisan warfare, and fellow Virginians
early in the war hailed the idea as well. The editors of the Richmond
Examiner labeled as a “good idea” the “suggestion that has been thrown
out by a number of the Virginia papers, that the patriotism of the people
should be allowed to have expression in the present contest by the forma-
tion of partisan legions for the more effectual suppression of robberies and
robbers, cut throats, abolition invaders and Lincolnites.” It fit the “history
of the country,” and such fighters “need[ed] no weapons of an established
and approved kind.” “Virginians,” the editors insisted, were not “wanting in
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the knowledge of the minutiae of a partisan war . . . The topography of the
State admirably fits it for purposes of guerrilla warfare.”70
Nothing in the ideology of slavery and social class in the Confederacy
held Virginians back from embracing guerrilla warfare when it held
promise of effectiveness. Before the Battle of Bull Run, the editors of the
Examiner observed:
Although the enemy, as yet, but hovers on our frontiers, threatening
invasion, but hesitating to commence it, we are already harassing him
and cutting him off in detail by a terrible guerrilla warfare. It is well that
we are giving him this foretaste of what they might expect, on a grander
scale, if they attempt to penetrate the interior of the South. Then, their
armies would be surrounded by our unerring sharp-shooters, and their
whole line of communications, for hundreds of miles, be harassed, day
and night, by the best partisan soldiers in the world, armed with rifles
that never miss their aim and mounted on horses as fleet as the wind.71
Another Richmond newspaper agreed. The Dispatch, unable to tell for

certain how many troops stood ready to defend Virginia in May 1861, esti-
mated seventy-five thousand Virginia troops, fifteen to thirty thousand
soldiers from other states of the South, and “in addition to this, the entire
male population of the State, from ten years of age to eighty, have arms,
and are eager to lend their aid in guerrilla or any other kind of warfare.”
When it was rumored that Ben McCulloch’s Texas Rangers had arrived in
Virginia to defend the state, the same newspaper observed approvingly,
“He will give the enemy some lessons in guerrilla fighting that will make
them rue the day they ever set out in a war of invasion and plunder.”72 The
Examiner asserted that the “strength of the South consists more in the
character of her territory than aught else. Her interior is inaccessible to
an invading foe. The fate of Braddock, Cornwallis and Packenham proves
this.”73 Although Yorktown was a siege conducted by French cannon and
the Continental army, Jackson’s victory over Packenham at New Orleans
was storied as the triumph of the riflemen of Kentucky, and the defeat
of Edward Braddock by French and Indians in 1755 in the wilderness of
western Pennsylvania was the centerpiece of the myth of the superiority of
guerrilla tactics in the New World.74
Endorsements of guerrilla warfare in the popular press and in the popu-
lar nicknames adopted by early volunteer companies in the Confederacy
appeared cheek-by-jowl with proslavery arguments in newspapers. That
was certainly true of the Richmond newspapers. The Examiner, for one,
could blithely state that everyone knew that slavery was good and that
it bred unity of thought in the Confederacy. The editors celebrated “the
g u e rri l la wa rfa re, slav e ry, a n d t h e co n f e de r ac y 4 0 1

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presence of an inferior race” for molding the character and manners of the
white men and giving them pride. They believed as well that the existence
of slavery made Christian morality possible and that the Golden Rule was
inapplicable in business in free societies and would ruin any practitioner
of it there.75 It was also striking that endorsements of guerrilla warfare
appeared in proximity with news that revealed the dangerous instability
of slavery. That was nowhere more striking than in the case of the Mobile
Register’s coverage of the early mobilization of south Alabama. In June 1861
the newspaper ran an article based on one from the Charleston Courier
about “Marion Men.” “The most effective fighters in a war of defence,” the
article stated, “are guerrillas, after the fashion of the ‘Marion Men’ of the
South Carolina revolution era.” Two days before the appearance of that
enthusiastic article, the same newspaper had reported the murder of a
woman named Holland, the mistress of the female slave who committed
the crime. Ten days later, the paper baldly reported the lynching of the
accused murderer. Those events happened not in the immediate Mobile
area but near Chattanooga, Tennessee, but the Mobile newspaper regularly
carried the advertisements of the sheriff describing runaway slaves in jail
and seeking their owners.76 Evidence of the instability of slavery was ever
present in the press, but it seems not to have fazed white southerners when
they considered guerrilla warfare as a useful defense from an enemy supe-
rior in numbers and resources.
The newspaper editors were not unthinking. Even as they trumpeted
the positive possibilities that lay in guerrilla warfare, they remained heav-
ily dependent on proslavery arguments to explain why their society was
superior to that of the northern enemy. In the case of the Mobile Register
and Advertiser, the editors explicitly linked prowess at guerrilla warfare
and southern slave society. Writing about “The Armies of the South,” they
pointed out:
Not the refuse of overcrowded cities compose them—not the shift-

less vagabond who fights for his bread and a coat—not the selfish boor
whom conscription musters into service of his master—but freemen,
every one of them animated by a heroic impulse . . . men accustomed
from early youth, not to servile toil, but to the use of arms, the exposures
of the chase, to self-reliance and to the habit of command. Gentlemen
all—nobles in the true sense of the word, because men of a master race.
Against these let Northern factories pour forth their starving drudges.
It is such men as these that won the battles of Mexico; it is such men as
these that scattered the trained veterans of Waterloo at New Orleans; it
is such men as these who fought under Marion and Sumter.77

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The contrast between the stereotype of an industrialized and urbanized
North and the southern white male made independent by the racial hier-
archies of southern slave society was here made crucial to the justification
of partisan warfare as a route to southern independence.78
The Confederacy was too busy fighting to see the publication of much
fiction, but there was some imaginative writing dedicated to the theme of
partisan warfare as the hope of the Confederacy. Sally Rochester Ford’s
Raids and Romances of Morgan and His Men was bound in wallpaper cov-
ers when it was published in 1863.79 To Raids and Romances can be added
the work of Mrs. Jane Tandy Hardin Cross, Duncan Adair: or, Captured
in Escaping. A Story of Morgan’s Men, also published in 1863. At fifty-one
pages Duncan Adair did not qualify as a long book, but it shared Ford’s
focus on the abundant national mythic possibilities that lay in the exploits
of the unconventional cavalryman, John Hunt Morgan. Ford’s book made
a significant contribution to popular nationalism in the Confederacy. The
Charleston Mercury complimented Ford for the theme of her work but
criticized its contrived romantic fictional plot. The newspaper’s reviewer
concluded his review of that work and other recent works by saying confi-
dently, “We shall gradually produce a literature wholly of our own.”80 The
Atlanta Confederacy also reviewed Ford’s book, describing the author as “a
Kentucky woman, deeply imbued with the indomitable spirit of Southern
independence.”81 Ford’s book was timely, because it basked in the fame of
Morgan at the zenith of his reputation. Her book appeared in June 1863,
and in early 1864 the famed cavalryman visited Richmond.82 Morgan
had recently escaped from a Union prison in Ohio, and he was now visit-
ing Richmond and Atlanta on his way to reorganizing his old command.
Richmond welcomed him as a hero, and his visit took on some of the cer-
emonial attributes of a triumphal procession.83
Romance was not a genre reserved exclusively for women readers and
writers, even in the days of the Confederacy, when many of the men had
departed for the war. James Dabney McCabe Jr.’s The Guerrillas: An
Original Domestic Drama, in Three Acts . . . with Cast of Characters, Stage
Business, Costumes, Relative Positions, &c., by R. D’Orsay Ogden, Acting
Stage Manager of Richmond Varieties and New Richmond Theatre as well
as The Partisan Ranger. Or the Bushwhacker were both published in 1863.84
The links between the antebellum myth of partisan warfare and
the Confederates who actually enlisted to fight were apparent in many
places, especially early in the war. The great partisan ranger himself, John
Singleton Mosby, of Virginia, recalled after the war that when he was grow-
ing up he “borrowed a copy of the ‘Life of Marion’, which was the first book
I read except as a task at school.” “I remember,” he said, “how I shouted

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when I read aloud in the nursery of the way the great partisan hid in the
swamp and outwitted the British. I did not then expect that the time would
ever come when I would . . . take part in adventures that have been com-
pared with Marion’s.”85
■ Alas for the dreamers, the group most likely to express reservations
about the employment of guerrillas in the Confederacy was the higher
command of the Confederate armies. We should not generalize from the
attitudes of those professionals to the society at large. On that score the
Confederate high command was not representative at all. From begin-
ning to end, Robert E. Lee was opposed. It has become one of the most
frequently repeated anecdotes about Lee to recall his conversation with
the artillery general Edmund Porter Alexander on the eve of the surren-
der at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. To Alexander’s suggestion to disperse
the Army of Northern Virginia into the interior to fight as guerillas, Lee
responded that he had no use for war in which soldiers had “no rations” and
were “under no discipline.” “Already demoralized by four years of war,” the
fugitive soldiers “would have to plunder & rob to procure subsistence. The
country would be full of lawless bands in every part, & and a state of society
would ensue from which it would take the country years to recover.”86 Even
early in the war, Lee looked to artillery and not bushwhackers to decide the
fate of the Confederacy. Though he then served in hardscrabble western
Virginia, operations there did not alter his point of view. Four years later, at
the end, Lee still turned a cold shoulder to partisan warfare. And when he
did so, he did not mention slavery, and, if he was like Confederates who did
admire guerrilla warfare, he likely was not even thinking about slavery.87
Yet many Confederates thrilled to the prospect of irregular and partisan
warfare as a way of winning against the greater numbers and resources of
the North. In fact, that infatuation with guerrilla warfare, nurtured over
the years in the South from the Revolution to the war by such romantics
as William Gilmore Simms, helps explain the nature of public opinion
early in the life of the Confederacy. In retrospect, the odds seemed so long
against the Confederacy that they caused the historian Richard N. Current,
later the editor of the Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, to wonder, while
writing an essay on Confederate defeat in one of the most influential of
books on the subject, “Why did the South even risk a war in which she
was all but beaten before the first shot was fired?”88 There seems to have
been altogether too much reliance on Confederate bluster as an explana-
tion for public opinion: the oft-quoted belief that one southerner could
whip ten Yankees.

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But there was more than bluster at work on southern white popular
opinion. As J. Mills Thornton has argued, secession was an essentially
broad popular movement.89 And it had all the attendant mythical trap-
pings. One of those was the sturdy myth that partisan warfare was a great
equalizer in war and that the South was the place par excellence for its
successful employment. What those hopeful southerners saw as a live pos-
sibility at first, modern historians have increasingly seen as a categorical
impossibility. They assert that no slave society would opt for guerrilla war-
fare to save itself. It would in the course of employing it destroy slavery
itself or give too much power to those in the society who did not hold slave
property.
The testimony of the white southerners at the time loudly asserted the
utility of partisan warfare to save their slave society. The most ardent and
systematic of proslavery thinkers shared the society’s vision of the special
adaptability of the South to partisan warfare. Being able to recognize the
class conflicts in northern capitalistic society did not mean they could rec-
ognize any similar problems in their own. To be obsessed with slavery did
not lead to fear of the disorderly quality of guerrilla warfare. To be sure,
the antebellum myth had nurtured a tepid view of what guerrilla warfare
might bring in its wake. The Francis Marion ideal was carefully depicted
as one in which leadership by professional military men would guide the
sharp-shooting mountaineers to their targets without violating the laws
and customs of war. Once that cultural value was taken care of, no others
stood in the way of utilizing guerrilla warfare when and where it might
work to bring about Confederate independence. The educated wisdom of
their professional military leaders and not popular fears of slave insurrec-
tion or of the slaveless yeomen would dictate the nature of the war the
Confederacy fought for its independence.
This article is in no way intended to constitute a call to answer the ques-
tion whether the secessionists failed to pursue a promising strategy, a road
not taken that might have won the war and gained southern independence.
For all the vivid evocations of riflemen in buckskins expressing themselves
in comically rustic accents, there was not much of a specific militarily oper-
ational nature in the hopes of the Confederacy for partisan warfare. The
real interest lies at the level of national mythology. Unconventional tactics
and regular warfare were, for military men perhaps, different weapons for
selection from an arsenal, but that was not true in popular imagination.
The power of irregular warfare in the popular mind contained hidden
cultural values that seized the imagination. The myth of the utility and
even superiority of partisan and irregular warfare had embedded within

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it vaguely held ideals: anti-European, anti-elitist, anti-standing armies,
informal, democratic, frontier-inspired, and rural or pastoral. To realize
the importance of recovering this nationalist vision, as embodied in a myth
of one form of military superiority, it is important to see that the values just
listed are rather difficult to associate with the image of Robert E. Lee, even
though he eventually became the most popular hero of the Confederacy.
The guerrilla myth was one of several national myths that Confederate
citizens held in their heads, no doubt. Confederate “nationalism” is a limit-
ing misnomer, rather than a description of a phenomenon that was never
strongly present. It would be more accurate to say “nationalisms” in the
plural. People in the Confederacy found several expressions of cultural
values attractive. We should, as is increasingly the trend, speak of several
Confederate nationalisms or versions of Confederate nationalism.90 These
need not be seen as “contradictions” but rather as varieties, the sorts of dif-
fering and softly held viewpoints that arise in pluralist, individualistic, and
substantially free societies—as much of the white South remained during
the Civil War.91 A look at the image of George Washington on the great seal
of the Confederacy will not of itself reveal all of those ideals. There is no
buckskin in that image. There was, even when Confederates linked them-
selves to the American Revolutionary heritage, more than one version of
American heritage to admire.
notes
William A. Blair encouraged me and helped me a great deal with this manuscript.
Carol Reardon gave it a useful reading in its early stages. The anonymous readers for
this journal also offered genuinely helpful advice.
1. Edmund Ruffin, Anticipations of the Future to Serve as Lessons for the Present
Time, in the Form of Extracts of Letters from an English Resident of the United States,
to the London Times, from 1864 to 1870 (Richmond, Va.: J. W. Randolph, 1860).
2. Daniel E. Sutherland, A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the
American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 27,
29–30, 265–66.
3. Emory M. Thomas, The Dogs of War, 1861 (New York: Oxford University Press,
2011), 6.
4. Gary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism, and
Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1997), 127, 141, 143, 148, 150.
5. Reid Mitchell, “The Perseverance of the Soldiers,” in Why the Confederacy Lost,
ed. Gabor S. Boritt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 125; Richard E. Beringer
et al., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986),
346; George M. Fredrickson, Why the Confederacy Did Not Fight a Guerrilla War after
the Fall of Richmond: A Comparative View (Gettysburg, Pa.: Gettysburg College, 1996),
406 jou rnal of t h e c iv i l wa r e ra , volum e 6, i s s u e 3

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26. Kenneth M. Stampp foreshadowed modern historical concerns by linking slavery
with a reluctance to employ guerrilla warfare, but his argument, focused on the old
idea that white southerners generally felt guilty about slavery, did not take the same
direction at all. See Stampp’s The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the
Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 246–69. The most extended
discussion appears in Gallagher, Confederate War, 140–53. Some historians who have
written on guerrilla warfare in the Confederacy have looked to cultural values associ-
ated with chivalry to explain Confederate reluctance to adopt a guerrilla strategy; see,
for example, Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during
the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), v–vi. Other histo-
rians are mainly concerned with the actual incidents of guerrilla warfare and not its
highly romanticized image in the eyes of many white southerners—Daniel Sutherland,
for example, in Savage Conflict.
6. Theodore J. Crackel, West Point: A Bicentennial History (Lawrence: University
Press of Kansas, 2002), 125–26.
7. Dennis Hart Mahan, An Elementary Treatise on Advanced-Guard, Out-Post, and
Detachment Service of Troops . . . Intended as a Supplement to the System of Tactics for
the Military Service of the United States . . . (1847; repr., New York: J. Wiley, 1853), 42
8. Francis Lieber, Guerrilla Parties Considered with Reference to the Laws and
Usages of War (New York: Van Nostrand, 1862). On the origins of this pamphlet, see
Frank Freidel, Francis Lieber: Nineteenth-Century Liberal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1947), 328–30.
9. Drew Gilpin Faust, A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old
South, 1840–1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). They were three
of the five thinkers she studied.
10. William Gilmore Simms, The Life of Francis Marion (New York: G. F. Cooledge
& Brother, 1844). An edition was published on the eve of the Civil War in Philadelphia
by G. G. Evans, in 1860. Works on Marion generally derived from Mason Locke Weems
and P. Horry, The Life of General Francis Marion, A Celebrated Partisan Officer in the
Revolutionary War (Philadelphia: Matthew Carey, 1810).
11. William Gilmore Simms, The Partisan: A Tale of the Revolution, 2 vols. in one
(1835; repr., Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg Press, 1968), 1:144, 149, 77.
12. Ibid., 2:9–10.
13. Ibid., 2:276.
14. Ibid., 2:111.
15. Ibid., 2:6–7.
16. For other interpretations, see William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old
South and American National Character (1961; repr, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,
1963), 246–78 and William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay,
1776–1854 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 236–50. Taylor pays scant
attention to The Partisan, though it proved popular enough to launch a series of novels
about the Carolina backcountry. Freehling focuses on a civilization and frontier conflict
that puts decidedly in the background the strategic military role of partisan warfare
in sustaining the Revolution in the South. But Freehling shrewdly notes that Simms

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depicted upper-class heroes in a wilderness setting taming the wild and brutal environ-
ment, not becoming a part of it. See especially pages 238 and 241.
17. Simms, Partisan, ix–x.
18. The emphasis in this later northern edition was on the evidence of secret conspir-
acy for secession at so early a date and not on the idea of the utility of guerrilla warfare
to achieve southern independence. An edition was also published in the Confederacy,
in Richmond, in 1862 entitled The Partisan Leader: A Novel, and an Apocalypse of the
Origin and Struggles of the Southern Confederacy, ed. Thomas A. Ware (Richmond,
Virginia: West & Johnson, 1862). A new introduction by Ware included a visit to the
Devil’s Backbone, site of a key military scene in the book, where he discovered that “it
required no fertile imagination to locate the rocky covert of the sentinel, the stand of
the piquet, and the headquarters of ‘The Partisan Leader’—marked as the wide, wild
gorge, with its difficult approaches of steep precipice, and its clear, dashing river, ‘pour-
ing over rugged barriers of yellow stone’” (viii). Ware was impressed with more than the
political message of Tucker’s precocious book.
19. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, The Partisan Leader, ed. Carl Bridenbaugh (1836;
repr., New York: Knopf, 1933), 4, 25, 168. Andrew Pickens and Thomas Sumter were
partisan leaders of the Revolution in the South.
20. Ibid., 186–87, 238.
21. Ibid., 209, 243, 246.
22. The book appears in T. Michael Parrish and Robert M. Willingham Jr., Confed-
erate Imprints: A Bibliography of Southern Publications from Secession to Surrender
(Austin, Texas: Jenkins Publishing, n.d.), as item 6586 on page 556. William Gilmore
Simms’s book did not enjoy republication in the Confederacy, and neither did Edmund
Ruffin’s novel, discussed next.
23. Edmund Ruffin, Anticipations of the Future, To Serve as Lessons for the Present
Time (1861; repr. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries, 1972), chaps. 33 and 34, p. 185.
24. Ibid., chap. 37, 185–86.
25. See John William Ward, Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1962), chap. 1 and David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual
Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1997), 289–91.
26. Ruffin, Anticipations of the Future, 198–99.
27. On the generals’ decisive mindset, governed by West Point education and
vague ideals of chivalry, see, for example, Fellman, Inside War, 100, and Gallagher,
Confederate War, 143.
28. Daniel E. Sutherland argues that in fact guerrilla warfare was thought of as a
guarantor of slavery and the partisans constituted a particularly effective version of a
slave patrol. See Savage Conflict, 46.
29. Ian Binnington uses the images on Confederate money to investigate Confederate
nationalism, but he does not cite the note with the Marion image. See Ian Binnington,
Confederate Visions: Nationalism, Symbolism, and the Imagined South in the Civil
War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 70–92.

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30. See, for example, Drew Gilpin Faust, Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and
Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988),
14. A picture of the Confederate national seal with its image of George Washington in
the center appears on the very cover of Faust’s book.
31. Ruffin refers to the riots in the North as “terror” and compares them to the
excesses of the French Revolution. See Anticipations of the Future, 287, 294.
32. Sutherland, Savage Conflict, xi–xii. Sutherland argues that guerrillas were
defined by unconventional tactics and by being usually raised for local defense.
33. See John William Ward, Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1955), esp. 22–27; and David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual
Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1997), esp. 289–91.
34. For a discerning and thrilling account, see Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The
Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New
York: Knopf, 2000), esp. 105–7. See also David L. Preston, Braddock’s Defeat: The
Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2015), 2.
35. See especially Sylvia Neely, “Mason Locke Weems’s Life of George Washington
and the Myth of Braddock’s Defeat,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 107
(Winter 1999): 45–72. For a book that rescues Washington from any reputation as
an irregular or bushwhacking general, see Don Higginbotham, The War of American
Independence: Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practice, 1763–1789 (New York:
Macmillan, 1971).
36. As in the case of George Washington, Jackson was not responsible for the Ken-
tucky riflemen version of the myth and in fact engaged in a bitter public argument with
the leader of the Kentucky forces in the Battle of New Orleans, accusing him of cow-
ardice. See Letters of Gen. Adair and Gen. Jackson, Relative to the Charge of Cowardice,
Made by the Latter against the Kentucky Troops at New Orleans, ed. Thomas Smith
(Lexington, Ky.: Thomas Smith, 1824); and Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and
the Course of American Empire, 1767–1821 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 286–88.
37. For an introduction to the difficulties of usage of the term “guerrilla,” see Charles
J. Esdaile, Fighting Napoleon: Guerrillas, Bandits, and Adventurers in Spain, 1808–
1814 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 25–26.
38. The hold on the American imagination of the idea that Southerners were espe-
cially adept at this American brand of warfare because of their agrarianism is explored
to great effect by Michael C. C. Adams in Fighting for Defeat: Union Military Failure
in the East, 1861–1865, originally published as Our Masters the Rebels: A Speculation
on Union Military Failure in the East, 1861–1865 in 1978 (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1992), esp. 39–47.
39. Alexander Hamilton, Federalist #26, in The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton
Rossiter (New York: Penguin, 2003), 162.
40. On the sources and major themes of Confederate national propaganda see
Faust, Confederate Nationalism, esp. chaps. 2 and 3.

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41. Paul Quigley, Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848–
1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 84–85.
42. Robert E. Bonner, Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of
American Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 181–83.
43. Ian Binnington, Confederate Visions: Nationalism, Symbolism, and the Imag-
ined South in the Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 46.
44. Binnington gives passing mention to “the superiority of the rifle over the mus-
ket, echoing the tradition of the frontiersman’s Kentucky rifle.” Ibid., 62.
45. Ibid., 65.
46. Ruffin, Anticipations of the Future, ix.
47. J. B. Jones, Wild Southern Scenes: A Tale of Disunion! And Border War!
(Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson and Brothers, [1859]), 92, 239.
48. Ibid., 320–21.
49. Information in this and the four preceding paragraphs comes from Edmund
Ruffin, February 29 and March 1 diary entries, The Diary of Edmund Ruffin, vol. 1,
Toward Independence, October, 1856–April 1861, ed. William Kauffman Scarbrough
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), 407–9.
50. George Fitzhugh, “The Conduct of the War,” De Bow’s Review 32 (January–
February 1862): 140, 142, 143.
51. J. D. B. DeBow, “Our Danger and Our Duty,” De Bow’s Review enl. ser. 8 (May–
August 1862): 48. Beringer et al. point out that “some . . . southerners” thought guerrilla
warfare possible, “J. B. D. De Bow, for example,” but, they add, “there were relatively
few such men.” Why the South Lost the Civil War, 343.
52. Charleston Mercury, May 22, 1861.
53. Charleston Mercury, June 13, 1861.
54. Quoted in Neely, “Mason Locke Weems’s Life of George Washington,” 63–64.
55. Avery Craven, Edmund Ruffin, Southerner: A Study in Secession (New York: D.
Appleton, 1932), 188.
56. Charles McArver, “Newspapers,” in Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, 4 vols., ed.
Richard N. Current (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 3:1144.
57. Charleston Courier, June 10, 1861.
61. Mobile Advertiser and Register, September 3, 1861.
62. Savannah Daily News, July 30, 1861.
63. Savannah Daily News, April 20, July 27, and August 15, 1861. The Sharp
Shooters came from Waynesboro, some seventy-five miles up the Savannah River.
64. Earl J. Hess, The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat: Reality and Myth
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 63.
65. Savannah Daily News, June 18, 1861.
66. Savannah Daily News, June 19, 1861. See also August 6, 1861. The same news-
paper also published reassuring articles indicating the loyalty of the slaves to their mas-
ters and to the Confederacy.

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67. On the contrary, as Daniel E. Sutherland insists, the guerrilla companies were
seen as the units that would control the slave population. See Savage Conflict, 46, and
many other references.
68. William Frayne Amann, ed., Personnel of the Civil War, 2 vols. (New York:
Thomas Yoseloff, 1961).
69. Savannah Daily News, August 19, 1861. They would have bayonets attached,
reported the newspaper.
70. Richmond Examiner, May 29, 1861.
71. Richmond Examiner, July 12, 1861.
72. Quoted in the Savannah Daily News, May 14, 1861.
73. Richmond Examiner, July 20, 1861.
74. Neely, “Mason Locke Weems’s Life of George Washington,” 45–72.
75. Richmond Examiner, June 18, July 8, July 17, 1861.
76. Mobile Advertiser and Register, June 16, 18, 26, August 6, 1861.
77. Quoted in the Savannah Daily News, April 16, 1861.
78. For the agrarian understanding of the American Civil War see Adams, Fighting
for Defeat, 39–47.
79. Sally Rochester Ford, Raids and Romances of Morgan and His Men (Mobile,
Ala.: S. H. Goetzel, 1863). A second edition appeared in 1864. She was the author of
several antebellum works and of one other Confederate imprint, the rare Trials and
Triumphs on the “Dark and Bloody Ground,” published in Mississippi in 1863. This
work is known only by its title page, surviving in the Library of Congress. For this
careful and essential bibliographical work see Parrish and Willingham, Confederate
Imprints, 541. I rely heavily on this work for this section of the article.
80. Charleston Mercury, May 18, 1864.
81. Quoted in the Mobile Advertiser and Register, June 23, 1863.
82. See the Charleston Mercury, June 18, 1863, for an advertisement for Ford’s book.
83. James A. Ramage recognizes Morgan’s great contribution to Confederate
morale but perhaps underestimates the public quality of Morgan’s visits to Richmond
and Atlanta. See Ramage’s Rebel Raider: The Life of General John Hunt Morgan
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 198–207.
84. Parrish and Willingham, Confederate Imprints, 547. There are no surviving cop-
ies of The Partisan Ranger. Or the Bushwhacker, which is advertised in the Richmond
Examiner, March 9, 1863.
85. The Memoirs of John S. Mosby, ed. Charles Wells Russell (1917; repr., Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1958), 4.
86. Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward
Porter Alexander, ed. Gary W. Gallagher (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1989), 532. See also Jefferson Davis endorsement on Zebulon B. Vance to Davis,
April 11, 1865, in The Papers of Jefferson Davis, vol. 11, September 1864–May 1865,
ed. Lynda Lasswell Crist (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 532.
The historiographical trail starts with “Lee at Appomattox,” in Charles Francis Adams
[Jr.], Lee at Appomattox and Other Papers, 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903),
17. Adams thought the Lee anecdote apt because of the Boer War. Eventually, it found

87.202.40.168 on Mon, 17 Jan 2022 18:27:15 UTC
its way into the mainstream of Confederate history: for example, the standard one-
volume history, Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation: 1861–1865 (New York:
Harper & Row, 1979), 301–3, and continues to enjoy attention from historians.
87. The anecdote describing Lee’s rejection of the suggestion of guerrilla warfare has
become famous in the literature. See, for example, Gallagher, Confederate War, 142–43.
88. Richard N. Current, “God and the Strongest Battalions,” in Why the North Won
the Civil War, ed. David H. Donald (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1960), 3–4.
89. J. Mills Thornton, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978).
90. The most recent works are careful about pluralism. See, for example, Michael
T. Bernath, Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil
War South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010) and, already cited,
Ian Binnington’s Confederate Visions. Note the plurals.
91. For the view of “contradictions” in a society on which conservatives allegedly
attempted to press an unwelcome reactionary national vision, see Faust, Confederate
Nationalism, 39–40, 84.

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Guerrilla Warfare, Slavery, and the Hopes of the Confederacy

Author(s): MARK E. NEELY JR.

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Guerrilla Warfare, Slavery,

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380 j ou rnal of th e c iv i l wa r e ra , volum e 6 , i s s u e 3

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﻿g u e rri l la wa rfa re, slav e ry, a n d t h e co n f e de r ac y ﻿ 381

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382 j ou rnal of t h e c iv i l wa r e ra , volum e 6 , i s s u e 3

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The partisans who inhabited so natural an environment resembled in

It is impossible to conceive a military array, with less of the “pomp and

An old Indian fighter, a broadly comic lower-class character named

“I’m telling our boys,” continued Schwartz . . .”some of the lessons I

﻿g u e rri l la wa rfa re, slav e ry, a n d t h e co n f e de r ac y ﻿ 383

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384 jou rnal of th e c iv i l wa r e ra , volum e 6 , i s s u e 3

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﻿g u e rri l la wa rfa re, slav e ry, a n d t h e co n f e de r ac y ﻿ 385

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Ruffin thus differentiated the common soldiers of the two armies by a

386 jou rnal of th e c iv i l wa r e ra , volum e 6 , i s s u e 3

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﻿g u e rri l la wa rfa re, slav e ry, a n d t h e co n f e de r ac y ﻿ 387

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﻿g u e rri l la wa rfa re, slav e ry, a n d t h e co n f e de r ac y ﻿ 389

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﻿g u e rri l la wa rfa re, slav e ry, a n d t h e co n f e de r ac y ﻿ 391

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392 jou rnal of th e c iv i l wa r e ra , volum e 6 , i s s u e 3

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﻿g u e rri l la wa rfa re, slav e ry, a n d t h e co n f e de r ac y ﻿ 393

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﻿g u e rri l la wa rfa re, slav e ry, a n d t h e co n f e de r ac y ﻿ 395

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﻿g u e rri l la wa rfa re, slav e ry, a n d t h e co n f e de r ac y ﻿ 397

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Edmund Ruffin had close connections with the Mercury of Robert

398 jou rnal of th e c iv i l wa r e ra , volum e 6 , i s s u e 3

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﻿g u e rri l la wa rfa re, slav e ry, a n d t h e co n f e de r ac y ﻿ 399

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400 jou rnal of t h e c iv i l wa r e ra , volum e 6, i s s u e 3

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g u e rri l la wa rfa re, slav e ry, a n d t h e co n f e de r ac y 37 7

g u e rri l la wa rfa re, slav e ry, a n d t h e co n f e de r ac y 37 9

g u e rri l la wa rfa re, slav e ry, a n d t h e co n f e de r ac y 381

g u e rri l la wa rfa re, slav e ry, a n d t h e co n f e de r ac y 383

g u e rri l la wa rfa re, slav e ry, a n d t h e co n f e de r ac y 385

g u e rri l la wa rfa re, slav e ry, a n d t h e co n f e de r ac y 387

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