Edmund Ruffin, the fire-eating Southern secessionist, practiced what he preached. When the moment of decision came in Charleston Harbor in April 1861, he actually fired one of the war’s first shots. Unlike some of his fellow political agitators for breaking up the Union, before the war Ruffin had given some thought to what might happen if the South seceded and war ensued.
Ruffin decided to address the challenge of advocating war when the odds were against the South by writing a novel in 1860 called Anticipations of the Future: To Serve as Lessons for the Present Time. The action takes place in an imagined mid-1860s, after secession and during the ensuing war. Ruffin focuses on the career of “a guerrilla officer” identified only as “J.M.,” who came from Wheeling, in western Virginia.
Ruffin believed that the answer to the problem of going to war against a superior power lay in guerrilla warfare led by mountaineers. In the book, the South gains its independence by ambushes in which Southern forces of small size use cunning and marksmanship to inflict colossal slaughter on Northern armies of great size.
Ruffin was not the only Southern secessionist to recognize the promise of guerrilla warfare to the South. Many white Southerners thought the mountains and swamps of the region, the people’s superior knowledge of the countryside, and Southern outdoorsmen’s skills would make up for their want of population and industry. The Confederacy would imitate the successes of the American Revolution, especially of partisan fighters like the “Swamp Fox,” Francis Marion. The odds were long against the patriots, but the war ended in independence; the odds were long again in 1861, but they believed the result might be the same with the adoption of irregular warfare.
But after Ruffin fired that shot at Fort Sumter, the Confederacy actually met the large Northern armies with great armies of their own—on battlefields of now storied reputation. The Confederacy conspicuously did not often practice what Ruffin had preached, and fought a largely conventional war with organized armies, mostly on manageable terrain with artillery and infantry. When enemy soldiers surrendered, they were taken prisoner. Flags of truce were utilized and usually honored so the dead could be buried after great battles. Those who had believed in the Swamp Fox tradition watched the war unfold in ways that defied their predictions of easy victory against great odds.
There were moments when the war might have turned into a guerrilla conflict. But it did so only occasionally and mostly on the margins. Confederate leaders generally counseled the Southern people not to embark in guerrilla warfare. Take, for example, the fall of New Orleans in 1862. The New Or leans Bee made fiery calls for resistance by guerrilla warfare should the Yankees extend their lines into the Confederate interior, but changed its tune when Union forces occupied the city in April. Following is a portion of the Bee editorial of March 26, 1862: “If among the means of effective injury a partisan and guerrilla warfare offers apparent advantages, let us adopt it, and practice it with indomitable vigor and ceaseless resolution.” But as Federal naval vessels neared New Orleans and prepared to bombard the protecting forts, the Bee did not call for individual resistance by civilians and instead quoted a Richmond newspaper advising Confederates in areas being occupied by Federal forces to submit and to remain at home and not encumber the Confederate armies by fleeing.
Confederate citizens in occupied areas took such advice to heart. That was so much the case that die -hard Rebel newspapers wrote off the South’s cities as they fell to Union conquest as unnecessary to the fight. The reluctance of Confederates to engage in guerrilla resistance frustrated some Southerners to the very end of the war.
After the burning of Columbia, S.C., William Gilmore Simms, another ardent Confederate who had hoped to see Southerners imitate the feats of Francis Marion, lamented the easy sweep of Sherman’s armies through the state. David Aiken’s edition of Simms’ bitter tract, written in March 1865, A City Laid Waste: The Capture, Sack, and Destruction of the City of Columbia, which might be expected to reveal dogged guerrilla resistance, in fact gives testimony to the opposite phenomenon. Simms complained: “[T]he enemy were allowed to travel one hundred and fifty miles of our State, through a region of swamp and thicket, in no portion of which could a field be found adequate to the display of ten thousand men, and where, under good partisan leaders, the invaders might have been cut off in separate bodies, their supplies stopped, their march constantly embarrassed by hard fighting, and where, a bloody toll exacted at every defile, they must have found a Thermopylae at every five miles of their march. We had no partisan fighting, as in the days of old.”
The notably unbloody results of such occupations of Southern territory caused historian Kenneth M. Stampp to focus on the lack of guerrilla resistance as a cause of Confederate defeat in a famous essay titled “The Southern Road to Appomattox.” Commenting on “the behavior of Confederate civilians in areas occupied by Union military forces,” Stampp saw no analogy to “the problems that plagued the German Nazis in the countries they occupied during the Second World War. Everywhere they met resistance from an organized underground that… made life precarious for collaborators and German military personnel.”
By contrast, Stampp noted accurately, in “the Confederate South, apart from border-state bushwhacking, there was only one example of underground resistance even remotely comparable to that demonstrated in Nazi-occupied Eu rope or French-occupied Algeria.” That was East Tennessee, where Southern Unionists made life miserable for the occupying Confederate soldiers.
For Confederates who continued to hope for massive guerrilla resistance to Union invasion, the behavior of their people continually disappointed them. The fierce editor of the Richmond Examiner commented after mid-May 1862, “Up to this time all resistance and trouble has ceased with the entrance of Yankee troops into Confederate towns and territories…the people have done nothing.” The only example the disappointed Richmond newspaperman could find in all of the Confederacy so far in the contest was John Hunt Morgan. “Morgan is yet unique,” he lamented. And such leaders remained rare in the Confederacy.
When a genuine partisan hero arrived on the scene in Virginia in 1863, it was John Singleton Mosby, who prided himself not only on his unconventional cavalry tactics and the abandonment of the useless cavalry saber, but also on observing the laws and customs of war, especially in regard to POWs. Historian Robert R. Mackey, in The Uncivil War: Irregular Warfare in the Upper South, 1861-1865, notes that one of the reasons for Mosby’s relative success was his “fair treatment of surrendered Federals,” which “encouraged others to capitulate, and…limited, but did not eliminate, reprisals.”
The famous exception to Mosby’s record on that score might be said to prove the rule. He dealt with the incident openly in his memoirs. On September 22, 1864, enraged Union cavalrymen executed six of Mosby’s men, in retaliation, said the Union soldiers, for the killing of a Union officer after he had surrendered. Mosby retaliated on November 6, waiting, he said, until he engaged the Union units responsible for the executions. He ordered seven soldiers killed, and then promised, in a letter written to Philip H. Sheridan, “Hereafter, any prisoners falling into my hands will be treated with the kindness due to their condition, unless some new act of barbarity shall compel me, reluctantly to adopt a line of policy repugnant to humanity.” Soldiers such as Mosby—most Civil War soldiers, in fact—generally attempted to avoid adopting “a line of policy repugnant to humanity.”
Stampp’s brilliant observation on the lack of guerrilla or partisan warfare has not been refuted to this day. Where is the lore of the uprising of some “New Orleans Ghetto” in the Civil War? Why does our memory of the conflict not include chilling references to Mo lo tov cocktails and improvised ex plosive devices, the legacies of other partisan conflicts? Perhaps Stampp’s idea of guerrilla warfare and the ideas of historians who came after him are not the same. But if that is so, then what we need is more careful definition of what constitutes guerrilla conflict.
What is at issue is the representativeness of guerrilla warfare as the standard of combat. The revolting practices of guerrillas in Missouri and other places were horrifying. But what was their degree of prevalence in the 11 states of the Confederacy (Missouri was a border state) or in major battles? How big a role did they play in winning or losing? Careful military students of the subject, like Robert R. Mackey, concluded essentially that the Confederates found the strategy of guerrilla and partisan warfare wanting, and such strategy remained marginal. The Confederate Congress even rescinded the Partisan Ranger Act, authorizing irregular units, in April 1864.
The gloomy motivations for killing depicted in Michael Fellman’s Inside War dwell largely at the bottom of human motivations: revenge, blood sport and other monstrous psychological urges divorced from political purpose. If we let the visions of such combat take over our understanding of the war, then we lose sight of other motivations, Union and liberty and defense of home and hearth and the slavery system. The disagreement is fundamental and would change the entire meaning and significance of the Civil War.
I am pleased to see vigorous debate on this subject in this magazine. But I am writing another book now, Lincoln and the American Nation, which considers the degree to which Confederate hopes for nationhood were bound up in a vision of imitating the feats of the Swamp Fox and winning at great odds, and what I have said here offers a glimpse of what is to come. It is time to move on.
Originally published in the April 2009 issue of Civil War Times. To subscribe, click here.
