Mountain Partisans: Guerrilla Warfare in the Southern Appalachians, 1861-1865

Mountain Partisans: Guerrilla Warfare in the Southern Appalachians, 1861-1865, by Sean Michael O'Brien. 221 pages, 20 illustrations. Praeger Publishers, 2000. $35.

The mountainous area bounded by the western portions of North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and the northern counties of Alabama and Georgia was the isolated home for what Edmund Kirby Smith described as "an ignorant, primitive people." Kirby Smith's comment may have had to do with the fact that those people were fiercely independent, owing their first loyalty to kith and kin rather than to any government. Although secessionist and anti-secessionist sentiments in the Southern Appalachians were about evenly divided along class lines, the people tended to resent virtually any outside authority, as both Federal and Confederate authorities learned when they attempted to impose conscription and taxation laws.

As sectarian feelings coalesced, the area soon became a fluid battleground for regular Federal and Confederate troops, as well as for home guards, partisan rangers, night riders, and a host of independent units, uniformed or not, created by both sides. Some had the stamp of authority, but others were nothing more than roving bands of criminals, changing sides as opportunities arose, and whose only allegiance was to themselves. Numerous engagements occurred throughout the war, many involving only a handful of men who struck quickly and then vanished. Some of these had a clear military purpose, but others were simply opportunities to settle old scores. In all cases, an enemy soldier counted himself fortunate indeed to be taken prisoner rather than being summarily hanged, shot, or beaten to death. It was worse for the civilian population. The fighting in the mountains degenerated into a true civil war, with civilians bearing the brunt of vicious attacks and reprisals.

Farmers were shot down in their fields, and the midnight knock on the door was often followed by murder, robbery, rape, and arson. Many of the men who engaged in this type of warfare came by their skills through genetic inheritance. As Kevin Phillips suggests in The Cousins' Wars, our war of 1861-1865 was the final stage of a conflict that began with the English Civil War. Toward the end, the Confederate government debated, but fortunately abandoned, an idea to continue guerrilla warfare in the mountains. Had it chosen otherwise, the Civil War could have dragged on for months or years as a partisan struggle costing huge amounts of manpower and materiel, and perhaps altering American society as we know it. As O'Brien notes in his last chapter, the enmities created during the war lasted well into the twentieth century for many of the people of Southern Appalachia.

Copyright Military Images Jan/Feb 2001
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