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Latter Stages Of The War

Chickasaw A Mississippi Scout for the Union: The Civil War Memoir of Levi H. Naron Cockrell & Ballard, ed. As a well-to-do planter and slave owner, Levi Naron was an unlikely supporter of the Union, but at the outbreak of the Civil War, he headed north and began his career as "Chickasaw" - Federal scout, spy, and raider. This memoir offers a rare and vivid account of his operations behind Confederate lines - including how he burned bridges, tracked down Rebel spies, suppressed guerrillas and bushwhackers, and more.

By the latter stages of the war every part of the South and the Border States contained guerrillas - Confederate, Unionist, and just plain bandit. Aside from Virginia, Missouri, and Kentucky, the main centers of Confederate partisan activity were Arkansas, Tennessee, and Louisiana, large areas of which came under Northern occupation early in the conflict.

In Arkansas the most militarily effective partisan leaders were "Captains" James McGhee and Joseph F. Barton. Early in 1863 they captured, plundered, and burned a half-dozen Federal steamers on the Mississippi, either by ambushing them at landings or by boarding them from flatboats. Another notorious guerrilla in eastern Arkansas was George Rutherford, who from his swamp hideout scoured the country between Batesville and Helena, attacking wagon trains and terrorizing Union sympathizers. And over in the Ozarks of northwestern Arkansas bands led by James lngraham and Buck Brown bedeviled the Federals and native "Tories." In reprisal for the amphibious strikes of McGhee and Barton Union troops destroyed two Arkansas villages on the Mississippi, and they burned forty houses belonging to families suspected of aiding Ingraham and Brown.

Tennessee's most famous - or infamous - Confederate guerrilla was Champ Ferguson, who prowled the Cumberland Mountains, a region where Unionists and Secessionists waged a remorseless, feud-like struggle. What set him apart from the numerous other bushwhackers on both sides was the ferocity and number of his killings. Not content merely to shoot his victims, he often stabbed them as well. Once he literally slashed a man to pieces, then rammed two cornstalks into the wounds. Following the unsuccessful Federal raid on Saltville, Virginia, October 2, 1864, he murdered Union wounded lying on the battlefield and shot a dozen Negro prisoners. His bloodlust still unsated, he went to a hospital, pushed aside a physician who tried to stop him, and with a rifle blew out the brains of a Union lieutenant who was lying helpless in bed. All told he personally slew over one hundred men during the war.

According to Confederate sources, at the outbreak of the war a band of local Unionists went to his house on Calfkiller Creek near Sparta, Tennessee while he was away and stripped his wife and 12-year-old daughter naked, an atrocity that caused him to seek blood vengeance against all "Lincolnites." This story may be true, although Ferguson himself denied it, but it scarcely explains and certainly does not excuse his savagery, which seems to have been psychopathic. In any case, shortly after the war ended the Federals, who had declared him an outlaw, apprehended him by means of a ruse and placed him on trial before a military commission, charged with fifty-three specified murders. He of course was found guilty, and on October 20, 1865 was hanged at Nashville. To the end he expressed no regret for his deeds, and his only last wish was that he be buried in his native Cumberlands - a request that his wife fulfilled.

Guerrilla resistance to the Yankees in Louisiana began after the fall of New Orleans early in 1862. On May 28, as a boat from Admiral David G. Farragut's flagship Hartford was putting ashore at Baton Rouge to have some laundry done, forty bushwhackers hiding on the landing blasted it with buckshot, wounding an officer and two sailors. An outraged Farragut promptly shelled the town, causing both bushwhackers and civilians to flee in terror, killing one woman and wounding three, and wrecking numerous buildings, among them the Catholic church, a hotel, and the state capitol. Several months later Farragut's cannon gave Donaldsville an even worse going over in retaliation for guerrillas sniping at transports. These tough countermeasures resulted in the governor of Louisiana calling a halt to the firing on boats. At the same time public complaints that the guerrillas were as bad as the Yankee invaders led to the disbandment of the state's partisan ranger companies and the conscription of their men into the army.

Nevertheless numerous freelance bushwhackers remained active. Beside the usual attacks on Union troops and installations, they attempted to prevent the newly liberated Negroes from growing cotton for shipment to New England and Britain by raiding their farms and even carrying them off to Texas and a return to slavery. Quite naturally the blacks fought back by attacking white settlements. In May 1863 the Confederates hanged fifty Negroes for "jayhawking" in St. Mary's Parish.

Union guerrillas existed not only in east Tennessee and north Texas, but also in the mountains of southwest Virginia, north Arkansas, western North and South Carolina, and north Georgia; in the hill country of northern Alabama and the pinelands of Mississippi; and in the canebrakes of Louisiana and the swamps of Florida. The people of these regions were predominantly non-slaveholding small farmers who had opposed secession. The Confederate Conscription Act of 1862, which exempted men owning twenty or more slaves, led non-slaveholders to charge that it was a "rich man's war and a poor man's fight." Attempts by the Richmond government to enforce the draft, the confiscation of crops and livestock by the Confederate Army, and the occasional suspension of habeas corpus by Jefferson Davis drove them to open, armed resistance, with many of the dissidents joining the "Heroes of America" and the "Peace Society," Southern-wide secret organizations dedicated to restoring Federal rule.

In northwest Arkansas gangs led by "Wild Bill" Heffington, William Dark, and Captain Martin Hunt plundered and murdered Secessionists. The most notable of the three was Hunt. A former Texas state senator, he obtained a commission in the Confederate Army early in the war, then defected to the Federals in 1862. During the winter of 1862-63 his small band, which consisted mainly of fellow Texans, killed a number of prominent secessionists around Fort Smith, Arkansas. Confederate troops captured and hanged him in January 1863.

From 1862 to the end of the war guerrillas and/or bandits infested southwest Virginia and the western Carolinas, "robbing, burning, and plundering at will," to quote a Southern historian. Most of them were draft dodgers or deserters who organized gangs numbering from 50 to as many as 500. Backed by a sympathetic populace, they built forts and even openly occupied towns. One Confederate conscription officer in North Carolina reported that they "are not only determined to kill in avoiding apprehension (having just put to death yet another of our enrolling officers), but their esprit de corps extends to killing in revenge. . . . So far they seem to have had no trouble for subsistence. While the disaffected feed them from sympathy, the loyal do so from fear."

Similarly, in South Carolina another Confederate officer informed his superiors that the loyal people were afraid to assist him in arresting deserters because of their threats to retaliate with knife and torch. And in the east Tennessee-southwest Virginia area Unionist bands more than held their own against Rebel partisans. Not even the employment during the winter of 1863-64 of an entire brigade of Confederate troops sufficed to suppress what amounted to a rebellion against the rebellion in the southern highlands.

Union sympathizers in northern Alabama and Mississippi lay low until Federal forces invaded those states in 1862. They then came into the open, forming bands, which harassed Southern loyalists and aided the Northern troops. For example, in April 1863 two companies of Alabama Unionists guided Colonel A. D. Streight during his raid on railroads in Confederate-held Alabama and Georgia - an expedition, which ended disastrously, however, when Streight was overtaken by Nathan Bedford Forrest. Other Alabama "Tories" operating from Federal gunboats on the Tennessee River and the hill country devastated much of the upper portion of the state and by 1865 were practically in control of this section.

Union sentiment in Mississippi centered around Jones County, which according to legend seceded from the Confederacy and became "The Republic of Jones." In any case large bands of deserters, with the one headed by Newton Knight being the most notorious, prowled through that area during the latter half of the war, terrorizing Southern loyalists, attacking conscription officers, and on one occasion capturing a Confederate wagon train. Periodically the Confederates sent sizable bodies of troops, accompanied by bloodhounds, to round up the deserters, whom they estimated to number 5,000. However, their success was minimal, and most of the men they did send back into the army deserted again at the first opportunity.

Conditions were not quite so bad in the north Georgia mountains, but even there depredations by deserters and Unionists became so bad that early in 1863 the governor dispatched militia to preserve order. Likewise in western Louisiana hundreds of deserters and bandits swarmed in the canebrakes, so terrorizing loyal Confederates that they were afraid to join the army and thus leave their families and property unprotected. In an attempt to restore security and apprehend deserters, Lieutenant General Richard Taylor sent ex-members of Quantrill's band into the region with orders to "shoot every man found with arms in hand." Nevertheless marauding remained such a serious problem for the Confederates in Louisiana that early in 1865 they actually agreed to co-operate with Federal troops in suppressing it!

Another favorite haven for Southern draft dodgers and deserters was Florida with its sparse population and numerous swamps. There gangs of "lay-outs," as they were called, ambushed Confederate patrols, carried off arms, food, and slaves from plantations, robbed the mails, and in some areas intimidated local officials and prevented the collection of taxes. Furthermore, along the coasts they aided Union blockaders and raiding columns, and in west Florida they rustled cattle to prevent meat from reaching the Confederate Army and to feed Federal forces and Unionist refugees. By 1864 they were so strong and active that the governor was afraid to leave the capital (Tallahassee) for fear of being captured, and the editor of the Gainesville Cotton States declared that "East Florida must make up its mind whether to Fight or submit to the deserters."

The militia having proved ineffectual as well as unreliable (many of them also deserted), in April 1864 a regular Confederate regiment tried to suppress the "layouts," but it too achieved little beyond putting the torch to the homes of suspected "Tories" in Taylor County, headquarters of a guerrilla band which called itself the "Independent Union Rangers." A few months later a motley horde of "500 Union men, deserters, and negroes," to quote a contemporary account, ravished the Gainesville area in retaliation for these burnings.

Bloody Dawn The Story of the Lawrence Kansas Massacre. Goodrich. This narrative reconsiders the Lawrence Kansas Massacre, exploring the reasons that Confederate Guerrillas under William Clarke Quantrill raided the remote settlement and killed more than 150 people before burning the town to the ground. Written in vivid prose, you'll relive the hellish scene and learn of the retribution that followed.

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