As a Confederate Soldier, John Fulton Brown opposed all things pointing to a division of the United States. He felt he was helping to establish a cause that he did not want established. His heart was not in it and it didn't reflect his interests. He was half-starved all the time and was plagued by the horrid, hungry insects that sucked out what little beef and rice he didn't get at suppertime. Who wouldn't move, influenced by a variety of facts such as these? In The Bushwhackers, he recounts how, while traveling in the high, craggy mountains of Tennessee, they discovered the area had been overrun by both Yanks and Rebs. Barns and corncribs were empty with no men in sight, except every now and then a very old man would wander out of hiding. Women with long, peaked faces peeped out through cracks in their huts, looking as scared to death as they undoubtedly were. Children with woolly heads and prominent eyeballs, pale from lack of sufficient food-skedaddled in all directions. Real pretty girls, or those who would have been pretty if there were peace and plenty, looked as though they had never had a full meal in their lives.

Intro -- Halftitle Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- Author's Note -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: A Curiosity and Specimen -- Chapter 1: Household War -- Chapter 2: Rebel Kin -- Chapter 3: The Hired Hand -- Chapter 4: Rebel Foodways -- Chapter 5: The Rebel Style -- Chapter 6: The Rebel Horseman -- Chapter 7: The Rebel Gun -- Chapter 8: The Rebel Bushwhacker -- Coda: The Empty Graves of Killers -- Appendix 1 -- Appendix 2 -- Appendix 3 -- Appendix 4 -- Appendix 5 -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

The award-winning author provides “a look at the women who supported the male border raiders . . . includes heartrending stories from a savage war” (HistoryNet). In this fascinating look at an often overlooked subject, historian Larry Wood delves into the hidden lives of the brave belles of Missouri. Sometimes connected by blood but always united in purpose, these wives, sisters, daughters, lovers, friends, and mothers risked their lives and their freedom to give aid and comfort to their menfolk. They used subterfuge and occasionally sheer luck to feed, clothe, and shelter the guerrillas. These courageous women of every age and station acted as essential go-betweens, scouts, spies, guides, and mail handlers. They often joined in on the bushwhackers’ campaigns, assisting them in any way possible. They even received and traded stolen property for their Confederate brethren. Many of the women were arrested or banished from their home state of Missouri; many were forced to give an oath of allegiance to the Union in order to gain their freedom; a few were able to carry out their clandestine missions undetected. Wood traces these women through their own diaries and other primary sources from the era. The poignant tales of these women are punctuated by images of many of them; the stiff, posed portraits give silent testimony to their resiliency and strength during tumultuous times. “A fascinating glimpse into the irregular warfare that embroiled the state during the Civil War.” —Jefferson City News Tribune

Color illustration on front cover of three superimposed vignettes: man wearing western hat and red bandana holding a rifle in his proper left hand; bare-chested man wearing blue pants embracing a woman wearing a pink dress; two men in a rocky outcropping shooting at each other.

While the Civil War rages in Missouri and Rebels destroy their farm home and scatter their family, thirteen-year-old Jacob and his younger sister find refuge in an unlikely place.

The Civil War tends to be remembered as a vast sequence of battles, with a turning point at Gettysburg and a culmination at Appomattox. But in the guerrilla theater, the conflict was a vast sequence of home invasions, local traumas, and social degeneration that did not necessarily end in 1865. This book chronicles the history of “guerrilla memory,” the collision of the Civil War memory “industry” with the somber realities of irregular warfare in the borderlands of Missouri and Kansas. In the first accounting of its kind, Matthew Christopher Hulbert’s book analyzes the cultural politics behind how Americans have remembered, misremembered, and re-remembered guerrilla warfare in political rhetoric, historical scholarship, literature, and film and at reunions and on the stage. By probing how memories of the guerrilla war were intentionally designed, created, silenced, updated, and even destroyed, Hulbert ultimately reveals a continent-wide story in which Confederate bushwhackers—pariahs of the eastern struggle over slavery—were transformed into the vanguards of American imperialism in the West.

The story of Bill Wilson has been told and re-told throughout the Ozarks Mountains since he began his bloody career in 1861. He is a true folk hero from the time when the Ozarks were full of men who took to the bush and waged war on the Yankees who had invaded their state.In the summer of 1861, Bill was accused of stealing horses from the Union. He was questioned and released, but a few days later, while he was away from home, a group of Yankees, Red Legs, and Jawhawkers ejected his family from his house, stole everything worth stealing, and burned the house, barn, and outbuildings.From that day forward, Bill became a one-man army intent on killing every Yankee, or Yankee sympathizer, he could find. He became one of the best known Bushwhackers in Missouri, along with men like Sam Hildebrand, another Missouri Bushwhacker legend.After the war ended, with a $300 bounty on his head, Bill left Missouri. As did many ex-Confederates, he took off for Texas.The end of the Bill Wilson story is said to have come in Sherman, Texas. Two of his ex-comrades, former Missouri Partisan Rangers, apparently got the drop on him and murdered him for the cash he was carrying. The two men, William O. Blackmore and John Thompson, were apprehended, tried, and convicted of the murder. They ware hanged on 26 March, 1869 in Sherman, Texas at 1:00 p.m.