Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy: Guerrilla Warfare in the West, 1861--1865

Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy is an excellent account of the "fighting" in and around Missouri during the War Between the States. More importantly, this gem of American history yields insights that foreign policy makers would do well to ponder as American soldiers battle disparate bands of irregular fighters in distant lands today.

Often called the second oldest profession, spying is as old as war itself. Espionage became something a quiet person could do for God and his/her country. Giving reports of overheard conversations, purpoined correspondence, even actual battle plans during the Civil War like that yankee spy in Richmond, Crazy Betty Lew. Her name was similar to my maiden name, shortened last name but I would have been Confederate; the South had more more spies (younger males called scouts) than the Union. President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis interrogated suspected spies personally. There was an assassination plot by Kilpatrick's men with the approval of Abraham Lincoln to kill Jefferson Davis in 1864 in Richmond, Virginia. The son of Admiral John Dahlgren had the papers when he was killed during the raid. John Surratt was a Confederate spy, a courier for the "secred Service" using his mother's boardinghouse in Maryland for assignations. It was L. C. Baker from California who hunted down John Wilkes Booth and B. Corbet who illegally shot him. The Civil War did not end with Lee's surrender but on June 28, 1865, after Lincoln's funeral. Naval action continued until August 2. At first, women were considerated less discreet and not smart enough to report what they they heard. Rebel Rose was Confederate's top spy, a Maryland widow with southern charm. She'd been married to a lawyer and a "society lady" who held lavish parties for the Union army officers even though her Sourthern sympathies were well known. After she became a widow, James Buchanan visited her quite often. John C. Breakeridge, Buchanan's Vice President (1857-1860) became a Confederate general. The Battle of Bull Run was a Confederate victory. General Robert E. Lee quoted "The chief source of information to the enemy is through our Negroes interested in their freedom and the Underground Railroad." Bell Boyd was no beauty but other attributes to "please young federal officers" in exchange for information. She was an eccentric spinster with a crazy hairdo. She was died facing North, ever on the alert for Yankees approaching. Pauline Cushman was a double agent; an actress though not of Booth's caliber, she was expelled from Nashville as a dangerous secessionist. It was assumed that Mary Surrat was a spy; on the contrary, it was her son John who was connected to the Confederate spy network. The Gray Ghost was Major John S. Mosby, a young lawyer who originally suppoorted the North; later, he became a Virginia calvaryman and began a raid on Union positions. Like the Lone Ranger, he became a hero of the South and became a t.v. icon. Acted by a New Yorker, Tod Andres, who visited the site of the last battle of the Civil War at Mobile, Alabama, and posed on the actual war embankment for a fan, he was considered a hero of the South. Allan J. Pinkerton had his own operatives to catch rebel spies. Secret couriers on horseback behind the enemy lines used insted of the telegraph. Commanders on both sides

focused particularly on events, dates, places and names in Missouri, with some mentions of the border battles involving Kansas

_Gray Ghosts_ is an excellent foray into a chapter of the Civil War that does not always garner attention -- the establishment of a police state in Missouri and the subsequent backlash and ensuing war of sabotage by local guerrillas. Complexifying the historical landscape, Missouri and Kansas had shared much animosity in the years leading up to the Civil War, and Kanasas, who was a steadfast Union state, used the War as an opportunity to raid Missouri towns as Union Army representatives. Missouri to this point had been a borderline state. Many of the bands of Guerrillas, while they received aid from the Confederacy, never considered themselves a part of any Civil War cause. As Bill Anderson wrote, "I am a guerrilla. I have never belonged to the Confederate Army, nor do my men . . . I have chosen guerrilla warfare to revenge myself for wrongs that I could not honorably avenge otherwise" (201). These "wrongs" included the murder of his father and mother and the imprisonment of Anderson's sisters. The book is excellently written with thorough footnotes and documentation. Most of Brownlee's sources are either primary from newspapers and accounts of the time or secondary dating from the early 1900's. Brownlee also shows himself to be an excellent writer, stringing together the accounts into a vivid portrait of the time. His conversations with such characters as Jessie and Frank James, Bloody Bill Anderson, and William Quantrill represent Lazaras-esque scholastic resurrections. I found the author to be very opinionated, although his judgements are generally limited to the realm of speculative ethics and do not seem to fall along Blue/Gray or political demarcations. As he remarks in the preface, "In dealing with the characters involved, the author has not hesitated to credit each with personal responsibility" and seeks to give them the "praise or condemnation they deserve." From such a perspective, Brownlee comments on both the contextual factors shaping the guerrillas and the decisions they made that in turn shaped history.

Brownlee does a good job of not letting his personal feelings get in the way. Unlike many authors who don't let truth enter into the fold. Brownlee uses numerous firsthand accounts of people who lived at the time and not his own opinions or that of a college professor from Kansas. Good historical book. Not to biased.