Gary Gallagher: evaluation

Transcript context

…Since you mentioned Missouri, you’ve talked about how that was the most brutal guerrilla warfare of the conflict. And maybe can you speak to what do you mean by guerrilla warfare? What kind of war was that? And then contrast with the structure, the dynamics of battles elsewhere in the war. Yes. Guerrilla war is more of what I think most Americans can sort of imagine what guerrilla war is. It involves small, much, much smaller numbers of actors, obviously, on both sides. Guerrilla bands might have a few dozen members. They might have a few hundred at different times. There are no real battles between guerrillas. There is a lot of bushwhacking, which is what they called it, ambushing people, terrorizing civilians, killing livestock, killing some civilians, killing prisoners after you’ve captured them, hanging some people. There are a few semi-large scale ones. There’s a Confederate guerrilla named Quantrill led a raid against Lawrence, Kansas, where they burned parts of the town, executed more than 150 men in the town, and terrorized the place. That is going on in the… There’s a relationship in many places between elevation and guerrilla activity. The more mountainous or hilly, the more likely there’ll be guerrillas operating. They operate in the mountains, East Tennessee, western North Carolina, southwestern Virginia, central… There’s even some activity in parts of Texas, but Missouri and Kentucky have the worst guerrilla warfare. It’s present through the whole war, probably involves maybe 50,000 men out of the 3 million who were in action during the war, and was very nasty, no rules. One reason that rules of war were codified was because Henry Halleck, who was a Union general in Missouri, was dealing with this guerrilla activity and he said, “We need to get some rules about who’s a civilian, who’s not a civilian. How do you deal with this kind of situation and that kind of situation?” What should we take away from the fact that most of the fighting had the rules of war behind it? So it was more structured, it was–…

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