John R. Kelso’s Civil Wars:
A Graphic History - Episode 13

More on the text

Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy, 145-7, 152-3, 198-9.   Union commanders despaired that guerrillas like Wallace Finney, often called bushwhackers, were infesting the countryside and spreading terror through the loyal populace.  How to fight them and beat them proved to be an enormous challenge.  Supported by their kin and by secret networks of Southern sympathizers, disguised as ordinary farmers by day and in the blue uniforms they stripped from the bodies of their military victims when they rode and attacked, hiding in wooded hills and creek bottoms, striking quickly from the bush on fast horses, shooting rapidly at close range with the multiple revolvers pulled from holsters strapped to their bodies and saddles, and then dispersing and vanishing back into the countryside, bushwhackers were an elusive and dangerous enemy.  

The Missouri bushwhackers that cavalrymen like Kelso hunted were a mixed bunch.  Some were former Confederate soldiers who wanted to serve the cause closer to home. Other Missouri guerrillas were connected to the Confederate command through kin connections.    Many of the men fighting with Sterling Price would spend part of the war as guerrillas and part as regulars.

Other bushwhackers grabbed their guns and saddled up less in devotion to the Confederacy than because they imagined themselves protecting their own “southern rights” in Missouri and their own families from northern “tyranny.”  By southern rights they meant a right to property that included the ownership of people of African descent, and the right to erect local, state, and national governments protecting that “property.”  They defended their families against any who threatened an economic well-being connected to the slave economy (even if they did not personally own slaves), against the depredations of Federal soldiers, and against the free black marauders who, they imagined, would take their women if abolition ever came to pass.  Some had few ideological motivations of any sort.  Young men sought the thrill of battle without having to endure the discipline and deprivations of life in the regular military.  The criminally-inclined sought to exploit the breakdown of civil order to rob for their own profit and kill people they did not like.  Through the magic of mythologization, militant white supremacists were turned into freedom fighters and sociopathic criminals into folk heroes.