...Guerrilla war, intrinsically ruthless and inconclusive, fails to please either the historian or the reader with much in the way of narrative clarity or a sense of man's honor enlarged. Real war assaults, diminishes, and embitters participants. It challenges them fundamentally - not to rise to triumph, but to survive brutal defeat, to maintain vestiges of their prewar selves. Guerrilla struggle, perhaps the most prevalent form of war in history, is also the most devastating challenge to any notion of civility or virtue in war. In this sense, guerrilla war approaches total war, the war of all against all.
Though understudied by historians, guerrilla war was quite widespread along the border between the South and the North during the American Civil War. From the hills of western Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, through the mountain hollows of east Tennessee and Kentucky to the wooded, hilly farmlands of Missouri, bands of guerrillas wandered the countryside striking terror in all those around them. I have chosen to discuss Missouri not because it was unique, but because of all the regions it produced the most widespread, longest-lived, and most destructive guerrilla war in the Civil War. Missouri provides a horrendous example of the nature of guerrilla war in the American heartland...
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