"thrilling .... a crisp page-turner"

From the Journal of Southern History, February 2009

Confederate Guerrilla: The Civil War Memoir of Joseph M. Bailey contains the Civil War reminiscences of Joseph Marion Bailey of Carroll County, Arkansas, written some sixty years after the end of hostilities. Bailey chronicles his adventures as a soldier in the regular Confederate army, where he saw action at Wilson's Creek, Pea Ridge, Corinth, and Port Hudson, and as an irregular in the Ozark Mountains of northwestern Arkansas. Despite his advanced age, Bailey recounted his story with clarity and detail, providing an uncompromising account of his experiences. The book is strengthened by T. Lindsay Baker's careful editing through which he combines several different versions of Bailey 's memoir and painstakingly identifies the people and places that the old soldier discussed. The endnotes make up a full fifty-five pages of the book.

Bailey's reminiscences of his service in the regular army portray some well-known trans-Mississippi battles, including a noteworthy relation of the death of Confederate general Ben McCulloch at Pea Ridge. Of particular interest is Bailey's account of the fighting at Port Hudson, Louisiana, where his keen eye for detail brings life to the misery and squalor that the southern soldiers suffered during weeks of Federal siege and that did not end until after the rebels were reduced to eating horse, mule, and rat meat. After a daring escape from Port Hudson and return to Arkansas with future governor James H. Berry, Bailey entered the irregular warfare in the area around his Ozark Mountains home.

Bailey's period as a guerrilla began after the murder of a rebel captain (Baker's meticulous notes point out that the victim was actively recruiting soldiers for Confederate service), and Bailey barely survived his first encounter with the so-called Mountain Federals against whom he would fight for the next several months. His account of the cat-and-mouse warfare fought in the mountains of northern Arkansas is thrilling, and he shares the hard lessons learned there: "A house was liable to be surrounded or waylaid at any time, and many lives were lost in that way, by parties venturing to sleep in their homes," he notes; and "if man or horse was disabled, death was almost certain as very few prisoners were taken" (pp. 45, 47). This was indeed a far different war from that fought by the regular armies. Bailey eventually returned to the army, and he recalled that, as the Confederacy was collapsing, "[m]any favored the disbandonment of the regular army . . . and a resort to guerrita [guerrilla] warfare"; it is with the bitter view of experience that he concludes with relief that "wiser and more conservative counsel prevailed" (p. 63).

Confederate Guerrilla is a crisp page-turner and provides a southern counterpoint to such books as A. W. Bishop's Loyalty on the Frontier; or, Sketches of Union Men of the South-west (1863; Fayetteville, 2003) and a first-person companion to such excellent academic studies as Daniel E. Sutherland's edited collection Guerrillas, Unionists, and Violence on the Confederate Home Front (Fayetteville, 1999) and Robert R. Mackey's The Uncivil War: Irregular Warfare in the Upper South, 1861-1865 (Norman, Okla., 2004). Bailey's memoir will be of interest to anyone studying guerrilla warfare in the American Civil War.

[Author Affiliation]
MARK K. CHRIST
Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, Little Rock


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