Bushwhacking was a form of guerrilla warfare common during the American Revolutionary War, American Civil War and other conflicts in which there are large areas of contested land and few governmental resources to control these tracts. This was particularly prevalent in rural areas during the Civil War where there were sharp divisions between those favoring the Union and Confederacy in the conflict. The perpetrators of the attacks were called bushwhackers.
Bushwhackers were generally part of the irregular military forces on both sides. While bushwhackers conducted a few well-organized raids in which they burned cities, most of the attacks involved ambushes of individuals or families in rural areas. In areas affected by bushwhacking the actions were particularly insidious since it amounted to a fight of neighbor against neighbor. Since the attacks were non-uniformed, the government response was complicated by trying to decide whether they were legitimate military attacks or criminal actions.
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The term was widely used during the conflict, though it came to be particularly associated with the guerrillas of Missouri, where such warfare was most intense. Guerrilla warfare also wracked Kentucky, Tennessee, northern Georgia, Arkansas, and northern Virginia, among other locations. Two bands operated in California in 1864.
Pro-Union guerrilla fighters in Kansas were called "jayhawkers". They used tactics similar to the bushwhackers. A typical jayhawker action was a cross-border raid into Missouri.
In some areas, particularly the Appalachian regions of Tennessee and North Carolina, the term bushwhackers was used for Union partisans who attacked Confederate forces. During the Gettysburg Campaign, Pennsylvanian civilians at times bushwhacked stragglers from the Army of Northern Virginia.
In most areas, irregular warfare operated as an adjunct to conventional military operations. The most famous such "partisan ranger" (to use the title adopted by the Confederate government in formally authorizing such insurgents) was Col. John Singleton Mosby, who carried out raids on Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley and northern Virginia. Partisan rangers were also authorized in Arkansas.
In Missouri, however, secessionist bushwhackers operated outside of the Confederate chain of command. On occasion, a prominent bushwhacker chieftain might receive formal Confederate rank (notably William Clarke Quantrill), or receive written orders from a Confederate general (as "Bloody Bill" Anderson did in October 1864 during a large-scale Confederate incursion into Missouri, or as when Joseph C. Porter was authorized by Gen. Sterling Price to recruit in northeast Missouri). Missouri guerrillas frequently assisted Confederate recruiters in Union-held territory. For the most part, however, Missouri's bushwhacker squads were self-organized groups of young men, predominantly from the slave-holding counties along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, who took it upon themselves to attack Federal forces and their Unionist neighbors, both in Kansas and Missouri, the latter in response to what they considered a Federal invasion of their home state.
The guerrilla conflict in Missouri was, in many respects, a civil war within the Civil War. One of the most famous men who fought as a bushwhacker was Jesse James, who began to fight in 1864. During months of often intense combat, he only battled fellow Missourians, ranging from Missouri regiments of U.S. Volunteer troops to state militia to unarmed Unionist civilians. The single confirmed instance of his exchanging fire with Federal troops from another state occurred a month after the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, during a near-fatal encounter with Wisconsin cavalrymen. In the course of the war, his mother and sister were arrested, his stepfather tortured, and his family banished temporarily from Missouri by state militiamen— all Unionist Missourians.[1]
The conflict with Confederate bushwhackers everywhere rapidly escalated into a succession of atrocities committed by both sides. Union troops often executed or tortured suspects without trial and burned the homes of suspected guerrillas and those suspected of aiding or harboring them. Where credentials were suspect, the accused bushwhacker was often executed, as in the case of Lt. Col. Frisby McCullough after the Battle of Kirksville. Bushwhackers frequently went house to house, executing Unionist farmers.
One of the most vicious actions during the Civil War by the bushwhackers was the Lawrence Massacre. William Quantrill led a raid in August 1863 on Lawrence, Kansas, burning the town and murdering some 150 men and boys in Lawrence. The raiders justified the raid in retaliation for the Sacking of Osceola, Missouri two years earlier (in which the town was set aflame and at least nine men killed) and for the deaths of five female relatives of bushwhackers killed in the collapse of a Kansas City, Missouri jail. Following the Lawrence raid, the Union district commander, Thomas Ewing, Jr., ordered the total depopulation of all men, women, and children (both Unionists and Southern sympathizers) of three and a half Missouri counties along the Kansas border from Kansas City, Missouri south, under his infamous General Order No. 11. (The Missouri-Kansas border conflict was in many ways a continuation of Bleeding Kansas violence.) In other areas, individual families (including that of Jesse and Frank James and the grandparents and mother of future President Harry Truman) were banished from Missouri.
Next to the attack on Lawrence, the most notorious atrocity by Confederate bushwhackers was the murder of 22 unarmed Union soldiers pulled from a train in the Centralia Massacre in retaliation for the earlier execution of a number of Anderson's own men. In an ambush of pursuing Union forces shortly thereafter, the bushwhackers killed well over 100 Federal troops. In October 1864, "Bloody Bill" Anderson was tricked into an ambush and killed by state militiamen under the command of Col. Samuel P. Cox. Anderson's body was displayed and his head was severed.
After the end of the war, the survivors of Anderson's band (including the James brothers) remained together under the leadership of Archie Clement, one of Anderson's lieutenants, and began a series of armed robberies in February 1866. This group became known as the James-Younger Gang, after the death or capture of the older outlaws (including Clement) and the addition of former bushwhacker Cole Younger and his brothers. In December 1869, Jesse James became the most famous of this group when he emerged as the prime suspect in the robbery of the Daviess County Savings Association in Gallatin, Missouri, and the murder of the cashier, John W. Sheets. During Jesse's flight from the scene, he declared that he had killed Samuel P. Cox and had taken revenge for Anderson's death. (Cox lived in Gallatin, and the killer apparently mistook Sheets for the former militia officer.) Throughout Jesse James' criminal career, he often wrote to the newspapers with pride of his role as a bushwhacker, rallying the support of former Confederates and other Missourians who had been brutalized by Federal authorities during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
After the end of the war in 1865, the Mason Henry Gang continued as outlaws in Southern California with a price on their heads for the November 1864 "Copperhead Murders" of three men they believed to be Republicans, in the San Joaquin Valley. Tom McCauley, known as James or Jim Henry, was killed in a shootout with a posse from San Bernardino on September 14 of that year, in San Jacinto Canyon, in what was then San Diego County. John Mason was killed by a fellow gang member for the reward in April 1866 near Fort Tejon in Kern County.
In 1867, near Nevada, Missouri, a band of bushwhackers shot and killed Sheriff Joseph Bailey, a former Union brigadier general, who was attempting to arrest them.