Most of the American Civil War’s practitioners of guerrilla warfare were not famous. They were unknowns, nameless and faceless to history. Forgotten. This lecture reframes the American Civil War’s military history around these “other” Civil Warriors. Reevaluating Confederate military history from the perspective of the complex but critically important world of Confederate irregular soldiers like Kentucky’s John Hunt Morgan, Virginia’s John Singleton Mosby and lesser known figures like Arkansas’s Joseph Bailey. Here we see a different war than the one we think we know. Not the great conventional battlefield war, but irregular conflicts, involving raiding “Thunderbolts,” deceptive “Gray Ghosts,” and vigilante outlaws, a collection of wars within a war that is absolutely essential to our study of America’s bloodiest armed conflict.

Barton A. Myers is Associate Professor of Civil War History at Washington and Lee University, where he teaches military history and Civil War era courses. He is the author of the awarding winning Executing Daniel Bright: Race, Loyalty, and Guerrilla Violence in a Coastal Carolina Community, 1861-1865, Rebels Against the Confederacy: North Carolina’s Unionists, and co-editor with Dr. Brian D. McKnight of the forthcoming The Guerrilla Hunters: Irregular Conflicts during the Civil War.  Dr. Myers has received grants and fellowships from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Marine Corps Historical Center, the Virginia Historical Society, and the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History. In 2016, he was awarded the Ballard Breaux Visiting Fellowship at The Filson Historical Society.