Booknotes: Union Guerrillas of Civil War Kansas

New Arrival:

• Union Guerrillas of Civil War Kansas: Jayhawkers and Red Legs by Paul A. Thomas & Matt M. Matthews (Arcadia Pub and The Hist Press, 2025).

From the description: "Both before and during the American Civil War, ragtag groups of Kansas militants patrolled the Kansas-Missouri border. Known as “Jayhawkers” and later “Red Legs,” they raided anyone they believed sympathetic to secession. For many in the state, these irregular warriors were heroes fighting for a Free Kansas and preservation of the Union; for their victims, these men were little more than opportunistic thieves."

The pro-Union/antislavery irregulars that operated along the Missouri-Kansas borderland have long been overshadowed by their pro-Confederate counterparts, especially Quantrill's raiders and lieutenants. That has changed a great deal in recent years, prominently through with a pair of James Lane biographies from the early 2000s, a 2009 history of the Lane Brigade, and, most recently, two James Montgomery biographies released in 2022 and 2023. In addition to revisiting the lives and Civil War careers those two towering Border War figures, Paul Thomas and Matt Matthews's Union Guerrillas of Civil War Kansas: Jayhawkers and Red Legs offers mini-biographies of four other leading individuals: Charles "Doc" Jennison, George Hoyt, Marshall Cleveland, and William Tough (the latter pair probably the least commonly recognized among the wider Civil War readership).

History has presented the Border War militants of both sides in a variety of ways that have changed over time. In their own words, Thomas and Matthews "have consciously chosen to neither gloss over nor exaggerate" the more infamous actions of the Kansas Jayhawkers. Instead, they "have attempted to describe these men in a way that fairly highlights the diverse and often complex reasons they did what they did." Their book might be summarized as "the story of both good and bad men who did good and bad things" (pg. 18).