FOUR

CONFEDERATE GUERRILLAS TO OUTLAW ICONS

I grew up in rural Oklahoma. Both my parents were born in western Missouri. My father, besides being a tenant farmer and rodeo man, was an actual proletarian cowboy who worked on a large cattle ranch in Oklahoma mending fences and herding cattle long distances before he married my mother. In this world, stories of “Robin Hood” outlaw heroes were pervasive. These included the James Gang, Jesse and Frank; the Younger Brothers, Cole, Jim, John, and Bob; and Belle Starr—dubbed the “Bandit Queen”—my female role model. I was, thanks to my mother, a devout Southern Baptist, yet it didn’t seem contradictory that these bandits broke nearly all the Ten Commandments, because they stole from the rich and gave to the poor, or so it was said. Not until I moved to San Francisco when I was twenty-one and took a college course in U.S. West History did I learn that all my heroes had been Confederate guerrillas associated with William Quantrill’s Rangers. They all came from middle-class families who bought, sold, and worked enslaved Africans, and who were devoted to the Confederacy, that is, the preservation of chattel slavery. This came as a shock, because I had for the previous four years taken sides in favor of the Civil Rights movement and despised racism, the main reason I left Oklahoma as soon as I could. I’ve been trying to figure out this disconnect ever since. But I do know that border-outlaw narratives have played a role in gun fetishism and a culture of violence in the United States.

I was not alone in buying into the myths about these outlaws. Even in San Francisco, New York City, and beyond, during the folk music revival of the late 1950s, Woody Guthrie’s 1939 recording of the 1882 traditional song extolling Jesse James was revived and made the pop charts:1

Oh, they laid poor Jesse in his grave, yes, Lord

They laid Jesse James in his grave

Oh, he took from the rich and he gave to the poor

But they laid Jesse James in his grave

Pete Seeger recorded the song in 1957, followed by Eddy Arnold in 1959, the Kingston Trio in 1961, and in the 1970s it made the charts again, recorded by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band as well as by Bob Seger; even The Pogues and Bruce Springsteen got into the act in the mid-1980s. It was recorded by dozens of other lesser-known folk, pop, and country musicians.

And there was a larger theme of sympathy for the slave South’s “Lost Cause” in the 1960s counterculture. The Band first recorded “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” with lyrics by Robbie Robertson,² in 1969, when they were closely associated with Bob Dylan, topping the charts in several categories; Joan Baez recorded it in 1971, with the same result, as did Johnny Cash in 1975. Liberal San Francisco music critic Ralph J. Gleason waxed eloquent on The Band’s recording: “Nothing I have read . . . has brought home the overwhelming human sense of history that this song does. . . . It’s a remarkable song, the rhythmic structure, the voice of Levon [Helms] and the bass line with the drum accents and then the heavy close harmony of Levon, Richard and Rick in the theme, make it seem impossible that this isn’t some traditional material handed down from father to son straight from that winter of 1865 to today. It has that ring of truth and the whole aura of authenticity.”3

Virgil Kane is the name . . .

In the winter of ’65, we were hungry, just barely alive

By May the tenth, Richmond had fell, it’s a time I remember, oh so well

The night they drove old Dixie down, and the bells were ringing . . .

Ya take what ya need and ya leave the rest,

But they should never have taken the very best . . .

Like my father before me, I will work the land

Like my brother above me, who took a rebel stand

He was just eighteen, proud and brave, but a Yankee laid him in his grave

This was a post−World War II composition mourning the Confederate defeat in the Civil War, written by Robbie Robertson, also a member of The Band and one of the most celebrated of the many musicians, writers, and producers coming out of the 1960s. He is also Mohawk, his mother from the Six Nations Reserve outside Toronto, Canada, his father Jewish. Not having grown up in the United States, Robertson likely had very little knowledge of the Civil War, but Joan Baez did and was a pacifist and an icon of the African American Civil Rights movement of the time. It seems that the sanitized lore that views bloody, murdering, Confederate guerrillas as righteous outlaws continues to be deeply engrained in United States culture.4

It wasn’t just the music counterculture, but also mainstream pop culture. True Grit, a best-selling 1968 novel by Charles Portis, also serialized in the popular mass-distributed magazine The Saturday Evening Post, was made into a blockbuster movie in 1969, featuring John Wayne as the fictional Rooster Cogburn, former Confederate guerrilla with Quantrill. John Wayne won the Academy Award for best acting in the role of the good-hearted drunken anti-hero who proves himself a true hero. Ethan and Joel Coen did a 2010 remake of the film for the new generation starring Jeff Bridges in the John Wayne role, accompanied by a new edition of the novel with an afterword by best-selling author Donna Tartt, which reached number one on the New York Times best-seller list.

The 1976 film The Outlaw Josey Wales, directed by Clint Eastwood and scripted by Forrest Carter, adapting his 1972 novel The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales, featured a Missouri Confederate guerrilla played by Clint Eastwood and was based on the true story of Bill Wilson, a folk hero in the Ozarks. After Union troops murder his wife and child, Wales refuses to surrender at the end of the war, seeks revenge, and guns down the Union man who murdered his family. He then flees to Texas with a bounty on his head. In the film, Josey Wales expresses his worldview: “Now remember, things look bad and it looks like you’re not gonna make it, then you gotta get mean. I mean plumb, mad-dog mean. Cause if you lose your head and give up then you neither live nor win. That’s just the way it is.”5

Forrest Carter, who wrote the script for The Outlaw Josey Wales, is the pen name of Asa Earl Carter (1925–1979) who was a leader in the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s and a speechwriter for the segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace in the 1960s. He changed his name and successfully turned to writing, first the Josey Wales book, then in 1976 what claimed to be a memoir, The Education of Little Tree.⁶ The story is told by an orphaned boy of five years old, being raised by Cherokee grandparents who called him “Little Tree,” with stereotypical noble savage actions and settings, perfect for the growing “New Age” appropriation and distortion of Native ways. At the book’s release, The New York Times published an article outing Forrest Carter as Asa Carter, former Klansman. It was not a big secret, as Carter had run for governor of Alabama in 1970. The article reported, “Beyond denying that he is Asa Carter, the author has declined to be interviewed on the subject.”⁷

Carter died at age 53 in 1979, beaten to death in a fight with his son. His literary fame faded. There had been no questioning of Carter’s claim of Cherokee identity until the University of New Mexico Press bought the rights to The Education of Little Tree in 1985, and published it as nonfiction in 1991. The book took off and became the number one best seller on the New York Times best-seller list, won the American Booksellers Book of the Year award, and became a much loved book. The Cherokee Nation denied that Carter was Cherokee, and Carter’s Ku Klux Klan background was once again revealed, leading the Times to shift the book to its fiction list. Despite calls from the Native American academic community and the Cherokee Nation that the University of New Mexico Press withdraw the book from publication, instead they changed the cover, removing the “True Story” subtitle, and reclassified it as fiction, but the biographical profile did not change to include Carter’s Klan activities and the lack of evidence of his being Cherokee; it remains one of their best-selling books. Oprah Winfrey had endorsed the book when it was published, but removed it from her recommendations in 1994.

Clint Eastwood, directing The Outlaw Josey Wales, featured several stereotypical Native American characters, written by Carter and performed by excellent Native American actors, Geraldine Keams as a love interest, the elderly Chief Dan George as the protagonist’s spirit guide, and Will Sampson as a protector. In the script, there is no mention of slavery, even though Wales was a Confederate guerrilla who rejected the Confederate defeat.

Two other widely viewed films—Bonnie and Clyde and Pat Garret and Billy the Kid—glorified the gun violence of real-life outlaws who were not Confederate guerrillas, but have contributed to those narratives being folded into ones of the Wild West, even though Bonnie and Clyde were bandits in the Great Depression era and Billie the Kid’s short life ended in 1882. With Bonnie and Clyde, Arthur Penn broke through to mainstream box-office triumph and was embraced by the counterculture of 1967 at the same time. The film was noted for the bloodiest scenes in film history, and starred Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 film Pat Garret and Billy the Kid featured the popular musician and songwriter Kris Kristofferson as the Kid and a memorable soundtrack by Bob Dylan, who also played a cameo role.

How did it happen that popular culture transformed Confederate guerrillas into celebrity Western gunfighters, merging them with actual Western gunfighters, and what has this phenomenon contributed to the culture of violence and gun-love in the United States?

As explored in the previous two chapters, Euro American settlers had a long tradition of organized violence against unarmed civilian populations, their habitats, and their food supplies, beginning with the first early seventeenth-century incursions into Indigenous communities that reached global proportions in the “French and Indian War” (the North American theater of the 1754–1763 Seven Years’ War between England and France), which was fought over colonialist domination of Native territories, followed soon after by the Anglo settlers’ violent eight-year war for independence from Britain. In the first half of the nineteenth century, U.S. Americans’ counterinsurgent operations and wars continued against resistant Natives, Mexicans, Mormons, and, in the Missouri-Kansas border conflict over slavery of the 1850s, each other, continuing through the Civil War itself. In dealing with the Civil War specifically, historians often divide guerrilla combatants into a top-down hierarchy, distinguishing between cavalry raiders, partisan rangers, and bushwhackers, the latter low category reserved for the Missouri-Kansas guerrillas. Guerrillas of these three types were part of the total war strategies of both the Union and Confederate armies, but in the case of the Missouri-border bushwhackers, they were outside any command structure and lacking actual battlefields in Missouri. These were small volunteer units under a leader the most famous being William Clarke Quantrill and “Bloody” Bill Anderson that attacked any sign of Union presence or suspected sympathies with the Union. This included an early morning assault on pro-Union Lawrence, Kansas, in which more than two hundred residents were massacred. During the Civil War, these bands were continuing a decade of irregular war when they had raided Kansas’s abolitionist households and institutions, and in turn were attacked by their counterparts, such as John Brown and his sons; when the Civil War broke out, the opposing forces were Kansas anti-slavery guerrillas, called “Jayhawkers.” Not only young men were combatants, but whole extended families and communities were involved, young women often as couriers, such as teenage Belle Starr.8

Missouri became a state of the United States in 1821, entering as a slave state, but it never formally seceded or joined the Confederate States of America. Both the Union and Confederacy claimed Missouri, which had two competing state governments and representatives in the U.S. Congress as well as in the Confederacy Congress. What became the state of Missouri had been a section of the French Louisiana Territory that the Jefferson administration purchased from Napoleon in 1803. As with the founding of all the colonies before U.S. Independence, and of territories that would become states after Independence, settlers and their voluntary militias preceded the armies and administrators in displacing the Native population. In the case of Missouri, Daniel Boone, with his extended family and community, led Anglo-American settlement there, migrating from Kentucky when Missouri was still a part of the Spanish Empire; he had initiated settlement on Native land in Kentucky illegally under British law in 1769. Boone’s group settled a swath along both sides of the part of the Missouri River, from St. Louis, on the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, to Kansas City, at the western end of the Missouri River before it turns north, and this is where the Missouri Confederate guerrillas were born. Some of the area reached to the Missouri part of the Ozarks.9

In Missouri, there were no super-wealthy slave-worked cotton plantations with absentee owners, as there were in the Deep South, but the labor of enslaved Africans was often used in Missouri to commercially produce hemp, corn, wheat, oats, and rye. At the onset of the Civil War, enslaved Africans made up nearly 10 percent of the population in Missouri, while slavers were only 3 percent of the settler population. There were tensions between those who did and those who did not own property. Yet, if few Missouri families enslaved people compared to the numbers in the South, slavers were brutal and Black people were brutalized equally, if not more, after being freed.¹⁰

The August 1863 massacre in Lawrence, Kansas, led by William Quantrill was one of many brutal attacks and counterattacks occurring at the time between those loyal to either abolitionism or slavery. Lawrence had become famous for being a militant anti-slavery bastion, founded by settlers from the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society soon after Kansas Territory was opened by the federal government in 1854. Pro-slavery Kansas settlers sacked and burned Lawrence in 1856, which set off months of guerrilla warfare, best remembered for the role of abolitionist John Brown and his sons.

William Quantrill was born in Ohio, made his living as a cattle rustler and slave catcher in Missouri-Kansas and Texas, and was living in Lawrence in 1859, although not yet politicized. Quantrill’s pro-slavery terrorism in Missouri coincided with the onset of the Civil War, when he and fifteen men set out to torture, kill, and destroy the properties and livestock of abolitionists and their supporters. In August 1862, Quantrill received a field commission as a captain in the Confederate Army.11

By the time of the attack on Lawrence a year later, Quantrill was able to muster a force of hundreds of Bushwhacker guerrillas, nearly all armed with multiple six-shot revolvers. The group staged its attack at daybreak, when everyone in the town was still sleeping. Although the men of Lawrence had drilled and practiced for defending themselves and the town, they stored their firearms and ammunition in the city’s armory, so the sleeping population was defenseless when the lightning attack began. Over a span of hours, the guerrillas secured the main hotel as a command center, slaughtering 150 unarmed men and boys, most of the adult males of the town. They burned about a quarter of the town’s buildings, including all the businesses except two.12

For the city of Lawrence today, the trauma of the massacre still resonates, especially for the descendants of the dead and survivors. “‘It was utterly catastrophic,’ said Pat Kehde, a retired Lawrence bookstore owner and great-granddaughter of Ralph and Jetta Dix,” reads a Wichita Journal account 150 years after the fact. “On the morning of the raid, Jetta tried to protect Ralph by standing between William Quantrill’s men and her husband. When Jetta stumbled as one of Quantrill’s men rode his horse into her, Ralph was momentarily unguarded and in that instant was shot and killed.”¹³ “We are in an age where we have a war on terrorism, and we talk about terrorism all the time,” said Lawrence historian Paul Stuewe, “but we don’t think about the 19th-century terrorism.”¹⁴ “It is a calamity of the most heartrending kind,” said the New York Times following the attacks, “an atrocity of unspeakable character.”¹⁵

Following the Civil War, John Newman Edwards, who had fought for the Confederacy, wrote Noted Guerrillas, extolling the Missouri guerrillas as great patriots of the Confederate cause, romanticizing the taking of life up close, claiming the guerrillas were almost superhuman specimens, trying to place them alongside the valiant Confederate Army to be commemorated. He was fascinated by the guerrillas’ deft use of the pistol, often attacking with one in each hand, rather than a rifle, which was the standard weapon used by professional soldiers. He wrote that before a battle, “a Guerrilla takes every portion of his revolver apart and lays it upon a white shirt, if he has one, as carefully as a surgeon places his instruments on a white towel. . . . He touches each piece as a man might touch the thing that he loves.”16

Edwards also portrayed Quantrill and his guerrillas as expert horsemen, shooting while riding fast. In fetishizing the guerrilla revolver and the horse, Edwards heralded the beginning of the “cowboy” and “outlaw” hero of the post−Civil War decades, even though these figures had nothing to do with cattle or ranching or even the “West.”¹⁷ Some of the most enduringly famous, or infamous, of the Missouri guerrillas—Jesse James, Cole Younger, Myra Maybelle Shirley (Belle Starr), and their brothers—came from land-owning slavers; some, like the Shirleys, ran successful business operations and were well connected politically. Their elevation to post−Civil War social bandit heroes would eclipse their former pro-Confederate deeds.¹⁸ In the two decades after the Civil War, the Winchester rifle was fetishized for killing Indians, and the Colt revolver for outlawry. In the process, gun violence and civilian massacres were not just normalized, but commercially glorified, packaged, promoted, and mass marketed.

“In the annals of American frontier mythology, no two figures have become more synonymous with generic notions of the ‘Wild West’ than Billy the Kid and Jesse James,”¹⁹ writes historian Matthew Christopher Hulbert, noting that people often confuse the two, especially by placing Jesse in New Mexico and other parts of the former Mexican territory. Their biographies were collapsed in the cheap Western novels that were popular the way movies and television were later. They were each assassinated within nine months of each other, July 188l for Billy the Kid and April 1882 for Jesse James. Billy was born Henry William McCarty to a single mom who was an Irish famine refugee in New York City. She took him to New Mexico, where she died. As an orphan kid, he worked as a cowboy on ranches, then as a gunman in the service of a rancher in the endemic Anglo ranch wars of the time. Billy was twenty-one when Sheriff Pat Garrett assassinated him. Jesse James was thirty-five when he was assassinated. They never crossed paths, as Billy was never outside New Mexico after he moved there, and Jesse never strayed far from the Missouri borderlands with Kansas and the Indian Territory (eastern Oklahoma) where he would hide out. Hulbert points out that through fiction and later film, Jesse James is merged, along with a handful of other Confederate guerrillas, into the “same abstracted geographical space (the ‘West’) during an equally abstracted period of time (when that ambiguous western locale was particularly ‘Wild’).” The most storied of the Missouri-guerrillas-turned-Western-outlaws besides Jesse James was his brother Frank—they made up the leadership of the “James Gang”—along with Cole Younger and his brothers—the “Younger Brothers,” with whom the “Bandit Queen” Belle Starr rode.20

Of course, there were other gunslinging outlaws besides Billy the Kid who were not former Confederate guerrillas, such as Wild Bill Hickok, the Dalton Brothers, and many more. But, historian Hulbert is interested in understanding the cultural process by which Jesse James and, through his legend, the other Missouri guerrillas “came to exist symbolically, first in two places—Missouri and the Wild West—and then only in one: the West of the popular imagination.”

Understanding this process is far more important than we might realize, for this is not merely a process of westernization but, through it, “Americanization.” Bloodthirsty Confederates are being incorporated (and “made safe”) via a process that moves them west and buries them there—allowing them to become larger-than-life legends of American machismo. With them gone, the Civil War can safely remain the civilized test of American manhood, and the Wild West can become the civilizing test of American manhood. In the end, then, both “histories” become genres of American masculine self-congratulation.21

In the mid-twentieth century, with real and fictional Western heroics in decline, fetishization of guns and the Second Amendment accelerated, along with mass shootings, nearly all carried out by white men.

Jesse James lore contributes to the Americana so beloved in the culture, generating “gun culture,” as does the iconic figure of Daniel Boone, the commercial hunter who trail-blazed across the Appalachian chain and into the Ohio Country, illegally establishing a settlement in what would become Kentucky, and then moved on to Missouri as one of the first settlers before it became a state. Jesse’s parents, Robert and Zerelda James, moved from Kentucky in the wake of Daniel Boone’s trek there. Boone himself was of Welsh heritage, born in Pennsylvania, but most of those who followed his migration were Scots-Irish. Westward migration of Scots-Irish settlers represented a mass movement between 1720 and the War of Independence; during the last two decades of the eighteenth century, first- and second-generation Ulster-Scots continued to migrate to the Ohio Valley, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Ulster-Scots cleared forests, built log cabins, killed Indians, and took their cultivated land; historian Carl Degler writes, “These hardy, God-fearing Calvinists made themselves into a veritable human shield of colonial civilization.”22

Richard Slotkin finds the origin of U.S. nationalism in the late eighteenth-century treks of settlers over the Appalachian-Allegheny spine. Daniel Boone, he writes, “became the most significant, most emotionally compelling myth-hero of the early republic,” the U.S. American hero as “the lover of the spirit of the wilderness, and his acts of love and sacred affirmation are acts of violence against that spirit and her avatars.” In the twentieth century reformation of the archetype, promoted notably in the writings of Theodore Roosevelt and, of course, Western novels and films, Slotkin finds the “hunter” and the “farmer,” or “breeder,” and especially “the man who knows Indians.”²³ Indeed, it is rare even today to meet a descendant of the old settler trekking culture who does not identify Daniel Boone as a direct ancestor.

Jesse James was sixteen years old in 1863 when he joined the Missouri pro-Confederate guerrillas; his older brother Frank was already an experienced member. Jesse had less than twenty years to live, in which time he became one of the most famous men alive. Among his mentors in his two years as a guerrilla was Archie Clements; together the two were involved in particularly gruesome killings, including mutilations of corpses. After the war ended, Clements led a group of former guerrillas, including Jesse, in an armed robbery of a bank. Soon Clements himself was murdered, and leadership fell to the now twenty-one-year-old Jesse James. By 1868, this group became known as the James-Younger Gang, with Jesse at its head, and included his brother Frank, Cole and Jim Younger, and four other former Confederate guerrillas. Two other Younger brothers, John and Bob, too young to be guerrillas during the war, also rode with the gang. They robbed banks and trains in Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, and Kentucky until 1876, when the enterprise crashed in a failed attempt to stick up a bank in Northfield, Minnesota. Several members of the gang were captured and sent to prison, including Cole and Jim Younger, but Jesse escaped. He tried, but failed, to form another gang, and lived the final six years of his life in the open in St. Joseph, Missouri, using the fake identity of a Mr. Howard, a horse trader. His assassin, Robert Ford, hired by the governor of Missouri, found and befriended him, then shot him dead in 1882.24 In 2007, Hollywood revived Jesse as a lone hero in a critically acclaimed film, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, starring Brad Pitt as Jesse and Casey Affleck as Ford.

In his biography of Jesse James, T.J. Stiles makes an important point about the guerrillas-to-outlaws period, observing that they emerged during a time of new mass-produced guns made with innovative technology, which were much more lethal but also more affordable than guns had ever been.

Before the Civil War, most firearms were handmade by local gunsmiths. Rapid-firing handguns, designed to kill people, were relatively uncommon. There was so little demand for Samuel Colt’s revolutionary revolver that his Patent Arms Manufacturing Company went bankrupt in 1843. The Civil War changed all that by putting firearms in the hands of millions of men, fostering mass production of revolvers, and launching a new marketing offensive by weapons makers. On May 5, 1865, with scattered skirmishes still flaring in Missouri, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton wired a striking message to the military commander there. ‘Gun manufacturers are applying for leave to sell guns and ammunition to the loyal people of Missouri. . . . Is there any objections to opening the trade to the sale of fire-arms and ammunition, and under what restrictions if any?’ There were neither objections nor limitations.25

During the Civil War’s irregular warfare against noncombatants, citizens began to carry firearms, and gun violence and murder became commonplace. The normalization of violence included the racial terrorism of the KKK and other armed groups, as well as the outlaw violence carried out by individuals and crime gangs. Not surprisingly, many of the gunfights of the late nineteenth century in the West took place between Union and Confederate veterans or supporters. Ghosts of those battle lines can be detected in contemporary divisions on gun rights and gun control.²⁶ Today, one can see the Confederate battle flag unfurled at protests and rallies and at gun shows in South Carolina and Virginia, as well as in the Pacific Northwest or Chicago.

Former Confederate guerrillas jumped on the opportunity to join Theodore Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders” in Cuba. Due to increasing insurrections of enslaved populations, in 1886 the Spanish Empire abolished legal slavery in Cuba. Spain had remained active in the transatlantic slave trade up to that time, and had transported a million enslaved Africans to Cuba. But by 1895, Afro-Cubans, along with Spanish-Cuban revolutionaries, had raised a full war of independence against Spain. They were on the cusp of victory in 1898, when they were crushed by the U.S. invasion and occupation. The United States falsely took credit for ousting Spain and “freeing” the Cuban people in what U.S. historians call the “Spanish-American War,” next turning to the Philippines to neutralize their revolution against Spanish control.

When President William McKinley called for volunteers to fight in Cuba, future U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the Navy, resigned and dipped into his personal fortune to finance and outfit the First United States Volunteer Cavalry, one of three voluntary regiments raised for the invasion. The core troops that he outfitted were drawn from the Ninth Cavalry (“Buffalo Soldiers”), the segregated African American army regiment, but his call for volunteers was answered by many former Confederate and Union regular soldiers as well as guerrillas. Roosevelt borrowed the term “Rough Riders” from “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World,” melding war and show business. Out of the many thousands of men who volunteered, the thousand-plus whom Roosevelt chose came from Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma Territory, and Texas. The requirements included being good with guns and horses, and physically capable; most were working cowhands, prospectors, gamblers, hunters, lawmen, Civil War veterans, and former Confederate guerrillas.

In the fight, the presence of former Confederate and former Union soldiers and guerrillas, white and Black, even some Native Americans, all fighting on the same side under the U.S. flag, signaled a certain reconciliation: “To former Union vets, ex-Rebels carrying the American flag reiterated their victory in the Civil War. To former Confederates, the Spanish-American War was an invaluable opportunity to renew their status as citizens of the United States once and for all.”27 The Army became the institution that brought North and South together in militarism, and also the one that brought them to the cutting edge of racial and gender integration.

And so began the long twentieth century of endless U.S. wars, covert and open, with a distinct revival of gun glorification and a recasting of the personalities of brutal pro-slavery guerrillas as outlaw heroes, the influence of which continues to spill over into the present.