Confederate Guerrilla: The Civil War Memoir of Joseph M. Bailey

By T. Lindsay Baker

Joseph M. Bailey’s memoir, Confederate Guerrilla, provides a unique perspective on the fighting that took place behind Union lines in Federal-occupied northwest Arkansas during and after the Civil War. This story—now published for the first time—will appeal to modern readers interested in the grassroots history of the Trans-Mississippi war. Bailey participated in the Battle of Pea Ridge and the siege of Port Hudson, eventually escaping to northwest Arkansas where he fought as a guerrilla against Federal troops and civilian unionists. After Federal forces gained control of the area, Bailey rejoined the Confederate army and continued in regular service in northeast Texas until the end of the war.

Historians will find the descriptions of military campaigns and the observations on guerrilla war especially valuable. According to Bailey, Southern guerrillas were motivated less by a sense of loyalty to either the Confederate or Union side than by a determination to protect their families and neighbors from the “Mountain Federals.” This partisan war waged between the rebel guerrillas and Southern Unionists was essentially a “struggle for supremacy and revenge.”

Comprehensive annotations are provided by editor T. Lindsay Baker to illuminate the clarity and reliability of Bailey’s late-life memoir.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Release date: May 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9781610751117

Book preview

CONFEDERATE GUERRILLA

The Civil War Memoir of Joseph M. Bailey

JOSEPH M. BAILEY

EDITED BY

T. LINDSAY BAKER

The University of Arkansas Press

Fayetteville

2007

Copyright © 2007 by The University of Arkansas Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

ISBN-10: 1–55728–838–0

ISBN-13: 978–1-55728–838–7

11    10    09    08    07        5    4    3    2

Text Design by Ellen Beeler

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48–1984.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Bailey, Joseph M. (Joseph Marion), 1841–1930.

Confederate guerrilla : the Civil War memoir of Joseph M. Bailey / Joseph M. Bailey ; edited by T. Lindsay Baker.

p. cm. — (Civil War in the West)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-1-55728-838-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Bailey, Joseph M. (Joseph Marion), 1841–1930.  2. Guerrillas—Confederate States of America—Biography.  3. Soldiers—Confederate States of America-—Biography.  4. Arkansas—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Underground movements.  5. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Underground movements.  6. Arkansas—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Personal narratives.  7. Louisiana—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Personal narratives.  8. Missouri—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Personal narratives.  9.—Mississippi—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Personal narratives.  10. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Personal narratives, Confederate.  I. Baker, T. Lindsay.  II. Title.

E470.45.B35 2007

973.7'42092—dc22

2007006543

ISBN-13: 978-1-61075-111-7 (electronic)

CONTENTS

Series Editors’ Preface

Editor’s Preface

Chapter 1. The Story Begins

Chapter 2. Becoming a Soldier: Wilson’s Creek and Pea Ridge

Chapter 3. Fighting in Mississippi

Chapter 4. Siege of Port Hudson and Escape

Chapter 5. Life as a Guerrilla in Arkansas

Chapter 6. Collapse of the Confederacy

Notes

Bibliography

Index

SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

The Civil War in the West has a single goal: to promote historical writing about the war in the western states and territories. It focuses most particularly on the Trans-Mississippi theater, which consisted of Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, most of Louisiana (west of the Mississippi River), Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), and Arizona Territory (two-fifths of modern-day Arizona and New Mexico), but encompasses adjacent states, such as Kansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi, that directly influenced the Trans-Mississippi war. It is a wide swath, to be sure, but one too often ignored by historians and, consequently, too little understood and appreciated.

Topically, the series embraces all aspects of the wartime story. Military history in its many guises, from the strategies of generals to the daily lives of common soldiers, forms an important part of that story, but so, too, do the numerous and complex political, economic, social, and diplomatic dimensions of the war. The series also provides a variety of perspectives on these topics. Most important, it offers the best in modern scholarship, with thoughtful, challenging monographs. Secondly, it presents new editions of important books that have gone out of print. And thirdly, it premieres expertly edited correspondence, diaries, reminiscences, and other writings by participants in the war.

It is a formidable challenge, but by focusing on some of the least familiar dimensions of the conflict, The Civil War in the West significantly broadens our understanding of the nation’s most pivotal and dramatic story.

Civil War memoirs come three a penny: there is no shortage. Generals and politicians wrote most of the published memoirs, the justification being that their lofty perspectives on the war gave them something worth saying. They were the leaders who directed and fashioned the outcome of the war. However, modern readers have an equally keen interest in grassroots history. They want to know about ordinary folk, something of the adventures and misfortunes of common soldiers and civilians. Joseph M. Bailey was as grass-roots as they came. Although Bailey rose to captain in the Sixteenth Arkansas Infantry at one point in the war, his most memorable experiences—the heart of his memoirs—came while operating as a rebel guerrilla in Arkansas and Missouri. Surviving records of any sort are rare for the guerrilla contest. Bailey’s highly perceptive firsthand account is a genuine historical treasure.

Bailey recorded his memoirs for his family when he was in his late seventies. He never intended, never expected, that they should be published. Despite his advanced years, Bailey recalled many useful details about military campaigns and life on the home front, but his most valuable comments concerned the causes and nature of the guerrilla war. Unlike Samuel S. Hildebrand, another Confederate irregular whose autobiography was published in this series last year, Bailey was no outlaw. He came late to guerrilla fighting, after serving two years in the Confederate army. He became a guerrilla because Arkansas Unionists–Mountain Federals, he called them—endangered his family and neighbors. It was the most common reason for southerners on either side to become bushwhackers. They waged their partisan war not so much against enemy armies, or in the name of either Union or Confederate victory, but against each other and the threat of local violence. Their war, as Bailey explains, became a struggle for supremacy and revenge.

While Bailey’s clear-sighted recollections may be enjoyed for their own sake, T. Lindsay Baker has added enormously to their historical value. An authority on the Trans-Mississippi West, Baker, as editor, has clearly identified people, places, and events mentioned only casually by Bailey. He has also placed Bailey’s life and wartime experiences in a broader context, thus enhancing our understanding of a man like Bailey. This belated but welcome collaboration between scholar and long-dead veteran yields as rich and thoughtful an account of the war in the West as any left by the generals and politicians.

T. Michael Parrish

Daniel E. Sutherland

Series Editors

Image: Joseph M. Bailey as he appeared ca. 1920 when he dictated his memoir of Civil War experiences. Courtesy of Dr. Ralph Bailey.

Joseph M. Bailey as he appeared ca. 1920 when he dictated his memoir of Civil War experiences. Courtesy of Dr. Ralph Bailey.

EDITOR’S PREFACE

I Thought I Knew Something about the Civil War

For a number of years I taught American history, wrote books about the history of the Trans-Mississippi West, and even created an entire gallery on the War Between the States for the military history museum at Hill College in Texas. I felt like I had gained at least some mastery of events during the conflict. Then I discovered Joseph M. Bailey’s unpublished memoir, I began reading its pages, and soon I realized that another war took place in Arkansas that I knew nothing about. It was a gruesome, ugly conflict in which throat slitting became commonplace; defenseless old people, women, and children routinely were robbed and burned out of their homes; and bands of armed men mostly wearing civilian clothing roamed the countryside fighting with each other and executing prisoners who might fall into their hands—and I thought I knew something about the Civil War.

As a tourist I had visited places like Prairie Grove and Fort Smith in Arkansas. My wife and I had even sought out the grave of General Patrick Cleburne in threadbare old Helena and gone to the end of the road to visit Arkansas Post. In these places I had learned the standard history of the conflict in the state. This was the story of grand strategies and massed troops. Civil War Arkansas, however, had two dimensions. The first was the one that I knew before reading the Bailey memoir, a conventional conflict between organized military forces of the North and South. This first category of conflict absorbed most of the men and resources from both sides. After the battles at Pea Ridge and Prairie Grove led to increasing Federal occupation of Arkansas, the war in the state became a sideshow. Because most of its soldiers and supplies were drained off to other states, Arkansas Confederate leaders had few other realistic options than to encourage the development of independent companies of irregular troops to harass and tie down the Federal occupiers as best they could. This decision led to the other dimension of the war in Arkansas, the part in which Joseph Bailey participated in 1863–64. Instead of major engagements, for most people the war in Arkansas became one of a thousand skirmishes between the U.S. Army and insurgents and at the same time between both Union and Confederate irregular forces. For Arkansans this grass-roots war became a four-year nightmare.¹

The United States Army in Arkansas found itself in a quagmire. The Federals were a well-organized but cumbersome fighting force engaged against small groups of insurgents who were nimble and ruthless and who knew the country intimately. In the north of Arkansas the guerrillas operated in vastness of rugged mountains, while in the south they retreated to the recesses of swamps. These irregulars attacked Federal troops only when they held the advantages of numbers or surprise. Most of the state insurgents, though, could rely on the support of the indigenous civilian population, who sheltered, fed, and otherwise supported them.

The first strategy of Federal officers in Arkansas to combat the rebel guerrillas was retributive burning. Whenever Confederate irregulars engaged Union forces, the Union soldiers held the local residents responsible, looting their properties and burning the homes and farms to the ground in retaliation. This resulted only in confirming Confederate propaganda that all northern soldiers were little more than brigands. Clearly a greater mix of counterinsurgency and pacification was needed.

Next the U.S. Army recruited Arkansas Unionists to engage in counter-guerrilla operations. Eventually ten thousand Arkansas loyalists joined regiments in the United States Army to oppose in-state Confederate guerrillas. The initial such unit was the First Arkansas Cavalry U.S. organized in 1862. Comprised mostly of men from northwestern Arkansas, this unit became the principal counterinsurgency force in the region, and its constant search-and-destroy patrols kept the irregulars on the run or at least constantly on guard. The Confederate guerrillas despised their fellow Arkansans in the Federal regiment, their hatred reaching almost the level of a blood feud. Toward the end of the war, Federal military authorities in northwestern Arkansas organized a system of farm colonies in which Unionist home-guard military units protected loyal farmers in communities. This change released regular forces to pursue more aggressive operations against the insurgents. In Arkansas Confederate guerrillas never won any important battles, but they made other contributions. The insurgents clearly tied down substantial numbers of Federal troops who might have rendered service elsewhere. Their ruthlessness helped foster war weariness in the North. Even though the guerrillas could not protect their state from invasion, they did succeed in keeping the rebellion alive inside Federal lines.²

My discovery of this other war in Arkansas came as I worked as the curator at the Harold B. Simpson History Center at Hill College in Texas. At the time in 1997, the center had on loan the manuscript collections of the Texas Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). In that substantial archival collection I came across a little black three-ring binder containing neatly typed six- by nine-inch sheets of paper with a handwritten title page, The Story of a Confederate Soldier, 1861–5. I thumbed through its pages to see whether there was any content that might help me with my current project of creating museum exhibits on Texans during the War Between the States. I didn’t find anything that would apply to my current project, but I did find something that I didn’t expect—the memoir of a Confederate guerrilla. I knew that there were not many remembrances from people who had served in irregular units, and I made a mental note to return to the little notebook when work would allow. In time I did come back. Thinking that the memoir might exist only in this typescript, I made a cover-to-cover photocopy. Then I sat down and read the whole text, learning that it was not only interesting to me but also that it could appeal to others. Discussing the project with Donaly Brice, a colleague at the Texas State Library, I learned this repository also has a copy of Joseph M. Bailey’s memoir. Still I mulled over the manuscript, wondering whether its story might merit publication. With a potential book in mind, I discussed the project with Mrs. Dickie Gerig, then president of the Texas Division of the UDC, and in 2000 she graciously gave me written permission to publish the work. With two slightly different versions of the remembrance in hand, I contacted Larry Malley at the University of Arkansas Press. We appointed to meet at a convention of the Southern Historical Association, I presented him with a prospectus for an annotated version of the Bailey memoir, and he offered a contract for its publication. As a Texas-based historian of the Trans-Mississippi West, I found myself editing a memoir about the Civil War in Arkansas. I felt like a fish out of water.

Dr. Daniel E. Sutherland, who edits the University of Arkansas Press series on the Civil War in the West, allayed my fears. When he, my wife, Julie, and I met in his office on the Fayetteville campus in 2003, he not only pointed me in the right directions for archival and library research, but he also informed me that he had yet another version of the typewritten manuscript. This one came from the papers of 1950s Boone County historian Ralph Rea. From Sutherland’s campus office, Julie and I traveled over the Ozarks to Harrison, seat of the present-day county that encompasses the home country for Joseph M. Bailey. At the Boone County Heritage Museum yet two more versions of the typescript appeared before my eyes, giving me a total of five different variant typings of the same remembrances. In Harrison I also was able to secure copies of the two previous non-annotated privately printed editions of the memoir.

The more that I worked on the annotations, the more intriguing the memoir became. Conducting preliminary research primarily at the Simpson History Center at Hill College, I then widened my net to find general corroborating data from resources in the main libraries at the University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma, both geographically close to my institutional base. Then I began work in Arkansas collections, finding very helpful materials at the Arkansas History Commission, Special Collections at the University of Arkansas Libraries, the Boone County Heritage Museum, and the Boone County Public Library, the latter two institutions in Harrison, Arkansas. Then through the assistance of LeAnna Biles Schooley, my colleague at Tarleton State University, I was able to make contact with Dr. Ralph Bailey, the great-grandson of the author. Residing on a ranch in central Texas, Dr. Bailey as a boy knew his aged Confederate veteran great-grandfather and heard many of his remembrances in person. The kind doctor generously shared copies of Joseph M. Bailey’s other writings as well as copies of historic family photographs and a handsome oil painting portrait of the memoirist. All this time I learned more and more about the young guerrilla and his life before and after the war.

Born in Polk County, Tennessee, on January 28, 1841, Joseph Marion Bailey experienced his boyhood there, moving with his family to Carroll County, Arkansas, in 1853. Spending his teenaged years in the scenic Crooked Creek Valley in what then was Carroll County, Arkansas, he was a farmboy who enjoyed reading and hoped to go to school more. The secession of Arkansas dashed Bailey’s aspirations for education, for in summer 1861 he joined a home-guard military company named after a pretty local girl. With the exception of a brief introduction about his family, Joseph Bailey’s memoir begins with his entry to this army unit. He traveled with the Joe Wright Guards to Missouri, where he tasted battle for the first time on August 10, 1861, at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek. When the state troops disbanded in the fall of 1861, as a twenty-year-old he volunteered on October 17, 1861, at Carrollton, Arkansas, to become a private in Company D of the Sixteenth Arkansas Infantry. Most of the other men in the unit were his friends and neighbors.

As a member of the Sixteenth Arkansas Infantry, Joseph Marion Bailey participated in the battles of Pea Ridge in Arkansas; Farmington, Iuka, and Corinth in Mississippi; and the Siege of Port Hudson in Louisiana between autumn 1861 and summer 1863. During this time he advanced in rank to first lieutenant and then to captain. When Confederate forces surrendered at Port Hudson on July 9, 1863, Bailey expected as an officer to be transported to a Federal prisoner-of-war camp. With this fear in mind, he and a colleague succeeded in making their way out of a prisoner compound and escaped through Union lines to return home on their own to northwestern Arkansas. It was at this time that Joseph Bailey began his career as a guerrilla. With one interruption he spent the months from September 1863 through October 1864 as a Confederate guerrilla operating in Union-occupied northwestern Arkansas and southwestern Missouri. These experiences constitute the bulk of his memoir. It was in 1864 while a guerrilla that twenty-three-year-old Bailey married Mary Matilda Baines. After Federal control in his home country became so tight that it was impossible for Confederate guerrillas to operate successfully, Bailey returned to southwestern Arkansas and eventually to northeastern Texas to rejoin colleagues from his old regiment. He witnessed the end of the war as civil order disintegrated in Marshall, Texas, in spring 1865. Paroled by Federal troops in Shreveport, Bailey made his way back home on foot and by horseback, finding that despite very hard times all of his family members had survived the war.³

Joseph M. Bailey lived the next twenty-five years in the Crooked Creek Valley in old Carroll County.⁴ He farmed and became a merchant in Bellefonte, apparently making a comfortable livelihood. The U.S. Census of 1870 listed him as having a personal estate worth $2,500, a very tidy sum at the time.⁵

Some of the old fire from Bailey’s days as a guerrilla remained after he returned home to Arkansas following the war. An often-repeated story in Harrison, Arkansas, deals with the registration of voters at the town during Reconstruction. As part of the legal process of putting together approved lists of voters, the registrars at the time of the event were authorized to enter only the names of African American freedmen or of white men who could swear that they had never supported the Confederacy. They had turned away several unreconstructed rebels. Feeling that their honor had been abused, about two hundred former Confederates, several carrying their wartime Colt navy pattern revolvers, headed by Joe Bailey rode into Harrison to see whether or not they would be refused as well. Two men from the group, Dan Johnson and Mat Rowland, approached the registrars, while their Federal soldier escorts began to fidget with their guns. We’ve come to register! announced Johnson, as he stepped up to the registrars. Hesitating for a moment, one of them started to remonstrate. He then saw the two men put their hands on the revolvers as Johnson declared, We’ll register, or our navies will register, adding, And if they register, . . . there’ll be some blue bellies elected to hell. The officials wisely pushed blank forms across the table and the two men registered, rejoining the mounted party across the creek, which then disbanded in peace, having made its defiant demonstration.⁶

At almost fifty years of age, in 1890 Joseph M. Bailey, his wife, and at least one son, Dr. Ralph Bailey, relocated to Texas. This was part of a common pattern of movement during the decades following the war. Joseph is known to have lived in Coleman, Texas, and then in the seaside community of Corpus Christi, which already was becoming a resort. Family tradition holds that a tropical hurricane destroyed Bailey’s home on the Gulf Coast, prompting him and wife Mary M. Bailey to move to Austin, the state capital, where they resided until her death in 1927. Family accounts relate that after Bailey came to Texas, he invested some of his money from Arkansas in rural property in the vicinity of Seguin, where oil was discovered, giving him a steady income for the rest of his years.⁷

Image: Mary M. Bailey and Joseph M. Bailey sitting in the yard of their home in Austin, Texas, ca. 1920. Courtesy of Dr. Ralph Bailey.

Mary M. Bailey and Joseph M. Bailey sitting in the yard of their home in Austin, Texas, ca. 1920. Courtesy of Dr. Ralph Bailey.

It was during the residence of Joseph and Mary Bailey in Austin that the old man created his memoir. Mary became active in the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and she and their grandchildren may have encouraged Joseph to put his remembrances into a written form. He dictated them to a stenographer, who then prepared the initial typescript about 1920. In time other typewritten copies of the memoir were made, and presumably with his wife’s prompting the elderly veteran placed one copy in the hands of the Albert Sidney Johnston Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and another in the Texas State Library. Great-grandson Ralph Bailey relates that a second set of typescripts was prepared about 1927. It was about this time that small selections from Joseph Bailey’s memoir were published in both Texas and Arkansas newspapers.⁸

Mary Matilda Bailey, whose health had declined, passed away in Austin, Texas, on February 16, 1927. She and her husband had lived in the city since about 1914,