Why Americans Didn’t Rally Around Ammon Bundy
by Matthew C. Hulbert
... contemporary Americans imagine the Civil War as a sequence of orchestrated battles ... populated by men, clad in blue or gray, slaying one another with ghastly efficiency ...
But imaginary montages of the Civil War in the West, specifically in the Missouri-Kansas borderlands, can’t look like those based in Virginia, Maryland, or Pennsylvania. This westerly conflict had been .. a vast sequence of home invasions and personal traumas. Lonely, moonlit trails, rural hamlets, houses, barns, and muddy cornfields replaced standard battlefields. Men, women, and children, regardless of age, ethnicity, or ideological persuasion stood in for regular armies. In turn, all manner of violent encounters — from backshooting, plunder, arson, and ambush to rape, torture, and massacre — took the place of pitched battles and West Point stratagems. Family fought against family, neighbor struggled against neighbor, and the Civil War took on hyper-local, hyper-personal qualities as the likes of Jesse and Frank James, Cole Younger, William Clarke Quantrill, and William “Bloody Bill” Anderson rose to prominence.
When the war finally did end, many easterners — both northern and southern, Unionist and ex-Confederate — took to crafting a legacy for the conflict that would help expedite the process of sectional reconciliation. These narratives downplayed slavery as the main cause of the war, instead emphasizing the chivalry, honor, and mutual valor displayed by men from both sides ... Rather than completely denying the existence of guerrillas like Jesse James and Cole Younger .. a transformation was enacted ... This is precisely why so many Americans imagine the Jameses and the Youngers as western legends in the model of Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, or John Wesley Hardin, as opposed to dedicated Confederate insurgents and legitimate Civil War veterans.
As post-Civil War legislation made the western half of the United States more available for free white settlement, the re-purposing of borderland guerrillas came to serve a double purpose. Not only did westernizing them allow meta-narratives of the war to remain pure and chivalric, but the skill set that had made irregulars seem so “ugly” now made them perfect vanguards in the fight to push white civilization westward. This latter struggle required men who could deal with unruly Native Americans and Mexicans on their own terms. In other words ... ambuscade, lightning assaults, arson, scalping, and terror campaigns against women and children weren’t just acceptable, they were esteemed tools for throwing open the region to American imperial interests ...
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/161892
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