Guerrilla Violence in the American Civil War

Related Organization: Kansas City Public Library

The Civil War killed more servicemembers than both world wars and the Vietnam War combined – about 620,000 people. But numbers that large tend to strip tragedy from the imagination. 

Andrew Fialka and Anderson Carman make the horrors of that war very real in their graphic history book, Hope Never to See It: A Graphic History of Guerrilla Violence during the American Civil War. They illustrate two instances of occupational and guerilla violence in Missouri during that time: a Union spy's two-week-long murder spree targeting civilians, and a pro-Confederate guerrilla group’s mutilation of almost 150 U.S. troops. 

The two discuss how those campaigns were similar in that each claimed to be avenging the deaths of their families and each operated under orders from military officials. They also talk about the moral ambiguities in the rules of engagement and the manner in which war can end. 

Fialka, a Kansas City native who now teaches history at Middle Tennessee State University, wrote the book, which is illustrated by Carman, a Georgia-based artist.