Author discusses Civil War guerrillas at Pamplin Park

Pamplin Historical Park & The National Museum of the Civil War Soldier welcomes guest speaker Matthew Hulbert on Thursday at 7 p.m. to the Petersburg Civil War Roundtable.

Newsome will discuss Civil War guerrilla fighters in his presentation titled, “The Lawrence, Kansas Massacre.”

The irregular warfare along the borderlands of Missouri and Kansas saw guerrilla fighters known as pro-Confederate bushwhackers or pro-Union jayhawkers attack small detachments of soldiers and terrorize civilian communities. U.S. Sen. James H. Lane led a raid by pro-Union against the town of Osceola, Mo., in September 1861.

Nine men were executed and the town was looted and all but three of the towns 800 buildings were burned. The town never fully recovered and the raid culminated in the forming of Confederate partisan rangers known as bushwhackers. Nearly a year later, in August 1862, one of the most infamous Confederate partisan groups in the region would exact revenge for what happened at Osceola. William Clarke Quantrill and his raiders would attack Lawrence and kill nearly 200 men and boys in one of the most violent raids of the war.

Hulbert is an assistant professor of history at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. His studies and interests include 19th century America, the Civil War, technology and warfare, regular and irregular warfare and the American West. Hulbert is the author of The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers became Gunslingers in the American West, which won the 2017 Wiley-Silver Prize, and the co-editor of both Writing History with Lightning: Cinematic Representations of Nineteenth-Century America and The Civil War Guerrilla: Unfolding the Black Flag in History, Memory, and Myth.

The Petersburg Civil War Roundtable will meet the first Thursday of each month at Pamplin Historical Park and the National Museum of the Civil War Soldier from 7-8 p.m. Annual membership is $40. Individuals who are already members of Pamplin Historical Park can become members of PCWRT for $20. Non-members can attend for $5 each meeting. Call (804) 861-2408 for more information.