A Man by Any Other Name: William Clarke Quantrill and the Search for American Manhood by Joseph M. Beilein Jr (review)

Reviewed by: A Man by Any Other Name: William Clarke Quantrill and the Search for American Manhood by Joseph M. Beilein Jr Matthew M. Stith (bio) A Man by Any Other Name: William Clarke Quantrill and the Search for American Manhood. By Joseph M. Beilein Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2023. Pp. 282. Cloth, 114. 95; paper, 26. 95. ) Guerrilla warfare during the Civil War calls to mind only a handful of individuals, and William Clarke Quantrill is toward the top of this small list. Yet Quantrill's real life has remained largely hidden in the shadows of his best-known exploits—namely, the 1863 raid on Lawrence, Kansas, and, more generally, his evolving wartime and postwar reputation as a brutal guerrilla leader. In A Man by Any Other Name, Joseph M. Beilein Jr. seeks to better understand the enigmatic schoolteacher-turned-guerrilla and tries to figure out just "what kind of man Quantrill really was" (xiii). This is no easy task. Most of Quantrill's story comes from others during and after the war who celebrated or vilified him in such a way that makes it difficult to square the real with the legend. For Beilein, Quantrill was many things. Each of the seventeen personae Beilein identifies—from teacher, to overseer, to killer—frames a chapter in the book and underscores Beilein's central goal to find and psychoanalyze Quantrill and his evolving manhood in mid-nineteenth-century America. Beilein maintains a keen focus on the ways in which notions of nineteenth-century manhood shaped guerrillas. According to Beilein, Quantrill was perpetually "hyperconscious of manliness" and a "changeling" throughout much of his life (xiii), ever working to adhere to the "confidence man" identity toward which so many mid-nineteenth-century men aspired. End Page 387 This, combined with the shadowy nature of the guerrilla war in the trans-Mississippi, made the guerrilla leader especially hard to pin down during his lifetime, and it continues to do so now. Beilein generally succeeds in his effort to explore and narrate the different Quantrills en route to some sort of understanding of the real Quantrill. This said, A Man by Any Other Name comes dangerously close to defending its protagonist as a product of the time who evolved "as part of an honest, if misguided, effort to improve himself or his situation" and who has been mistreated and misinterpreted by previous historians "as a vile man, a traitor, and the embodiment of an evil particular to proslavery antagonists" (xiv, 9). To be sure, Beilein makes clear that Quantrill and his men committed dastardly acts, but the tone throughout risks belying such disclaimers. Much as in his previous work, Bushwhackers: Guerrilla Warfare, Manhood, and the Household in Civil War Missouri (2016), Beilein leans heavily on the notion that guerrilla fighters, including Quantrill, were something more than criminally minded irregulars. Some might have been. But overt attempts to humanize Quantrill and his cronies risk detracting from the real vile and treacherous acts that defined their war. Perhaps part of the risk in this instance is due to Beilein's insistence on framing Quantrill and the guerrilla war he came to represent as something less brutal than the regular war. Here he attempts to counter a generation of guerrilla war historians who, he suggests, misguidedly "describe the guerrilla conflict in terms that echo sanguineous language of former bushwhackers" (137). The historian Michael Fellman, in his seminal work Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War (1989), is particularly guilty of this, Beilein contends, by narrating a "cyclone of chaos in which violence was boundless" (137). Such polemics are unconvincing in light of the overwhelming amount of firsthand evidence from civilians that indicate otherwise. Beilein argues for historians to employ more nuance to view guerrillas like Quantrill as human embodiments of antebellum manhood who "did not spring from the womb fully formed as brutal monsters" (138). The kind of war waged by Quantrill and those like him was brutal and chaotic owing not only to specific guerrilla actions but also to often equally harsh Union reprisals. Beilein also attempts to redefine the guerrilla war as something that contradicts its decisive role. . .