re: #104 Decatur Deb

Free State of Jones, and others.
smithsonianmag.com

Yup, when the southern states seceded a lot of young men joined up to protect their homes from the “mongrel Northern urban hordes” that were supposed to be coming to rape their livestock and steal their women. (You can still read this kind of crap in current survivalist and rwnj gun propaganda btw.)

As these folks realized that they had been completely had, they started to lose interest in being cannon fodder for rich plantation owners. By the fall of 1864 Jefferson Davis reported that half the Confederate Army was awol.

As the confederate army sent cavalry columns into the hinterlands to round up deserters and confiscate farm food stocks, resistance increased. There were a number of places that were no-go areas to confederate forces in less than brigade strength. The piney woods of Mississippi, the Appalachian Mountains into Northern Georgia, the rural coastal swamp areas of the Carolinas and Georgia.

And while you read about Mosby and other southern guerillas, remember that there were thousands of union guerillas operating from Maryland, Eastern Tennessee and in Northern Georgia.