Butcher

Burbridge ordered the retaliatory executions of over sixty people for guerrilla attacks in Kentucky. He ordered that four prisoners in military custody be shot for every Unionist citizen killed in a guerrilla raid. The idea was that such reprisals would restrain the guerrillas in the field, but his postwar critics attacked the killings as illegitimate military murders. This chapter argues that, while there were irregularities in the proceedings leading up to the executions, retaliation was (and is) an accepted part of the rules of war. Moreover, the criticisms of Burbridge’s enemies posited that anyone who had ever enlisted in the Confederacy—in uniform or out, in Union territory, or engaged in hostile actions—was entitled to prisoner-of-war status. Burbridge, subject to the Union’s understanding of the laws of war, saw these combatants differently.