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This is basically three works under one cover, as the sections on the three most well-known Confederate Ranger leaders are all independent of each other. There’s no general section on rangers, or their employment by less-successful leaders to tie things together, either. The most we get is a short introduction that mentions the CSA’s 1862 Partisan Ranger Act and a short description of its provisions.

The careers of Mosby, Morgan, and Forrest overlap quite a bit in time, and the latter two in place, so we get some repetition of external pressures in the narratives which are basically three separate works under one cover. That’s not too bad, but not the best either. More notably, all three, and Mosby in particular, are constant recounting of events and incidents without letup so it is hard to keep straight.

I would have liked to see more analysis and theorizing. Early in Mosby’s career, Black gives a description of a few things Mosby did, and then says ‘it seems someone else was already operating in the area’, and gives a similar sequence of events, but a few days earlier. To me, that sounds like perhaps someone miscounted days when writing down a proper report. But Black refuses to even speculate on that, or do anything other than assume they must be separate incidents because of the dates given.

There is some analysis given, but usually as asides in his narrative instead of breaking out a section to really sit back and chew things over. Union cavalry was largely ‘going by the book’ written in the Napoleonic era, and trying to charge to engage with sabers. As the war went on, experience and better leaders changed this, but Black never goes into how many troops had official equipment of what weapons, and what exceptions to this are known.

Of course, he is focused entirely on the Confederate side, but even here he doesn’t break down just what the Confederate cavalryman was supposed to be equipped with, and just what someone like Forrest would be working with. He does go into some depth with Mosby being very clear that he considered the saber and other melee weapons useless, and was entirely reliant on revolvers for arms (though there’s a couple of incidents that show some of his men also using cavalry sabers—probably after emptying their guns). On the subject of all the troops these various partisan ranger units tied down trying to find them and protect lines of supply from them, he’s better, but since the Union perspective isn’t a real focus, we only get incomplete accounts of what the most effective measures were, and just how back area protection of supply lines changed over time.

Unless you’re really interested in the subject, the writing isn’t up for carrying the narrative. It’s not bad, but it isn’t up to properly organizing all the constant parade separate incidents that are much like incidents directly surrounding it. (Mosby’s section is by far the worst offender here… and is the first part of the book.) The book description floats the idea that these units were forerunners to modern ranger and special forces units, but there’s no real discussion of how that might be so in the book.