On March 15, 1865, three weeks before the end of the Civil War, twenty-year-old M. Jerome Clarke was hanged as a Confederate guerrilla in Louisville, Kentucky, as a crowd of thousands looked on. In the official charges against him, Clarke’s description included the alias Sue Mundy. By the time of his execution, Sue Mundy had earned a reputation as the region’s most dangerous and enigmatic female outlaw. Sue Mundy is the story of Jerome Clarke, a quiet orphan boy who follows a near relative into the ranks of the Confederate infantry. Following his capture by Union forces and his subsequent escape, Jerome joins John Hunt Morgan’s notorious Raiders. After Morgan’s death, Jerome becomes a Confederate
irregular,
one of the many guerrillas in Kentucky who ignored the rules of military engagement and the laws of the land. As stability and familiarity disappear from his and his compatriots’ lives, Jerome is unwillingly transfigured by the chaos of war and the efforts of an ambitious journalist into Sue Mundy, she-scourge of Kentucky Unionists. Richard Taylor seamlessly joins narrative and history to tell the compelling story of the Civil War in a state dangerously divided, neighbor against neighbor. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, Sue Mundy reveals the psychology of one of the Civil War’s most fascinating figures while providing an accurate account of this tumultuous period in American history.