Plot
Jake Roedel (Tobey Maguire) and Jack Bull Chiles (Skeet Ulrich) are friends in Missouri when the American Civil War breaks out. During the mayhem, Chiles's father is murdered by Kansas Union Jayhawkers. The two men join the First Missouri Irregulars, also known as the Bushwhackers; informal units loyal to Missouri in 1861. They later meet George Clyde (Simon Baker) and former slave Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright), whose freedom Clyde has previously granted. The Bushwhackers battle Jayhawkers using guerrilla warfare tactics while trying to evade capture. The men manage to hide out in a coarsely-built shelter on the property of a pro-Confederacy family, the Evanses. A young widow in the household, Sue Lee Shelley (Jewel), becomes romantically involved with Chiles. When Chiles dies of gangrenous wounds received during a skirmish, Roedel escorts Shelley to a refuge dwelling where another pro-Confederate kindred, the Browns family, reside. Following the collapse and destruction of a makeshift prison holding the female relatives of guerrillas, a complementary clan of Bushwhackers led by William Quantrill (John Ales) plot a revenge attack against the Union and raid Lawrence, Kansas.
In the midst of the offense, a quarrel arises between Roedel and fellow Bushwhacker Pitt Mackeson (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). Roedel, a German American, was born in Germany but raised by his immigrant father in Missouri. He suffers from periodical anti-German suspicion from other Southerners, because the German population in the state is largely sympathetic to the Union. In an episode of hostility, Mackeson purposely shoots Roedel in the leg shortly after the raid on Lawrence, while retreating from a counterattack by Union forces. The perceived prejudice makes Roedel somewhat sympathetic to the plight faced by Holt, an African American coping with racism. Meanwhile, Shelley gives birth to Chiles's daughter. Holt and Roedel, both wounded, recover at the same residence that took in Shelley occupied by the Browns folk. Under pressure from the kin who mistakenly think Roedel is the child's father, Roedel marries Shelley in an abrupt wedding. At the close of the war, Roedel gives up being a Bushwhacker and takes his new family to California, while Holt leaves for Texas to find his long lost mother.
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“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)