From Aaron Astor at The Moderate Voice:
Slaveholders’ sons who feared the loss of their livelihood took to the bush to destroy all vestiges of the new post-emancipation order. Frustrated ambitions were central to the rise of Al Qaeda, especially among those in Egypt and Saudi Arabia who found their own careers as professionals (often engineers) blocked by pro-US autocratic governments for one reason or another. Their manhood undercut and financial well-being undermined, they took to a radical and destructive movement that vowed total war on the system that humiliated them. Like many of Quantrill’s raiders, they often witnessed their own fathers (and other family members) being emasculated by either the forces of secular autocracy or klepto-global-capitalism.
With ISIS, however, we see a second kind of guerrilla that showed up quite commonly in Civil War Missouri and Tennessee- the petty criminal who desperately sought a sense of purpose in the destruction of all that corrupted him and his society.
These were the mostly nameless followers and toadies who rode with Bloody Bill Anderson and Quantrill.