Please post your source for Brownlee's 10 May 1865 letter to his mother. I thought I had references to the major sources for his execution that day, but this one is new to me.

For what it is worth, I discovered researching and writing about guerrilla warfare in the winter of 1864-1865 and into the spring of 1865 that to Union authorities that spring the war was definitely not over. Interrogations with captured guerrillas and with southern sympathizers convinced the Federal leaders that the usual hundreds of bushwhackers were returning to Missouri that spring (as they had the previous two springs from wintering in the South) with the express goal to "set things right" no matter what the Confederacy did or did not do, or so the generals were told. Reading Major General Dodge's correspondence in the "Official Records" series 1, vol. 48, parts 1 and 2 he shows frustration that he was unable to squelch the "stay-behind" guerrillas that winter and all his changes and innovations failed to conquer that still-very-active little war, despite a number of small-scale tactical victories in the field. To prove Dodge's fears, a number of guerrillas in late April and May 1865 came north killing many in their path, as John Edwards in "Noted Guerrillas" pointed out on pages 331-333. Although Edwards exaggerated what surviving bushwhackers told him in his interviews when the war was really over, I found corroboration for some of the instances he mentions. All this is to say that Union authorities were very much fighting large numbers of guerrillas, returned Confederate soldiers, and even renegade Union deserters as late as May 1865, and were very much in a frame of mind to carry out an old 1863 order of execution if they thought it would give at least some of the guerrillas and southern sympathizers pause to reconsider the course they followed. This decision to kill Brownlee seems all the more tragic considering Union authorities finally hit upon the method to stop hostilities by offering amnesty just a few days after Brownlee's May 10 execution. The guerrilla war screeched to a halt within days of that decision with just a few isolated guerrillas remaining active that citizen posses tracked down thereafter, as the Union army turned over civil law to the residents.

Bruce Nichols