The war of raid and ambush in Missouri seemed often to have little relation to the larger conflict of which it was a part. But the hit-and-run tactics of the guerrillas, who numbered only a few thousand, tied down tens of thousands of Union soldiers and militia who might otherwise have fought elsewhere. The guerrillas' need for sanctuary in the countryside and the army's search and destroy missions forced civilians to choose sides or else suffer the consequences—usually both. Confederate generals frequently attached guerrilla bands to their commands or requested these bands to destroy Union supply lines and bases in conjunction with orthodox operations against northern forces. In August
21. When the O.A.K. changed its name to the Sons of Liberty elsewhere in early 1864, it appears to have retained the old name in Missouri. Frank L. Klement, "Phineas C. Wright, the Order of the American Knights, and the Sanderson Exposé," CWH, 18 (1972), 5–23, maintains that Sterling Price's alleged role in the Knights was invented by Union detectives and perjured witnesses. But Albert Castel, General Sterling Price and the Civil War in the West (Baton Rouge, 1968), 193–96, while conceding that the O.A.K. amounted to little, asserts that Price was indeed its military commander.
1862, Quantrill's band captured Independence, Missouri, as part of a raid by rebel cavalry from Arkansas. As a reward Quantrill received a captain's commission in the Confederate army—and thereafter claimed to be a colonel.
The motives of guerrillas and Jayhawkers alike sometimes seemed nothing more than robbery, revenge, or nihilistic love of violence. But ideology also played a part. Having battled proslavery Missourians for nearly a decade, many Jayhawkers were hardened abolitionists intent on destroying slavery and the social structure that it sustained. The notorious 7th Kansas Cavalry—"Jennison's Jayhawkers"—that plundered and killed their way across western Missouri were commanded by an abolitionist colonel with Susan B. Anthony's brother as lieutenant colonel and John Brown, Jr., as captain of a company. To a man the soldiers were determined to exterminate rebellion and slaveholders in the most literal manner possible. On the other side, guerrilla outlaws such as the James brothers have been celebrated in myth, by Hollywood films, and by some scholars as Robin-Hood types or "primitive rebels" who defended small farmers by attacking the agencies of Yankee capitalism—the Union army during the war, banks and railroads afterwards. But in reality, as a recent study has shown, the guerrillas tended to be the sons of farmers and planters of southern heritage who were three times more likely to own slaves and possessed twice as much wealth as the average Missourian. To the extent that ideology motivated their depredations, they fought for slavery and Confederate independence.22
The most notorious of their leaders was William Clarke Quantrill. The son of an Ohio schoolteacher, Quantrill had drifted around the West until the war came along to give full rein to his particular talents. Without any ties to the South or to slavery, he chose the Confederacy apparently because in Missouri this allowed him to attack all symbols of authority. He attracted to his gang some of the most psychopathic killers in American history. In kaleidoscopic fashion, groups of these men would split off to form their own bands and then come together again for larger raids. An eruption of such activities along Missouri's western border in the spring of 1863 infuriated the Union commander there, Thomas Ewing. A brother-in-law of William T. Sherman, Ewing
22. Don Bowen, "Guerrilla Warfare in Western Missouri, 1862–1865: Historical Extensions of the Relative Deprivation Hypothesis," Comparative Studies in Society and History (1977), 30–51. I am indebted to my colleague Richard D. Challener for calling this article to my attention.
had learned what Sherman was learning—that this was a war between peoples, not simply between armies. The wives and sisters of Quantrill's men fed and sheltered the guerrillas. Ewing arrested these women and lodged them under guard in Kansas City. There on August 14 a building containing many of them collapsed, killing five of the women.
This tragedy set in motion a greater one. Inflamed by a passion for revenge, the raiders combined in one large band of 450 men under Quantrill (including the Younger brothers and Frank James) and headed for Lawrence, Kansas, the hated center of free soilism since Bleeding Kansas days. After crossing the Kansas line they kidnapped ten farmers to guide them toward Lawrence and murdered each one after his usefulness was over. Approaching the town at dawn on August 21, Quantrill ordered his followers: "Kill every male and burn every house." They almost did. The first to die was a United Brethren clergyman, shot through the head while he sat milking his cow. During the next three hours Quantrill's band murdered another 182 men and boys and burned 185 buildings in Lawrence. They rode out of town ahead of pursuing Union cavalry and after a harrowing chase made it back to their Missouri sanctuary, where they scattered to the woods.23
This shocking act roused the whole country. A manhunt for Quantrill's outlaws netted a few of them, who were promptly hanged or shot. An enraged General Ewing issued his famous Order No. 11 for the forcible removal of civilians from large parts of four Missouri counties bordering Kansas. Union soldiers ruthlessly enforced this banishment of ten thousand people, leaving these counties a wasteland for years. None of this stopped the guerrillas, however. Quite the contrary, their raids became more daring and destructive during the following year.
General Sterling Price, who longed to redeem Missouri from the Yankees, was impressed by Quantrill's prowess. In November 1863 Price sent him words of "high appreciation of the hardships you . . . and your gallant command . . . have so nobly endured and the gallant struggle you have made against despotism and the oppression of our
23. Jay Monaghan, Civil War on the Western Border 1854–1865 (New York, 1955), 274–89; Richard S. Brownlee, Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy: Guerrilla Warfare in the West, 1861–186; (Baton Rouge, 1958), 110–57; Albert E. Castel, A Frontier State at War: Kansas, 1861–186; (Ithaca, 1950), 124–41. The best study of Quantrill is Albert E. Castel, William Clarke Quantrill: His Life and Times (New York, 1962).
State, with the confident hope that success will soon crown our efforts."24 Guerrilla chieftains convinced Price that Missourians would rise en masse if a Confederate army invaded the state, which had been denuded of first-line Union troops to deal with Forrest in Tennessee. Scraping together 12,000 cavalry from the trans-Mississippi, Price moved northward through Arkansas and entered Missouri in September 1864. He instructed partisan bands to spread chaos in the Union rear, while the O.A.K. mobilized civilians to welcome the invaders. The latter enterprise came to nothing, for when Union officers arrested the Order's leaders the organization proved to be an empty shell. The guerrillas were another matter. Raiding in small bands all over central Missouri they brought railroad and wagon transportation to a standstill and even halted boat traffic on the Missouri.
The most effective partisan was "Bloody Bill" Anderson, who had split from Quantrill with about fifty followers—all of them pathological killers like their leader. Through August and September, Anderson's band struck isolated garrisons and posts, murdering and scalping teamsters, cooks, and other unarmed personnel as well as soldiers. The climax of this saturnalia came at Centralia on September 27. With thirty men including Frank and Jesse James, Bloody Bill rode into town, burned a train and robbed its passengers, and murdered twenty-four unarmed northern soldiers traveling home on furlough. Chased out of town by three companies of militia, the guerrillas picked up 175 allies from other bands, turned on their pursuers, and slaughtered 124 of the 147 men, including the wounded, whom they shot in the head.
That same day, September 27, Price's invasion met its first setback 140 miles to the south at Pilot Knob, Missouri. There a Union force of 1,000 men under Thomas Ewing held a fort against assaults by 7,000 rebels and inflicted on them 1,500 casualties at the cost of only 200. Deflected by this action from his initial objective of St. Louis—which was filling up with Union reinforcements—Price turned westward toward the capital at Jefferson City. Here he expected to inaugurate a Confederate governor who
had accompanied him. But the Federals had strengthened its defenses, so the rebels continued to plunder their way westward along the south bank of the Missouri. Recruits and guerrilla bands swelled Price's ranks—he welcomed Bloody Bill Anderson to Boonville on October 11—but now they were beginning to think of flight rather than attack. Missouri and Kansas militia were swarming in
24. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 53, p. 908.
their front; Union cavalry were coming up from behind; and a veteran infantry division was marching fast to cut off escape to the south. In skirmishes and battles east and south of Kansas City from October 20 to 28, these Union forces pummelled Price and drove him south along the border all the way back to Arkansas via the Indian Territory and Texas. Although Price put the best possible face on his invasion—boasting that he had marched 1,400 miles from beginning to end, far more than any other Confederate army—it was a greater disaster than any other southern foray into Union territory. Though he had started with 12,000 men and picked up thousands of recruits along the way, he returned to Arkansas with fewer than 6,000. Organized Confederate resistance in Missouri came to an end.
Best of all from a Union standpoint, the fighting had wrecked most of the guerrilla bands and killed many of their leaders, including Bloody Bill Anderson. Quantrill left Missouri and headed east with the avowed intent of assassinating Lincoln. But he ran afoul of a Union patrol in Kentucky and was killed. In the presidential election, meanwhile, Lincoln had carried Missouri with 70 percent of the vote (most southern sympathizers, of course, were excluded from the polls by refusal or inability to take the loyalty oath). The radical Republican faction triumphed over the conservatives and called a constitutional convention which abolished slavery in Missouri in January 1865. The state's troubles were not over, however, for when the war ended the James and Younger brothers along with other surviving guerrillas were allowed to surrender as soldiers and go free.
III
Sensational revelations of copperhead activities in Missouri helped the Republican effort to discredit the opposition as disloyal. Democrats fought back with their tried and true weapon—racism. On this issue the party remained united and consistent. Sixty-five of sixty-eight Democratic congressmen had voted against the 13th Amendment, denying it the necessary two-thirds majority in the House. These congressmen also published a manifesto denouncing the enlistment of black soldiers as a vile Republican scheme to establish "the equality of the black and white races."25 Democratic opposition forced compromises in a Republican bill to equalize the pay of black and white soldiers. Under the terms of
25. CG, 38 Cong., 1 Sess., 1995; Forrest G. Wood, Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation and Reconstruction (Berkeley, 1968), 42.
the militia act passed in July 1862, blacks enrolled in the army were regarded as laborers and paid several dollars a month less than white soldiers. A concession to prejudice, this provision was blatantly inconsistent with the combat status of 100,000 black soldiers by 1864. In response to bitter protests by abolitionists and incipient mutiny among black troops, Republicans sponsored a law for retroactive equalization of pay. But a coalition of Democrats who opposed any equalization and conservative Republicans who questioned the retroactive clause prevented passage. To satisfy the latter and enact the bill, Congress made equal pay retroactive only to January 1, 1864—except for blacks who had been free before the war, who received equal pay from date of enlistment.26
Having gained votes in 1862 by tarring Republicans with the brush of racial equality, Democrats expected to do the same in 1864. The vulgarity of their tactics almost surpasses belief. An editor and a reporter for the New York World, McClellan's most powerful newspaper, coined a new word with their anonymous pamphlet Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races. Pretending to be Republicans, the authors recommended "miscegenation" as a solution of the race problem. This fusion, the pamphlet declared, would particularly "be of infinite service to the Irish." If the Republicans were re-elected they would prosecute the war to "its final fruit, to the blending of the white and the black." Although the Democratic press tried to pump up this hoax into a serious Republican program, few readers except confirmed copperheads seemed to take it seriously.
Democrats nevertheless exploited the miscegenation issue ad nauseam. The Emancipation Proclamation became the Miscegenation Proclamation. A pamphlet entitled Miscegenation Indorsed by the Republican Party circulated far and wide. Numerous cartoons showed thick-lipped, grinning, coarse black men kissing apple-cheeked girls "with snow-white bosoms" or dancing with them at the "Miscegenation Ball" to follow Lincoln's re-election. The "Benediction" of a leaflet entitled "Black Republican Prayer" invoked "the blessings of Emancipation throughout our unhappy land" so that "illustrious, sweet-scented Sambo [may] nestle in the bosom of every Abolition woman, that she may be quickened by the pure blood of the majestic African."27 Campaign pamphlets and
26. Ira Berlin et al., eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation 1861–1867, Series II: The Black Military Experience (Cambridge, 1982), 362–405.
27. Sidney Kaplan, "The Miscegenation Issue in the Election of 1864," Journal of Negro History, 34 (1949), 274–343; Wood, Black Scare, 53–76, and reproductions of campaign broadsides between pp. 92 and 93.
newspapers reported that "a great many squint-eyed yellow babies" had been born in New Orleans since Benjamin Butler was there; that New England schoolmarms teaching freedpeople on the South Carolina sea islands had produced numerous mulatto children; and that five thousand mulatto babies had been born in Washington since 1861. This, declared a Democratic pamphlet, was "what the President means by 'Rising to the Occasion.' "28
"Abraham Africanus the First" was of course the chief target of the tar brush. "Passing the question as to his taint of negro blood," commented a Catholic weekly, "Abe Lincoln . . . is brutal in all his habits. . . . He is obscene. . . . He is an animal. . . . Filthy black niggers, greasy, sweaty, and disgusting, now jostle white people and even ladies everywhere, even at the President's levees."29 Lincoln was "Abe the Widowmaker" who had sent half a million white men to their graves in this insane war to free the slaves because he "loves his country less, and the negro more." Commenting on petitions to suspend the draft, a Pennsylvania newspaper urged citizens to "go a step further, brethren, and suspend Old Abe—by the neck if necessary to stop the accursed slaughter of our citizens."30 And a copperhead editor in Wisconsin published a parody of the song "When Johnny Comes Marching Home":
The widow-maker soon must cave,
Hurrah, Hurrah,
We'll plant him in some nigger's grave,
Hurrah, Hurrah.
Torn from your farm, your ship, your raft,
Conscript. How do you like the draft,
And we'll stop that too,
When little Mac takes the helm.31
For all their stridency, Democrats appear to have profited little from the race issue in this election. For most undecided voters, the success
28. Arnold M. Shankman, The Pennsylvania Antiwar Movement, 1861–1865 (Rutherford, N.J., 1980), 165; "The Lincoln Catechism," in Frank Freidel, ed., Union Pamphlets of the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 1000–1001.
29. New-York Freeman's Journal & Catholic Register, Aug. 24, April 23, 1864.
30. Freidel, ed., Union Pamphlets, 983; Shankman, Pennsylvania Antiwar Movement, 192.
31. Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in theMid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, 1983), 40.
or failure of the war was more salient than the possibility of blacks marrying their sisters. Republicans were far more successful in pinning the label of traitor on Democrats than the latter were in pinning the label of miscegenationist on Republicans. If anything, racism may have boomeranged against the Democrats this time, for after Sherman's and Sheridan's victories many northern voters began to congratulate themselves on the selflessness of their sacrifices in this glorious war for Union and freedom.
On one issu
e tangentially linked to racial policy—the prisoners of war issue—the Democrats undoubtedly suffered a backlash, for northerners embittered by the condition of Union soldiers in southern prisons were not likely to favor a party stereotyped as pro-southern. The Democratic platform contained a plank condemning the administration's "shameful disregard" of "our fellow-citizens who now are, and long have been, prisoners of war in a suffering condition."32 When this plank was written, the overcrowding and shocking circumstances at Andersonville in particular had already become notorious. The anger evoked by this situation opens a window on one of the most emotional issues of the war.
The relatively few prisoners captured in 1861 imposed no great strain on either side. Obsolete forts, converted warehouses, county jails, and other existing buildings proved sufficient to hold prisoners while they awaited the informal exchanges that occasionally took place. Field commanders sometimes paroled captives or worked out local exchanges on the spot after a skirmish. Not wishing the burden of feeding prisoners, the Confederacy pressed for a formal exchange cartel. The Lincoln administration was reluctant to grant the official recognition that such a cartel might imply. After the fighting from Fort Donelson to the Seven Days' poured thousands of prisoners into inadequate facilities, however, the administration succumbed to growing northern pressure for regularized exchanges. Taking care to negotiate with a belligerent army, not government, the Union army accepted an exchange cartel on July 22, 1862. Specifying a rank weighting whereby a non-commissioned officer was equal to two privates, a lieutenant to four, and so on up to a commanding general who was worth sixty privates, this cartel specified a man-for-man exchange of all prisoners. The excess held by one side or another were to be released on parole (that is, they promised not to take up arms until formally exchanged). For ten months this arrangement
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