Bloody Dawn

by Thomas Goodrich

  Several hours later the advance of Lt. Col. Bazel Lazear’s Missouri militia was just clearing the timber along Big Creek. Oddly enough, by holding slow and hard to the same track made by the guerrillas on Wednesday, Lazear found himself on Saturday in a position not attained by any Federal officer during the entire chase. Unbeknownst to the colonel, he was the last obstacle to Quantrill’s escape. And with almost three hundred fresh men and mounts, he was certainly the most formidable.

  After moving a short distance from the creek the militia halted. Half a mile to the west a large number of blue-clad horsemen was seen approaching on the prairie. Suspicious, Lazear rode forward. As he neared, the mysterious column reached the top of a ridge and began forming a line of battle parallel with a fence. All doubts now removed, Lazear turned and quickly prepared for a fight. Dismounting a company and passing their horses to the rear, the colonel ordered the men forward to act as skirmishers. As these time-consuming procedures were taking place, Quantrill quietly faced south and rode down the fence, leaving Lazear with some of his force in the saddle and some not. By the time the militia was entirely remounted the guerrillas were half a mile in the distance.

  Galloping south, Lazear soon gained on the raiders and came up just as they disappeared behind a rise. Without pause the Yankees thundered over the hill. There on the other side they found the Rebels faced and waiting. Shots rang out as the guerrillas opened with revolvers. Momentarily checked, the militia replied with muskets. Several bushwhackers were hit and dropped from the saddle while a number of horses, struck by stray bullets, reared in the smoke and crashed to the ground. After a few more rounds the raiders broke for the timber. On their tired mounts, however, they were easy targets. Some had animals shot from under them, and as they gained their footing they were in turn cut down. Others ran for their lives or leaped on a friend’s horse. By the time the shooting stopped and the last of the Rebels had reached the woods, five of their number lay dead and several more, unable to move from wounds or sheer exhaustion, were executed on the spot.

  Racing over the littered ground Lazear and his men entered the brush in hot pursuit. Finding the trail had divided, the Federals in turn split, and shortly another band was run down and five more killed. After this, the militia reformed on the original field once more, buoyant and proud of their victory. While his troops raked over the plunder, discovering everything “from a horse to a finger ring,” Lazear set up camp and announced that a well-earned rest was in order. And well-earned the rest was. Had the colonel but pushed the initiative, however, he might have earned something far beyond his wildest dreams.34

  Behind, just breaking camp on the Grand after his latest halt, Charles Clark with nearly two thousand men was also dividing his command, sending Plumb and Thacher north following the main trail while the colonel himself chose to scout the brush to the east. Little was accomplished this day by either group. Clark did succeed in killing a number of stragglers, and just at dusk Thacher attacked a party of men he thought were guerrillas. But other than this, Saturday the twenty-second was spent in fruitless search.35

  That evening after dark, as though the lead role in a poorly acted, poorly directed tragedy had suddenly stepped onto the lighted stage, Thomas Ewing, tired, sore, and very, very alone, rode into the bivouac on the Grand. Around the campfires he found Colonel Clark, George Hoyt and his scouts, and what probably seemed like half the population of Kansas. He also found the most powerful man in the state, Jim Lane, still clad in his grimy nightshirt and baggy trousers. The tirade levied on Plumb that opened the chase—and afterwards at any other officer who didn’t measure up—now had a final and fitting outlet. And for the first time, Ewing heard the lurid details of what had transpired in Lawrence.

  With the chase for all practical purposes over, the two men retired and held a lengthy “interview,” shouting and arguing into the night about the next course of action.36 As to that, Ewing had already reached a verdict. He had pondered the thought earlier and was about to propose it to General Schofield when in truth the calm prior to the raid did not seem to warrant it. Now, with the sudden swirl of events, everything had changed; the day for hesitation and half measures had passed. Ewing’s former plan, the exile of Rebel families, severe though it seemed at the time, was scrapped, and in its stead a much more drastic, sweeping course was adopted. And though the distraught general didn’t need the senator’s curses and threats to convince him about the wisdom of his own plan, he received it nonetheless.

  “You are a dead dog if you fail to issue that order,” warned Lane.37

  With both men in agreement as to what would be done, the meeting ended. But even while Lane was threatening, his crafty mind was spinning.

  The hunt in western Missouri continued for the next few days with diminishing results. Clark, Lazear, and their small armies combed the Grand and Blue River country, the hills and valleys, the forests and fields, in the vain hope that they now could accomplish in the guerrillas’ backyard what they had failed to gain on the open prairie. And thus the pursuit ended. The race was lost. Only a score of actual raiders had, as Clark put it, “gone the way of all the world.” The bulk had escaped cleanly and scattered to their stronghold along the Sni. None of the leaders was killed: Todd, Anderson, Younger, Yager—all escaped.

  But the greatest disappointment was that the man who planned and led the raid lived to savor his triumph and bask in glory. And glory it was. For his role that morning in Lawrence he gained the eternal respect and admiration of thousands who had long since given up; thousands who felt that though it had come ever so slowly, justice had after all come ever so surely. There was a deep, quiet sense of satisfaction for some; there was a lifting, hardly contained elation for others upon learning that their old foe had been paid back for Osceola, Kansas City, Order No. 10, and a slate of other wounds, paid back, to borrow the old Kansas term, “with interest.” And although it was the most terrific, punishing ride of their lives, he had also won the undying love and devotion of his men. Indeed, the march over and retreat back had few equals in the war, and it was a feat many in the North might have secretly envied had circumstances been different. Five grueling days in the saddle—over two hundred miles—across much of occupied western Missouri, through four counties of the most warlike state in the nation where he had “dodged,” “bewildered,” and “baffled his pursuers,” all with the loss of only a handful of men. But even as he settled in along the Sni to rest and reflect upon the success, even then his name was flashing across the wires of the Union and being rushed to press in newspapers everywhere. And as it was read and pronounced on the lips of an incredulous, horrified public, the name became an abrupt and bitter curse. What normally might have been lauded as the most astonishing and dazzling light cavalry raid of the war was instead being transformed into one of the blackest pages in American history. The man and the deed, together, inseparable:

  Quantrill—the infamous monster

  Quantrill—the border butcher

  Quantrill—a crime … terrific, inhuman and bloody

  Quantrill—the Lawrence Massacre!

  10

  THIS SAVAGE WAR

  “Disaster has again fallen on our State,” wrote Governor Thomas Carney to John Schofield on August 24, 1863. “Lawrence is in ashes. Millions of property have been destroyed, and, worse yet,” he continued, “nearly 200 lives of our best citizens have been sacrificed. No fiends in human shape could have acted with more savage barbarity than did Quantrill and his band in their last successful raid.”1

  Thus, word of what came to be known as the Lawrence Massacre spread to the outside world. The reaction was swift … and mighty.

  New York Times

  Quantrell’s massacre … is almost enough to curdle the blood with horror. In the history of the war thus far … there has been no such diabolical work as this indiscriminate slaughter of peaceful villagers.… It is a calamity of the most heartrending kind—an atrocity of unspeakable character.

 
; Chicago Tribune

  What pen can depict the horrors … fiends incarnate … shooting down unarmed citizens … butchering them with wives and mothers clinging to them and begging for mercy.

  Leavenworth Conservative

  Shot down like dogs.… No fighting, no resistance—cold blooded murder.

  Boston Post

  The atrocious murders … exceed almost anything recorded in history.… The brutality, the cold-blooded ferocity.… Citizens butchered at their hearthstones, penned in like cattle.

  And elsewhere throughout the North people were shocked, stunned, sickened. Terrible though the war had been, nothing even approached this Lawrence butchery, either in numbers or grim, barefaced brutality. And it came like a slap in the night to find that this region, which outwardly seemed so quiet, so uneventful—especially when contrasted with the titanic struggle in the East—should now explode in flames of fury and hate and provide the war’s worst incident. But perhaps even more sobering was the realization that the “cruel war” had become by tenfold even crueler.

  Amid the swirl and storm following the slaughter there was a rush of angry and frightened men, each trying to explain how a thing of this magnitude could happen. The easiest way, of course, was to point. At first those handiest—the military guarding the border and those participating in the hapless chase—were the most likely candidates. There was Capt. Joshua Pike at Aubrey, whose tragic “error of judgment” opened wide to Quantrill the gates of Kansas. Although first to detect the invasion, Pike sat idly in camp, sending a few messages up and down the line but not a word west, while he frittered away hours waiting for help. Maj. Preston Plumb, whose seemingly cautious pursuit over the scorched prairie to Paola had the look to some of an honor guard escorting the raiders safely to Missouri, was branded a coward and a traitor for his role. When overall command fell to Lt. Col. Charles Clark at Paola, the last real chance to halt the Rebel retreat was squandered when the zealous subordinates were denied permission to leave town and move to the attack. With the chase resumed on Saturday, Clark’s creaking gyrations, especially after crossing the state line, were charitably described as “slow.” And the farmers and villagers along Quantrill’s route, those who either through fear, ignorance, or “criminal apathy” failed to warn Lawrence, did not escape the headhunting. The men of Franklin, where a stand of one hundred arms remained stacked in the arsenal all Friday morning, did not fire a shot. Those who scattered in quailish terror on the guerrillas’ line of retreat. And so on.2

  Naturally, the pointing quickly worked to the top, but in the end no one was certain just who or what merited the greatest share of guilt. The one thing Kansans were certain of, however, was where the source of trouble lay.

  “I must hold Missouri responsible for this fearful, fiendish raid,” continued Governor Carney. “No body of men large as that commanded by Quantrill could have been gathered together without the people residing in western Missouri knowing everything about it.”3

  On this score there was no debate. Kansas, not three years old, would remain a state in name only unless something was done—and soon. And at the time no means of guaranteeing its safety seemed too severe. The people of western Missouri were guilty, either as “aiders & abettors,” as Carney put it, or as pathetic pawns skillfully played in the hands of the bushwhackers. But these were fine points. Kansans held all western Missouri “responsible” and therefore all western Missouri would pay.

  Soon after the chase Thomas Ewing returned to the Pacific House in Kansas City. The District of the Border, a model of confidence and ability the week before, was now a shambles; along with it Ewing’s own heretofore spotless career had been blackened, perhaps beyond cleansing, by the smoke and soot at Lawrence. Ewing realized this only too well. Already an avalanche of criticism was thundering down: charges made by certain “political Quantrills,” as the general styled them; his untimely absence from headquarters on the night of August 20; Leavenworth, where no precautions had been taken to link the commanding general to the telegraph office and the office itself, opening and closing shop as if the border were at peace rather than home to a lightning guerrilla war; Ewing’s decision to march overland, an arduous ride in the best of conditions, absolutely murderous in sun-wracked August, with only the flimsiest of information as to the raiders’ whereabouts; the DeSoto ferry, a history of slow crossings and “poor accommodations.”4 The list went on.

  A cooler man, cried critics, would have boarded a boat at Leavenworth, steamed downriver to Kansas City, disembarked fresh men and mounts, read the latest dispatches, then, after a comparatively short ride of twenty or thirty miles, thrown himself across the state line barring Quantrill’s path.5 That no soldiers were stationed at Lawrence when in truth they were at every other town less despised by the Rebels was charged to the general. “No man, woman, or child ever suggested the idea of stationing troops permanently at Lawrence,” he burst out in a letter to his superior, John Schofield.6

  Although most accusations would not bear up and all were laced with character slurs and patent lies, each had its audience in the wake of the Lawrence disaster. “My political enemies are fanning the flames and wish me for a burnt-offering,” he continued to Schofield. “It is all mere mob clamor.”7 A court of inquiry was demanded, the light of which would reveal the truth, Ewing felt, and clear his name of any incompetence or wrongdoing. But still the clouds of failure hung black and heavy over the Pacific House, and when the hail of criticism didn’t trouble the general’s mind, the “horrors of the massacre” did.8

  To his credit, however, Ewing was not one to stew in self-pity or waste his time fending off every assault. Instead, he got down to business. So long as “half or more of the people are disloyal of all shades, as in western Missouri,” he explained to Schofield, the border would remain in turmoil. To this both men agreed. Thus Ewing did that which he felt he must; he issued General Orders, No. 11, calling for the dismantling and destruction of the Missouri border. Since virtually nothing seemed to work at wresting the bushwhackers from western Missouri, then western Missouri would be wrested from the bushwhackers.

  Effective on August 25, Order No. 11 decreed that within fifteen days all persons residing in the border counties situated between the Missouri and Osage rivers would remove themselves from the land. Rebels, “either openly or secretly disloyal,” living in the towns occupied by troops were also expelled. Those individuals fortunate enough to live within a mile of these stations, and who were able to prove their loyalty to the federal government, might remain. The few Unionists who yet lived on the countryside could move to the military posts or any part of Kansas beyond the border. But all else were banished. Where and how they went was their problem. But they must go, and quickly!

  “To obtain the full military advantages of this,” all grain and hay, either stored or growing in the fields, was to be burned. Nothing useful to the partisans was to remain in the region—no food, shelter, livestock, or forage, but most importantly, no people. Those lingering in the void after September 9 would be considered Rebels and hence guilty until proven innocent, if they were given the chance.9 As he inked his signature to the bottom line, Ewing understood as well as any the hardships that must result from such an edict. But in his mind, at least, to save Kansas the border cancer had to be removed, once and for all.

  “Though this measure may seem too severe,” he told Schofield, “I believe it will prove not inhuman, but merciful.”10

  His word a law, the officers and men versed on their assignments, Ewing set the clock in motion and the fifteen-day countdown began.

  Soon after Order No. 11 became known, famed artist and statesman George Caleb Bingham stepped onto a boat at the capital, Jefferson City, and steamed upriver. Stomping through the doors of the Pacific House, Bingham found the commanding general at his desk and got right to the point: the proclamation must be rescinded! Momentarily taken aback, Ewing replied that it was out of the question; the order would stand. Thereupon a heate
d argument ensued.

  Of Southern background, although a staunch Unionist currently serving a term as state treasurer, the popular, toupeed little man confronting Ewing did not represent the sentiment of George C. Bingham alone but uttered words that a good many loyal Missourians and moderate men everywhere felt: namely, that Order No. 11 was an odious crime, an intemperate, vengeful, unprecedented act against a vastly innocent society that had nothing whatsoever to do with Lawrence, Quantrill, or even the rebellion. The edict must be cancelled.

  “This is war, Mister Bingham,” said the general. “I do not propose to alter my course of action regarding it. And may I remind you that I am commander of this district.”

  “And may I remind you,” fired the artist, “that your whole course is stupid and outrageous.… Your mind is closed … as is your heart.”

  “To meddlers,” Ewing shot back.

  “Is it possible that unless you do something drastic to appease Kansas for the Lawrence raid that your own political star is quenched?” stabbed Bingham, alluding to the next senate election.

  Furious, the big general approached and glared down on the little man.

  “Mister Bingham, you can get out of here.”

  “Then you absolutely refuse to rescind the order?”