The Kansas-Missouri Border War.
Forgive, but Never Forget.
The 160th anniversary of Quantrill’s Raid on Lawrence is just days away. On August 21, 1863, at 5 a.m, a heavily armed group of 300 to 400 Missouri guerrillas led by Captain William Clark Quantrill stormed three adjacent downtown Lawrence streets in a rampage of murder, looting, and arson.
When the raiders left about 9 a.m., 150 to 200 men and boys had been murdered, 125 structures burned; only two buildings in the business district were left standing. The damage estimate was $2 million.
Robert “Robbie” Speer was among the victims. He had spent the previous night in his father’s newspaper office where he would occasionally sleep on hot summer nights. The office was torched, with Speer’s body never recovered. He was murdered on the morning of his 18th birthday, according to Tim Rues, curatator of Constitution Hall in Lecompton, Kansas.
In my 36 years living in Lawrence, I became well aware of the atrocity, known here as “The Lawrence Massacre.” It remains the most infamous action of the entire span of an 11-year border conflict from 1854 to 1865. There could be no military action by Kansas Jayhawkers or the Union regular army against Missouri non-combatants that could compare to Quantrill’s senseless massacre. Of this, I was certain. Until recently….
According to many historians, Quantrill attacked Lawrence with a kill list. High on that list was James Lane. He was the most reviled abolitionist among all Kansas Jayhawkers, at the time a U.S. Senator and former commander of the Lane Brigade.
But “Lawrence wasn’t sacked because of Lane,” insists military historian Bryce Benedict, author of Jayhawkers: The Civil War Brigade of James Henry Lane, a detailed account of Lane’s unit. “It was sacked as punishment for the very idea that slavery should have no existence in this country. What the Lane Brigade did that was probably most offensive to the guerrillas was having freed hundreds of slaves, many of whom made their way to Lawrence.”
According to available census data, there were 5,500 enslaved people in Missouri’s three county area of Jackson, Bates, and Cass counties in 1860. But the numbers of enslaved people who either freed themselves or were liberated by Kansas Jayhawkers or federal troops wasn’t what most angered Missouri’s pro-slavers. Slavery was legal in Missouri and their enslaved property was illegally taken from them. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act required that slaves be returned to their owners, even if the slaves moved to a free state. “Who was arresting these Kansas lawbreakers?” they were asking.
There are other perspectives. Missouri historian Tom Rafiner believes Quantrill’s Raid was an act of retribution. “Lane’s Kansas Brigade were all radical abolitionists whose agenda extended far beyond the normal dictates of military policy…A number of Missouri towns and villages were completely destroyed before August 1863: West Point, Butler, Parkersville, Morristown, Papinsville, Mt. Pleasant, Sibley and Dayton.”
Rafiner is author of Cinders and Silence, a 2013 account of the conflict on the border. “The accumulating destruction of Missouri communities, tied to the thieving and burning of family homes between 1861 and August 1863 led to a feeling expressed by one of Quantrill’s men ‘that we could stand no more.’’’
On a short trip over the border to visit the Bushwhacker Museum in Nevada, I was reminded that Missouri never joined the Confederacy. Yet, at the dawn of the Civil War in April 1861, over 140,000 Missourians joined one side or another. The pro-slavery men could join the Confederate States Army, the Missouri State Guard, or guerrilla groups, called “Bushwhackers,” like Quantrill’s Raiders. Anti-slavery Missourians enlisted in Union army, affiliated Jayhawker units, or local Union Militia like the Cass County Home Guard. It was nearly impossible to live on the border and remain neutral. Theft, arson, and assassinations were commonplace. “Western Missouri was unlike any other Civil War theatre of operations,” Rafiner writes.
Then, I learned about General Order № 11, an edict that few who are not Civil War historians are familiar with. Just four days after Quantrill’s raiders vanished into the forests and ravines of rural western Missouri, Union Brigadier-General Thomas Ewing ordered the following: “All persons living in Jackson, Cass, and Bates Counties, Missouri…are hereby ordered to remove from their present places of residence within fifteen days from the date hereof.” The formal order included residents of the northern section of Vernon County but excluded residents who could prove their Union loyalty, living within one mile of the city limits of several communities in these counties.
It was not an organized evacuation. “The refugees, mostly women, children and the aged, left burning homes and entered a living hell,” writes Rafiner. Twenty-five thousand Americans were driven from their land of 2,200 square miles in the middle of summer, most of their usable wagons and horses had already been confiscated.
Historian Albert Castel, wrote “in considering the harsh treatment of civilians in American history, the order ranks second only to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.”
A correspondent for the Olathe Mirror wrote, “scarcely anything marks the ‘ancient habitations’ of man except for the long and blackened chimneys of former buildings.” In quick order the area became known as “The Burnt District.”
Missouri artist and Union officer at the time, George Caleb Bingham, tagged Ewing’s edict “a crime against humanity.” A replica of his painting “Order №11 ” is hanging in Kirk Hall in the Kansas City Central Library.
What happened to the enslaved population of the Burnt District? Rafiner is now searching through the scarce records of the 5,500 enslaved people in the Burnt District, hoping to eventually tell their stories.
Meanwhile, is it necessary, or even possible, to make moral judgments over which action, Quantrill’s Raid or General Order № 11, was more evil? At the close of any Civil War who determines which side suffered more?
On April 26, 2009, the Burnt District Monument was dedicated west of Harrisonville, Missouri. Carol Bohl, then executive director of the Cass County Historical Society said, “When we come to this place, let us listen with respect to the stories of both Missourian and Kansan. Bushwhacker and Jayhawker. Union and Confederate.”
On August 21, Lawrence will mourn the victims of Quantrill’s Massacre, murdered on its streets. Four days later, the people of Jackson, Cass, Bates, and Vernon counties will memorialize the victims of a questionable Federal Order and that legacy 160 years later.
I can’t speak for the descendants of the the enslaved Blacks of Missouri, or victims on either side of the border. But I am determined to make space for all perspectives. To forgive, but never to forget. With an apology for long-neglecting stories from the other side of the border.
