Suffering on the Southwest Border

This is why I love digging in the archives. The following article appeared in the Confederate Veteran magazine Volume Vol. XXV, Feb. 1917. It was entitled "Suffering on the Southwest Border" and submitted  Mrs. Flora E. Stevens of Kansas City, Missouri. In it she addresses the difference between the atrocities committed by the men of Sherman's "March to the Sea" and the depredations inflicted on Missourians by Kansas Jayhawkers. To illustrate her point Mrs. Stevens states, "...These troops were chivalrous, high-principled men in comparison with the Kansas soldiers and the members of the 2d Colorado in their treatment of the unfortunate dwellers of Missouri on the Kansas border. " 

"An article in the January Veteran on “The South’s Suffering” dwells upon the devastation inflicted by Sherman and Sheridan as the greatest endured by the South during the war; but these troops were chivalrous, high-principled men in comparison with the Kansas soldiers and the members of the 2d Colorado in their treatment of the unfortunate dwellers of Missouri on the Kansas border. 

The Kansas troops, especially the 5th, 6th, and 7th Volunteer Cavalry, came into Missouri solely to murder — i. e„ hang and shoot—and to plunder. Trains of wagons filled with household goods, supplies, grain, etc., rolled over the border and thousands of sheep, cattle, and fine horses till the border of Missouri was simply “cleaned out” of everything worth carrying away. They began even before Missouri seceded and made no distinction between Union and Confederate. In the negro cabins at Lawrence, Kans., were many thousand-dollar pianos. Mr. E. Stine, a well-known citizen of Kansas City and a Union man, told me that on one single trip Jennison, the gambler-colonel of the 7th Kansas, crossed into Kansas with a hundred freight wagons 'loaded with stolen plunder, followed by all kinds of stock and a thousand negroes on foot, whom Jennison was taking into Kansas to form into regiments and send back into Missouri to steal and destroy. 

The border was not in favor of secession for itself, for, though Southern and slave-holding and sympathizing with the other States, it feared secession would leave it unprotected, open to the assaults of the entire Northwest. Senator Vest stated that “but one-fifth of the votes cast in i860 were for the secession candidates.” 

Not a single Kansas soldier had a right to enter Missouri, yet this district bore the most enormous suffering of the entire country in proportion to its extent. Where else in the South did a United States Senator head a regiment and fall suddenly upon a peaceful hamlet, slay a score of defenseless citizens, and then return with great loads of plunder and stock, boasting that they came but for loot, as did Jim Lane in 1861 in attacking Osceola, Mo.? 

While even the Western Journal of Commerce, of Kansas City, a black Republican paper, openly accused them of selling blooded horses, stolen from Missouri, on the streets of Leavenworth at twenty-five dollars a head (worth five hundred), adding that “General Lane’s own share of the spoil was a fine carriage.” 

Where else do you find a regiment crossing the State line in covered wagons, as did John T. Burris, of Olathe, Kans., and the 6th Kansas Volunteers, going to Independence, Mo., and back to their homes, every man riding a horse taken from the defenseless Missourians—nine-tenths of them Union—and the wagons, called “Burris’s gunboats,” loaded with costly spoil? And these raids were repeated again and again upon an unprotected people. After the war Lane committed suicide through remorse for his blood-stained career. Where else do you find old men and mere boys hanged by the hundreds simply because they or their fathers had come from some seceded State years before? Where else do you find a general who would pick for his staff such a set of cutthroats that their very name has become a byword, as did Blunt, of the notorious “Red Legs”? 

Where else do you find an officer issue an edict that every boy of nineteen years or over who did not join the Union army should be shot, as did at Independence, Mo., William Homer Pennock, of St. Joseph? Where else that old ladies, feeble, refined, were ordered out into the Red Leg camps to cook for these villains. In what other State was a woman put in jail for giving a loaf of bread to her own son, a Confederate soldier, as was Mrs. Tarleton, of Jefferson City, mother of Mrs. Phil Chappell, wife of a State Treasurer of Missouri? 

In what other State were young girls put in prison or banished from the State by the hundreds for the sole offense of conveying food to their brothers and relatives hiding in the timber to protect them from the negroes? In what other part of the country were delicate young women sentenced to the penitentiary for humanely aiding Confederates ? 

In what other part were men hanged for selling corn to Confederates? Where were Confederates denied burial and their bodies ordered left exposed to be devoured by wolves and vultures, while any who dared bury them were themselves shot? Where were men killed for feeding Confederates? Where were prisoners shot by the scores ? Where else did men chain ten-year-old girls on the upper floor of a brick building and Union soldiers dig out the foundation beneath till the building fell and killed these girls with infinite torture, as “Bill” Anderson’s young sisters were treated by the soldiers in Kansas City in August, 1863? 

Where else did a general issue a decree depopulating three counties—Jackson, Clay, and Bates—as did Tom Ewing in August, 1863? And his superior commander, Schofield, said that he “regretted the edict (order No. 11) had not been extended to a fourth county, Lafayette.” 

In what other State did the legislature forbid men to preach the gospel unless they took oath that they had shown no act of mercy to a Confederate or his family as did the radicals of Missouri in 1864, pass the hideous “ironclad,” or “test,” oath under which for years honest, kind-hearted ministers were put in jail, fined, and a dozen or more killed, even Union men, because they set God and their conscience above venal law- makers ? 

No, people of the South, of the country, for sheer open, gloating, undisguised atrocity toward the helpless give the black honors (?) to the Kansas troops, the “Dutch,” part of the Union Missouri militia, a detachment of the 2d Colorado while in the border district of Missouri. For unexampled suffering, for the highest rank of victims give the supreme place in history and your love and memory to the Southerners of this despoiled country, the northwest outpost of the Confederacy."

Clint Lacy - is the author of "Blood in the Ozarks: Union War Crimes Committed Against Southern Sympathizers and Civilians in Occupied Missouri"