War Crimes Against Southern Civilians

by Walter Cisco

  The crowd that gathered watched in horror and growing anger as the bloody and mangled bodies were removed. Authorities feared a riot and summoned soldiers with fixed bayonets to the scene.

  A rumor soon made the rounds that Brig. Gen. Thomas Ewing, Union army commander, had ordered the building undermined. To shift blame for the collapse from themselves, Federals claimed that the girls had weakened the building by digging a tunnel to escape. Apparently they did not consider how unlikely such a feat might be from the second story.' The truth-Union persecution exacerbated by gross negligencewas bad enough.

  The death and injury suffered by the girls in Kansas City had unanticipated consequences for Lawrence, Kansas. Quantrill had been planning a raid on this notorious enemy center. "When news of the tragedy in Kansas City reached Quantrill's men in the bush, they were wild," wrote historian Richard S. Brownlee. "It tore the last thin covering of mercy from [their] hearts." Then, just five days later, on August 18, 1863, Ewing issued his infamous Order No. 10. Among other things, "wives and children of known guerrillas, and also women who are heads of families and are willfully engaged in aiding guerrillas," would be required to leave the state of Missouri. That order, in Brownlee's words,

  Brig. Gen. Thomas Ewing

  was a final blow to Quantrill's boys. Those desperate, fearcrazed young men now knew that those persons dearest to them were to be forced from their homes and banished, with little money and very few possessions, from Missouri. Coupled with the death of their women in Kansas City, Order Number Ten seemed to scream for retaliatory .112

  Quantrill's raid, coming just three days later, resulted in the destruction of Lawrence and the deaths of some 150 civilian residents.

  "Most of the people of Western Missouri," wrote historian Albert Castel,

  looked upon the guerrillas as their avengers and defenders. ... Consequently they aided them in every possible way, from feeding them and sheltering them, to smuggling them ammunition and acting as spies. Even anti-Confederates assisted the partisans out of fear of reprisals. Thus in effect the Federal forces in Western Missouri were opposed by an entire people."'

  Union forces terrorized Cass and Jackson Counties in the aftermath of the Lawrence raid. If two or more farmers were seen together out-of-doors, soldiers thought this sufficient evidence that they were guerrillas and opened fire. Attempting to defend a home from Federal intruders was the cause of many deaths. Any man found wearing new clothes was assumed to have stolen them in Lawrence and was hanged. One group of three was hanged so high that their feet swung over the head of anyone riding beneath the tree. "Don't cut them down!" read the sign posted on the trunk. Soon Ewing reported to his superior that though eighty had thus far been killed, "I think it will largely exceed 100 before any considerable part of our troops withdraw from the pursuit. No prisoners have been taken, and none will be."'

  This was the kind of action needed to restore the union, at least in the minds of many in the Federal chain of command. A year earlier, William T. Sherman had confided to his brother, Sen. John Sherman, that the farms of "rebels" should be seized and given to immigrants from the North. "We must colonize and settle as we go south," wrote the general, giving Missouri as an example of an occupied state having an as yet unsubdued people. "Enemies must be killed or transported to some other country."5

  On August 25, 1863, Maj. Gen. John M. Schofield recommended to Ewing that he deport every resident of Jackson, Cass, and Bates Counties, destroying or appropriating all property of the "disloyal" since "nothing short of total devastation of the districts which are made the haunts of guerrillas will be sufficient."' Schofield's was an unnecessary suggestion. That very day Ewing issued Order No. 11. Except for Kansas City and the larger towns, "All persons living in Jackson, Cass, and Bates Counties, Missouri, and in that part of Vernon included in this district ... are hereby ordered to remove from their present places of residence within fifteen days." Those able to prove their loyalty to the Union could move to a military installation within the district or to any county in Kansas not bordering Missouri.-- The territory affected made up almost three thousand square miles, with a population of more than twenty thousand, and all were about to become homeless refugees. The number uprooted was even greater than the fifteen to twenty thousand Cherokees forced to take the "Trail of Tears" in the infamous removal of 1838-39.

  Most of the displaced headed to Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, or even hated Kansas. Unionist George Caleb Bingham witnessed the scene for himself.

  Bare-footed and bare-headed women and children, stripped of every article of clothing except a scant covering for their bodies, were exposed to the heat of an August sun and compelled to struggle through the dust on foot. All their means of transportation had been seized by their spoilers, except an occasional dilapidated cart, or an old and superannuated horse, which were necessarily appropriated to the use of the aged and infirm.

  Order No. 11 by George Caleb Bingham (Used by permission, State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia)

  It is well-known that men were shot down in the very act of obeying the order, and their wagons and effects seized by their murderers. Large trains of wagons, extending over the prairies for miles in length, and moving Kansas ward, were freighted with every description of house-hold furniture and wearing apparel belonging to the exiled inhabitants. Dense clouds of smoke arising in every direction marked the conflagration of dwellings. . . . The banished inhabitants . . . crowded by hundreds upon the banks of the Missouri river, and were indebted to the charity of benevolent steamboat conductors for transportation to places of safety."

  Kansas City Unionist H. B. Bouton described what he saw. "[P]oor people, widows and children, who, with little bundles of clothing, are crossing the river to be subsisted by the charities of the people amongst whom they might find shelter." Another viewed a road "crowded with women and children, women walking with their babies in their arms, packs on their backs and four or five children following after them-some crying for bread, some crying to be taken back to their homes." One refugee remembered that it was "dry, hot and dusty. The dust so thick on the fences a person could gather it up by the hand full."4

  Union militia stole all they could from victims before burning their homes. Fires often spread to fields and forests, giving rise to the term "Burnt District" to describe the devastated counties."' "With systematic destruction," wrote Federal colonel Bazel Lazear to his wife, "the torch was applied to the one-room cabin, the clapboard house, the porticoed mansion and to the barn, the smokehouse, and all outbuildings.... It is heartsickening to see what I have seen. A desolated country and women and children, some of them all most naked. Some on foot and some in old wagons. Oh God.""

  Many refugee families were stopped on the road and robbed, some even outside the boundaries of the evacuated district. "Everyday or two Yankee soldiers would unload our wagons in search of something to steal," remembered one. "They said they were hunting firearms." Mrs. P. H. Haggard described how some thirty-five Union militiamen "came swooping down ... charging and yelling" to where she and other women and children were camped.

  The first act was to take possession of all our horses, which they led off a little way from our wagons and tied to some trees. The next thing in order was to search our wagons for contraband goods, of which they knew we had none. Then tearing the wagon sheets off, two or three men would mount the wagons and pitch trunks, boxes, and everything else they contained to the ground, bursting trunks and breaking everything breakable, scattering things promiscuously; others engaged in ransacking everything."

  On September 6, just days before the deadline to depart, Union cavalry descended on the Roupe farm near Lone Jack, Missouri. Called "Redlegs" for the color of their leggings, the Kansas troopers saw that the family was loading their wagons in preparation to leave. Nevertheless, they led six men a short distance away then shot them. An elderly survivor dug a common grave, lovingly placed a pillow beneath each head, covered the bodies with quilts, a
nd prayed with the womenfolk. The dead were between seventeen and seventy-five years old. That very afternoon the grieving family, now mostly women and children, joined tens of thousands of other homeless exiles, each with their own tragic story to tell."

  "The order settled the border war by cutting off the supplies of the guerrillas," said an unrepentant Ewing in an 1879 interview with the Washington Post. "It was approved by Major General Schofield and by President Lincoln," he continued. "General Schofield said, in a letter published two years ago, that President Lincoln, himself and myself were responsible for the order, in the proportion of our respective rank and authority.""

  Historian Albert Castel concluded:

  Order No. 11 was the most drastic and repressive military measure directed against civilians by the Union Army during the Civil War. In fact, with the exception of the hysteria-motivated herding of Japanese-Americans into concentration camps during World War II, it stands as the harshest treatment ever imposed on United States citizens under the plea of military necessity in our nation's history."

  Of course the cause of the suffering of these Missourians, the reason for this persecution, was simply their desire to be citizens of a county other than the United States.

  Chapter 4

  "Treason Must Be Made Odious"

  Oppression in Tennessee

  In response to Lincoln's election, Tennessee disunionists demanded that a sovereignty convention consider the course to be taken, but voters in a February 9 referendum overwhelmingly declined even to convene such a body. Former Tennessee senator John Bell, candidate of the Constitutional Union Party, had carried his own and two other states in the 1860 presidential contest. Mountainous east Tennessee remained solidly Unionist, and a majority everywhere decried the Deep South's withdrawal to form the Confederacy. It was, after all, only an election that had been lost. Few in Tennessee even conceded that a state had the Constitutional right to secede. But on April 15, when Lincoln declared war, the political landscape changed overnight in the Volunteer State. Though Unionism persisted in the eastern region, Tennessee as a whole voted two to one for withdrawal, her governor, Isham Harris, declaring Lincoln's coercive policy "a wanton and alarming usurpation of power." And there would be no quibbling over "the abstract doctrine of secession." Exercising instead their right of revolution, the people approved a declaration of independence.'

  Early in 1862 Federal victories opened much of the state to invasion. Nashville was occupied in late February, the first Confederate capital to fall to the enemy. Expecting eventual liberation, Sarah Polk, widow of Pres. James Knox Polk, reacted in what was in many ways typical of Confederate Tennesseans. When Ulysses S. Grant came to pay his respects she met him, reported the New York Times, with "a polished coldness that indicated sufficiently in which direction her sympathies ran." The former first lady made it clear that "she expected nothing from the United States, and desired nothing."'

  Another of the invaders, a soldier from Ohio, had a dim view of those he was sent to guard. The people of Nashville were, in his words, "composed of Secesh, Niggers, and dogs, and a small sprinkle of whites."'

  Brig. Gen. Don Carlos Buell, in command at Nashville, was of the impression that Tennesseans were essentially Unionists, and if Lincoln would pursue "a lenient course," could be quickly restored to loyalty.' Equally out of touch was one who should have known better, former U.S. senator Andrew Johnson, an unconditional Unionist from the eastern part of the state. Johnson was sure that a handful of secessionists had misled the majority in 1861, but with the reappearance of the Stars and Stripes most would rally to the Union. Lincoln appointed him military governor on March 2, 1862. The power given him was great,' but Johnson would soon realize that the task of conquering the people was even greater. "We have all come to the conclusion here that treason must be made odious and traitors punished and impoverished," he reported to his president. "I am doing the best I

  When Federal forces first set foot in Nashville, they found one United States flag already flying. It belonged to Hetty McEwen, 117 Spruce Street, who had displayed her Unionist sympathies unmolested by her Confederate neighbors since the first shots of the war. Governor Johnson held a very different view about freedom of expression. E. E. Jones, editor of the Nashville Banner, and James T. Bell of the Gazette were arrested and jailed. A dependable Lincolnite was brought in from out of state to edit the Daily Union, his salary paid from public funds. The Nashville Common Council, Johnson appointees all, made it illegal to speak so much as a discouraging word about the Union and labeled such talk as "seditious."7

  The clergy of Nashville were among the first to feel Johnson's wrath. A group that included Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, and Christian Church ministers and educators was ushered into the governor's office, where he demanded they declare allegiance to the country at war with their own. When they refused, the pastors were jailed. "They are the enemies of our government," Johnson explained to the provost marshal, "and should receive such consideration only as attaches to a person guilty of so infamous a crime." Episcopal rector George Harris was arrested by military authorities and told he must "pray for the President of the United States or be hung." Harris was able to escape into exile. His church, Holy Trinity on Sixth Avenue South, was seized by the U.S. Army and used for the storage of munitions. The Methodist publishing house was commandeered for the printing of government documents. First Baptist Church was converted into a hospital before being destroyed!

  Andrew Johnson

  Persecution went on outside the capital as well. "How long, O Lord!" the Episcopal rector in Columbia, Tennessee, cried out. Soldiers had just destroyed his church's organ. They had already plundered everything of value in the sanctuary and even pried out the cornerstone of the building in hopes of finding treasure there. Clarksville's Presbyterian church was ordered closed by the military and remained so for years. In Murfreesboro the doors of every church were locked as soon as the U.S. Army came to town. Pastors there were ordered to pledge loyalty to the country invading theirs or face jail. Even to hold a funeral required permission of the authorities. The elders of Murfreesboro Presbyterian Church complained of soldiers committing "unprecedented destruction" and even of the cemetery being "desolated & desecrated."9

  A month after Johnson took office, the superintendent of Nashville's public school system, board members, and all teachers were ordered to take the infamous oath if they intended to continue in their jobs. When they declined, the schools were closed."'

  Nashville mayor R. B. Cheatham refused to betray the Confederacy by taking the oath and was removed from office and hauled off to prison. Elected members of the Common Council lost their offices, and their freedom, replaced by Johnson appointees. Former governor Neill S. Brown was charged with "treason," as was James Childress, brother of former first lady Sarah Polk. Bankers Daniel Carter and John Herriford refused the oath and were jailed. Others thought to have "aided the rebellion" were arrested, sometimes at night, and held without being charged with any specific crime. Some were confined in the penitentiary, a few were transferred to Fort Mackinac in Michigan or Camp Chase in Ohio, while others were exiled. By 1863 arrests had become a daily occurrence in Nashville, leading some to wonder where they might house them all. Nearly everyone had done something for the Southern cause. One Nashville diarist sarcastically suggested that it might be more practical for the authorities to "build a wall around the city, and take out the Union men.""

  A civilian, New Yorker William Truesdail, was brought in by the military to lead the army detective police. Truesdail's force gathered intelligence and exercised almost unlimited power over Nashville's citizens. Johnson complained that Truesdail's police were overly zealous, bringing complaints from even loyal citizens, thereby harming the Union cause.'' The governor's major concern may have been that the detective police were under the army's control and not his own. William Rosecrans, military commander responsible for the detectives, refused to rein them in, claiming that Truesdail's
critics were mostly "smugglers and unscrupulous Jews."''

  One fall day in 1862, Dr. William Bass was leaving the Nashville home of William Harding when passing Union soldiers demanded he halt. When the doctor kept walking, they shot him. The controlled press concocted a story about his death being the result of a guerilla raid, but it soon retracted that tale when confronted with the facts. "The brutality exhibited by the Federal soldiers in this affair awakens the intensest indignation," wrote another physician. "I never witnessed its like." He went on to express surprise that military authorities did not interfere with the victim's funeral."

  Thousands of Tennesseans escaped the Federal reign of terror by going south. John Bell, former standard-bearer of the Constitutional Union Party, was one of the first to flee the advance of Lincoln's army.', But by the second year of the occupation involuntary exile became an "effectual mode of suppressing the rebellion," in the words of Maj. Gen. Joseph J. Reynolds. "Despoil the rebels," recommended Reynolds. "Send the rebels out of the country."" In April 1863 a plan devised by Brig. Gen. Robert B. Mitchell, then commander in Nashville, went into effect. Those civilians who had "sympathies with the rebellion" would be forced south. A second category of individuals would be required to go north, "for the reason that if permitted to go South they might serve to swell the ranks of our enemies." If any exiled person returned, from north or south, they could expect to be executed. A third, "the most dangerous class," were to be confined in Northern military prisons.''