by Paul Martin
It’s been said that Drew was a product of his times, an age when striving upward by almost any means was acceptable—even admirable—behavior, no matter how many people were hurt along the way.18 In the years after the Civil War, increasing industrialization led to an ever greater concentration of riches in the hands of a few, along with widespread impoverishment. An 1892 political document stated that the shameful excesses of the Gilded Age had produced a nation of “tramps and millionaires.”19 A little over a century later, history seems to be repeating itself, with our country increasingly divided into extremes of wealth and poverty. As usual, sitting atop the largest mountains of lucre are the wizards of financial sleight of hand—confirmation that the spirit of Daniel Drew is with us still.
James Lane
Deep into September of 1861, summer still clung to the peaceful stretch of the Osage River Valley angling across Missouri’s St. Clair County. The broad brown Osage glided past wooded hills here on the northern fringe of the Ozark Highlands, just east of the heartland prairies. Patches of morning mist floated above the river, where giant spoonbill catfish patrolled the muddy bottom. Leggy herons slowly stalked the shallows while smaller birds bickered in the tall oaks lining the banks.
The idyllic Indian summer morning would have been perfect except for the riders. In the dawn light, fifteen hundred mounted men converged on the prosperous river town of Osceola. The horsemen were Kansas Jayhawkers, volunteer guerrilla fighters allied with the abolitionist cause that had helped provoke the Civil War. Made up mostly of poor whites, freed slaves, and a scattering of Indians, the company showed little sign of discipline. One Union Army officer who’d observed the men pegged them as riffraff—“ragged, half-armed, diseased, mutinous rabble.”1 The pro-Southern Argus newspaper in Weston, Missouri, described them as “thieves, cut-throats, and midnight robbers.”2
At the head of the irregulars rode James H. Lane, an intense, hatchet-faced man with a wild shock of black hair hidden under a battered white hat. A veteran of the Mexican-American War, Lane had organized the guerrilla band, which he’d loftily named the Kansas Brigade. Lane liked to think big. A fervent antislavery campaigner and political opportunist, he entertained visions of being elected president. He would have to settle for becoming the man Missourians despised above all others—a death-dealing zealot known as the Grim Chieftain.3 The fierce hatreds ignited by Lane’s fanaticism would linger long after the war, and they flicker still in a benign rivalry between the residents of Missouri and Kansas.
Lane had moved to Kansas in 1855 after representing Indiana for a term as a US congressman. In the late 1850s, he fought in the Missouri-Kansas border war, a murderous struggle over the issue of slavery in the Kansas Territory. In April 1861, he returned to Washington as one of the first senators from the new free state of Kansas, just days before the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter. At the outbreak of war, Lane was soon back home in Kansas, eager to renew the fight against the proslavery “border ruffians” of western Missouri. It didn’t matter that nearly half the people living in the area were either firmly pro-Union or uncommitted to either side. When it came to Missourians, the Grim Chieftain didn’t discriminate.
Lane found it easy to motivate the ragtag guerrilla group he’d put together. The promise of plunder always set their eyes to dancing. Lane worked his men into a frenzy with impassioned, long-winded speeches. One listener described these talks: “His oratory was voluble and incessant, without logic, learning, rhetoric, or grace . . . his diction is a pudding of slang, profanity and solecism; and yet the electric shock of his extraordinary eloquence thrills like the blast of a trumpet.”4 Another declared: “He talked like none of the others. None of the rest had his husky rasping, blood-curdling whisper or that menacing forefinger, or could shriek ‘Great God!’ on the same day with him.”5
Jim Lane was ready to shriek Great God this day. Just three weeks earlier, Sterling Price and the Missouri State Guard had defeated his forces in the Battle of Dry Wood Creek, a short distance to the west in Vernon County. Still smarting, Lane proclaimed that Osceola was to be “knocked into Herculaneum.”6 His men were on alert as they approached the town of three thousand. During the night, enemy troops had fired on them from the surrounding woods. However, when the Jayhawkers rode into Osceola they encountered no opposition. All the able-bodied men had fled, leaving mostly women, children, and the elderly. The defenseless town was Lane’s for the taking. The guerrillas surged through the streets, breaking into stores and warehouses. Commandeering every wagon and team they could find, they began loading their plunder: tons of lead for shot, kegs of powder, three thousand sacks of flour, plus large quantities of sugar, molasses, coffee, bacon, and other goods. The Kansans rounded up three hundred fifty horses and mules and four hundred head of cattle. They also freed two hundred slaves and encouraged them to join their ranks.7
No home was spared, despite the fact that perhaps a third of the town’s residents were loyal to the Union, with many locals off serving in the Northern army. Lane himself claimed a piano, a carriage, and several silk dresses for his wife. The Jayhawkers robbed the local bank of $8,000 and stripped the courthouse of its records before setting it on fire. In a hillside cellar, they discovered one hundred fifty barrels of liquor. Although the barrels were staved in to destroy the cache, the men filled their canteens and got staggering drunk. Nearly three hundred had to be hauled off in wagons.8
Somehow the spilled liquor caught fire, igniting nearby buildings. Other structures were intentionally torched. By the time the rampage was over, few buildings in the town still stood, and those survived only because the guerrillas fled after scouts erroneously reported that Confederate troops were marching toward town. The value of what was stolen or destroyed was estimated at a million dollars. “As the sun went down on Sunday night,” wrote one witness, “Osceola was a heap of smoldering ruins.”9
The most lasting damage from Lane’s assault on Osceola wasn’t the loss of property. In the course of the raid, Lane had convened a drumhead court-martial and sentenced nine local citizens to death. This act would seal the Grim Chieftain’s reputation among Missourians. Two years later, “Remember Osceola!” would serve as the rallying cry when a band of Missouri bushwhackers—guerrilla fighters every bit as merciless as the Jayhawkers—sought revenge in Lawrence, Kansas, the town that Jim Lane called home.10
The Missouri raiders who swooped down on Lawrence in 1863 were led by slender, sandy-haired William Quantrill, an exceptional horseman and crack shot. Though Quantrill had just turned twenty-six, songs had already been written about his exploits as a Southern guerrilla. Riding with him were veteran bushwhackers Frank James and Cole Younger, two men who, along with their respective brothers, would also go down in Western lore.
Some of the members of Quantrill’s band thought that a raid on Lawrence was suicidal. The Jayhawker stronghold was too far into Kansas, they argued, and too well protected. Quantrill won them over by pointing out that the town of three thousand held most of the plunder stolen from Missouri homes. He also told them he intended to capture Jim Lane, bring him back to Missouri, and publicly execute him.11
The heat of the prairie dawn was rising when Quantrill and his four hundred men reached the outskirts of Lawrence on August 21. Meeting little resistance, the guerrillas galloped into the center of town, pistols blazing. They cut down every man and teenage boy they saw—anyone they deemed old enough to take up arms against the South. A survivor described the grisly spectacle: “Men falling dead and wounded, and women and children, half-dressed, running and screaming—some trying to escape the danger and some rushing to the side of their murdered friends.”12
During the four hours that the raid lasted, Quantrill’s men stripped the town of valuables, looted the banks, and burned around two hundred homes and stores, causing some two million dollars in damage. When the shooting finally stopped, more than one hundred fifty men and teenage boys lay dead.13 Quantrill’s force suffered minimal casualties and head
ed back to Missouri laden with booty.
The hated Jim Lane, however, had eluded Quantrill. Displaying an uncanny knack for self-preservation, Lane bolted at the first sound of gunfire. Leaping from bed, the Jayhawker ripped the nameplate from his front door in hopes of saving his house, ran out the back door in his nightshirt, dashed through a nearby cornfield, and kept on running, leaving his wife alone to face the marauding Missourians. Quantrill had to content himself with burning down the Grim Chieftain’s fine new home. Lane later made a show of bravado by setting off after Quantrill in a buggy, although—luckily for him—he didn’t catch up with the fleeing Missourians.
The repercussions of the Lawrence massacre, as it came to be known, were immediate. Four days later—at the heated insistence of Jim Lane—Gen. Thomas Ewing, the commander of Union troops along the Missouri-Kansas border, issued Order No. 11, one of the harshest government edicts ever enacted against Americans.14 The order called for the depopulation, within fifteen days, of rural lands in four Missouri counties along the Kansas border. Ewing wanted to ensure that no bushwhacker would ever again find food or shelter there.
Over twenty thousand people were swept from their homes, their crops confiscated or destroyed, their livestock stolen. Gangs of Jayhawkers and Union militias roamed the countryside, torching everything in their path, robbing and killing evacuees even as they attempted to obey Ewing’s directive.15 Like a stone tossed in a lake, the sacking of Osceola had sent its ripples in ever-widening circles. One of Missouri’s richest agricultural regions was rendered a wasteland—the Burnt District, it came to be called.
Although fighting along the border slackened during the last years of the Civil War, Missouri’s Burnt District still smoldered when the conflict ended in 1865. Southern landowners who returned home to piece their lives together fell victim to carpetbagging Northern bankers and Northern-owned railroads. Former bushwhackers who wanted to settle down and forget the war found it hard to do. Radical Republican policies barred them from voting or holding office. Many of them were shot or lynched by vigilantes, and they were all subject to arrest and trial for their wartime activities.16
Some of these men fought back, including the James brothers and the Youngers. Both of their families had been run off their farms during the war and faced continued persecution afterward. Fed up with their bleak postwar prospects, the James and Younger boys began using their wartime hit-and-run guerrilla tactics in new pursuits: robbing banks and trains owned by hated Northerners. Not surprisingly, Missourians who’d been exploited by those Yankee businesses cheered for the James-Younger gang. Warranted or not, the men became folk heroes, with tales of their exploits written up in newspapers and dime novels. For a decade and a half, the gang rode wild across the Midwest, their reputations growing ever larger—although they probably had nothing to do with a good many of the crimes attributed to them. Cole Younger complained that “every daylight robbery in any part of the country, from the Alleghenies to the Rockies, was laid at our doors.”17
The era of the James-Younger gang began to fade in 1876, when Cole, Jim, and Bob Younger went to prison after being wounded in the botched Northfield, Minnesota, bank robbery. Bob Younger died of pneumonia in prison. Cole and Jim were finally released, although Jim committed suicide less than a year later at the age of fifty-four. In 1882, Jesse James, Frank’s notorious younger brother, was shot dead in St. Joseph, Missouri. He was thirty-four. Frank surrendered to authorities that same year and somehow escaped any jail time.
Frank James and Cole Younger lived to be old men, cashing in on their reputations for a time in Wild West shows. While both men mellowed and became philosophical about the twists and turns life had shown them, it’s unlikely they ever forgot their old enemy, the man who plundered Osceola. Jim Lane may not have turned the James and Younger boys into outlaws all by himself, but he was certainly the chief engineer on the train to hell. His destruction of Osceola was arguably the main provocation for the raid on Lawrence, which led directly to the suffering inflicted by Order No. 11—all formative experiences for the James and Younger clans. (A century later, the Jayhawkers’ attacks on Missouri farmers would inspire the Forrest Carter novel The Rebel Outlaw, Josey Wales, on which Clint Eastwood based his 1976 film.)
Lane survived the war and was still a US senator when he died by his own hand in 1866. Despondent over his waning political influence, he shot himself in the head in Leavenworth, Kansas. It was a fittingly violent death for someone who’d unleashed so much violence in life. One newspaper reported that Lane had been haunted by memories of all the men he’d killed and the screams of women and children fleeing their burning homes in Osceola.18 A fellow Kansan wrote: “No one can blame a person for wishing to hurry away from such a life as his.”19 It’s possible, of course, to construe Lane’s deeds as acts of war, although they seemed to reveal more about his personal obsessions than his loyalty to the Union cause.
The passions that Lane sparked survived into the present day in a thankfully milder form: the heated football and basketball competition between the Universities of Missouri and Kansas, which lasted for more than a century until the University of Missouri forsook tradition by moving from the Big 12 athletic conference to the Southeastern Conference in 2012. It’s likely that most of the fans who sat in the stands in Columbia and Lawrence for all those years never gave much thought to the rivalry’s bloody origins, but they always saved their loudest and most colorful invective for when their cross-border neighbors came to town. The rowdy animosity almost seemed inborn, as if such feelings are imprinted on the genes of Tiger and Jayhawk diehards. And who knows . . . maybe they are.
John Parker
Ford’s Theatre (left), scene of John Parker’s disgrace
April 14, 1865, dawned balmy and bright in Washington, DC. It was Good Friday, and the sunny weather seemed to reflect the spirits of Washingtonians. Just days before, Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, had fallen, followed quickly by the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. The Civil War was all but over.
The capital erupted in celebration at the news. After four years of conflict and doubt, it was finally time to whoop it up. All over town, the air shook with fireworks, cannon salutes, and wildly clanging church bells—startling horses, dogs, and the occasional meandering cow. Bands raced through “Yankee Doodle” and “Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys” again and again.
Cheering crowds surged through the dusty, unpaved streets. In makeshift hospitals around the city, smiles creased the haggard faces of wounded soldiers. Former slaves cavorted with joy, and drunken laughter spilled from the city’s plentiful saloons and bordellos. “The entire population of Washington seemed to be abroad,” wrote historian Margaret Leech, “shaking hands and embracing, throwing up their hats, shrieking and singing, like a carnival of lunatics.”1
Even the president felt the urge to let off steam. Abraham Lincoln needed the break. The war had made an old man of him. He was gaunt and pale, and he complained that his hands and feet were always cold. He’d been haunted by a dream of himself lying in state in the East Room, cut down by an assassin. A night out would do him good, mentally and physically. Mrs. Lincoln suggested a play. Our American Cousin, a popular comedy about an awkward young Yankee and his aristocratic English kin, was ending its run at Ford’s Theatre. That would be just the tonic the president needed.
Following Lee’s surrender, General Grant returned to Washington. Lincoln knew it would be good for people to see their president and his victorious general enjoying an evening out, and he urged Grant and his wife to accompany him to the play. Grant halfheartedly accepted then later changed his mind, claiming he needed to leave Washington and get back home to New Jersey to see his children. The truth was that Grant had grown tired of all the public adulation. Besides, his wife couldn’t stand Mrs. Lincoln, an unpredictable, short-tempered woman.2 Mrs. Grant had witnessed the first lady’s tantrums—and been a target of t
hem on occasion. Spending over two hours cooped up with her in a tiny theater box would be torture.
When Grant turned him down, Lincoln was inclined to cancel the evening altogether, but newspapers had already announced he’d be attending the play, and Ford’s Theatre had gone to the trouble of decorating the president’s box with flags and a portrait of George Washington. To avoid disappointing anyone, Lincoln agreed to go ahead with the outing.
After Grant backed out, Lincoln invited Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. However, Stanton’s wife also kept her distance from Mrs. Lincoln, and they begged off. At the last minute, Mrs. Lincoln invited a young couple to fill out the party, Maj. Henry Rathbone, a strapping soldier with impressive muttonchop whiskers, and his fiancée, Clara Harris, daughter of Senator Ira Harris of New York.
The Washington Metropolitan Police Force was to furnish an armed officer to accompany the group. While it’s hard to believe that a single policeman would be the president’s only protection, that wasn’t unusual. Lincoln was cavalier about his personal safety—despite a near-miss attempt on his life in August 1864.3 He’d often take in a play or go to church without guards, and he hated being encumbered by the military escort assigned to him. Sometimes he even walked alone at night between the White House and the War Department, a distance of around a quarter of a mile. But Lincoln’s staff took the frequent threats against the president seriously. A bodyguard made sense, especially given the chaos in the capital at the end of the war. The man the police department assigned to the job was John Frederick Parker. If a committee had spent days pondering the matter, it couldn’t have come up with a worse choice. Parker’s staggering incompetence would lead directly to a national tragedy.