II
Republicans also knew how to make the best use of evidence, real and imagined, of continued Democratic involvement with rebel schemes hatched in Canada. The aborted uprising at the Chicago Democratic convention did not put an end to such enterprises. The most bizarre was an attempt to capture the U.S.S. Michigan, the sole navy gunboat on Lake Erie, where it guarded the prisoner of war camp at Johnson's Island near Sandusky, and to liberate Confederate prisoners there. On September 19 some twenty rebel agents from Canada seized a steamboat near Sandusky with the idea of boarding the Michigan whose officers were to have been drugged by northern sympathizers. But a War Department detective had infiltrated the group. The northern sympathizers were arrested and the Michigan put on alert. Forestalled, the Confederates steamed back to Windsor empty-handed and scuttled their captured boat.14
More ambitious but equally abortive was a plot for an uprising by copperheads in Chicago and New York on election day. Having apparently learned nothing from the fiasco at the time of the Chicago convention, southern agents listened with pathetic eagerness to a few Democratic desperadoes who promised that this time their army of peace men would surely go into action—if enough rebel gold was forthcoming. Once again dozens of Confederate ex-soldiers turned up in Chicago as well as New York and other cities a few days before the scheduled rising. Once again nothing happened—except that Federal authorities, forewarned by secret service operatives who had penetrated the loose security of the Sons of Liberty, arrested more than a hundred copperheads and rebels in Chicago and seized a cache of arms. In New York, Benjamin Butler arrived with 3,500 soldiers to prevent trouble on election day. Whatever his deficiencies as a battlefield commander, Butler
14. Oscar A. Kinchen, Confederate Operations in Canada and the North (North Quincy, Mass., 1970), 104–16.
demonstrated anew—as he had done in Baltimore and New Orleans—his ability to cow potential civilian rioters. "This election has been quiet beyond precedent," wrote a surprised resident of New York.15
From the supposed hotbed of copperhead sentiment in southern Indiana came spectacular revelations—some of them probably true—of skullduggery and treason. Provost marshals uncovered hiding places containing weapons and arrested several prominent members of the Sons of Liberty. In October these men went on trial before a military court for "conspiracy, affording aid and comfort to the rebels, inciting insurrection, [and] disloyal practices." Testimony by Union agents who had infiltrated the order implicated prominent Democrats including Vallan-digham. Republican newspapers fed voters a daily diet of sensational headlines: "REBELLION IN THE NORTH!! Extraordinary Disclosure! Val's Plan to Overthrow the Government! Peace Party Plot!"16 The military court condemned four defendants to death. Delays and appeals kept them in prison until after the war, when the Supreme Court invalidated the conviction of one of them—Lambdin P. Milligan—on the ground that civilians could not be tried by military courts in non-war zones where civil courts were functioning. The alleged conspirators—along with several others convicted by military courts—went free.
But in October 1864 all that lay in the future. Simultaneously with the Indiana treason trials, U.S. Judge-Advocate General Joseph Holt released a report on the Sons of Liberty that portrayed them as a disciplined, powerful organization armed to the teeth and in the pay of Jefferson Davis to help him destroy the Union. "Judea produced but one Judas Iscariot," Holt perorated, but "there has arisen together in our land an entire brood of such traitors . . . all struggling with the same relentless malignity for the dismemberment of our Union."17 This report became grist for Republican mills. The party and the Union Leagues
15. Strong, Diary, 510. Kinchen, Confederate Operations in Canada, 148–63, is a sober, matter-of-fact account of the Chicago and New York conspiracies. James D. Horan, Confederate Agent: A Discovery in History (New York, 1954), 181–98, 208–10, is a more romanticized story of the same events. Nat Brandt, The Man Who Tried to Burn New York (Syracuse, 1986), combines elements of sobriety and romance. Frank L. Klement, Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War (Baton Rouge, 1984), dismisses these conspiracies as mostly figments of Republican propaganda, but a close reading of this book reveals a considerable core of truth to them in Klement's own evidence.
16. Frank L. Klement, The Copperheads in the Middle West (Chicago, 1960), 190.
17. O.R., Ser. II, Vol. 7, pp. 930–53; quotation from p. 953.
printed thousands of copies; Republican campaign speakers quoted Holt freely, equating the Democratic party with copperheadism and copper-headism with treason.
Democrats condemned Holt's report and the testimony of government detectives as "absolute falsehoods and fabrications . . . too ridiculous to be given a moment's credit." Lincoln himself did not take the conspiracy threat seriously, regarding the Sons of Liberty as "a mere political organization, with about as much of malice [as of] puerility."18 A number of modern scholars take a similar view. The leading historian of midwestern copperheads brands "the great Civil War myth of conspiracies and subversive secret societies" as a "fairy tale," a "figment of Republican imagination" compounded of "lies, conjecture and political malignancy."19
This carries revisionism a bit too far. There was some real fire under that smokescreen of Republican propaganda. The Sons of Liberty and similar organizations did exist. A few of their leaders—perhaps only a lunatic fringe—did conspire with rebel agents in Canada, receive arms for treasonable purposes, and plot insurrections against the government. Although Vallandigham and other prominent Democrats probably did not participate actively in these plots, some of them did confer with Jacob Thompson in Canada. Vallandigham was "Supreme Grand Commander" of the Sons of Liberty, and he lied under oath when he denied all knowledge of conspiracies at the treason trials of the Chicago conspirators in early 1865. As Thompson wrote in the final report on his Canadian mission, "I have so many papers in my possession, which would utterly ruin and destroy very many of the prominent men in the North."20
Whatever the true extent of pro-Confederate activity in the Old Northwest may have been, no one could deny its potency and danger in Missouri. There the shadowy "Order of American Knights" established
18. Klement, Copperheads in the Middle West, 205, 201; Dennett, Lincoln/Hay, 192.
19. Klement, Copperheads in the Middle West, 202; Frank L. Klement, The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham& the Civil War (Lexington, Ky., 1970), 293, 294. See also Frank L. Klement, "Civil War Politics, Nationalism, and Postwar Myths," Historian, 38 (1976), 419–38, and Klement, Dark Lanterns, passim.
20. Thompson to Judah P. Benjamin, Dec. 3, 1864, in O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 43, pt. 1, p. 935. For balanced appraisals of this matter, see Stephen Z. Starr, "Was There a Northwest Conspiracy?" The Filson Club Historical Quarterly, 38 (1964), 323–41, and William G. Carleton, "Civil War Dissidence in the North: The Perspective of a Century," South Atlantic Quarterly, 65 (1966), 390–402.
connections with various guerrilla bands that ravaged the state. Confederate General Sterling Price was designated "military commander" of the O.A.K.21 In September 1864, Price coordinated an invasion of Missouri with guerrilla attacks behind northern lines that represented a greater threat to Union control there than all the cloudy conspiracies in other parts of the Midwest.
Partisan warfare along the Kansas-Missouri border continued the violence that had begun in 1854. The vicious conflicts between Border Ruffians and Jayhawkers expanded a hundredfold after 1861 as they gained sanction from Confederate and Union governments. The guerrilla fighting in Missouri produced a form of terrorism that exceeded anything else in the war. Jayhawking Kansans and bushwhacking Missourians took no prisoners, killed in cold blood, plundered and pillaged and burned (but almost never raped) without stint. Jayhawkers initiated a scorched-earth policy against rebel sympathizers three years before Sheridan practiced it in the Shenandoah Valley. Guerrilla chieftains, especially the infamous William Clarke Quantrill, initiated the slaughter of unarmed soldiers as well as civilians, whites as well as blacks, long before Confederate troops began murdering captured black soldiers elsewhere. Guerrilla bands in Missouri provided a training ground for outlaw gangs that emerged after the war—most notably the James and Younger brothers.
The war of raid and ambush in Missouri seemed often to have little relation to the larger conflict of which it was a part. But the hit-and-run tactics of the guerrillas, who numbered only a few thousand, tied down tens of thousands of Union soldiers and militia who might otherwise have fought elsewhere. The guerrillas' need for sanctuary in the countryside and the army's search and destroy missions forced civilians to choose sides or else suffer the consequences—usually both. Confederate generals frequently attached guerrilla bands to their commands or requested these bands to destroy Union supply lines and bases in conjunction with orthodox operations against northern forces. In August
21. When the O.A.K. changed its name to the Sons of Liberty elsewhere in early 1864, it appears to have retained the old name in Missouri. Frank L. Klement, "Phineas C. Wright, the Order of the American Knights, and the Sanderson Exposé," CWH, 18 (1972), 5–23, maintains that Sterling Price's alleged role in the Knights was invented by Union detectives and perjured witnesses. But Albert Castel, General Sterling Price and the Civil War in the West (Baton Rouge, 1968), 193–96, while conceding that the O.A.K. amounted to little, asserts that Price was indeed its military commander.
1862, Quantrill's band captured Independence, Missouri, as part of a raid by rebel cavalry from Arkansas. As a reward Quantrill received a captain's commission in the Confederate army—and thereafter claimed to be a colonel.
The motives of guerrillas and Jayhawkers alike sometimes seemed nothing more than robbery, revenge, or nihilistic love of violence. But ideology also played a part. Having battled proslavery Missourians for nearly a decade, many Jayhawkers were hardened abolitionists intent on destroying slavery and the social structure that it sustained. The notorious 7th Kansas Cavalry—"Jennison's Jayhawkers"—that plundered and killed their way across western Missouri were commanded by an abolitionist colonel with Susan B. Anthony's brother as lieutenant colonel and John Brown, Jr., as captain of a company. To a man the soldiers were determined to exterminate rebellion and slaveholders in the most literal manner possible. On the other side, guerrilla outlaws such as the James brothers have been celebrated in myth, by Hollywood films, and by some scholars as Robin-Hood types or "primitive rebels" who defended small farmers by attacking the agencies of Yankee capitalism—the Union army during the war, banks and railroads afterwards. But in reality, as a recent study has shown, the guerrillas tended to be the sons of farmers and planters of southern heritage who were three times more likely to own slaves and possessed twice as much wealth as the average Missourian. To the extent that ideology motivated their depredations, they fought for slavery and Confederate independence.22
The most notorious of their leaders was William Clarke Quantrill. The son of an Ohio schoolteacher, Quantrill had drifted around the West until the war came along to give full rein to his particular talents. Without any ties to the South or to slavery, he chose the Confederacy apparently because in Missouri this allowed him to attack all symbols of authority. He attracted to his gang some of the most psychopathic killers in American history. In kaleidoscopic fashion, groups of these men would split off to form their own bands and then come together again for larger raids. An eruption of such activities along Missouri's western border in the spring of 1863 infuriated the Union commander there, Thomas Ewing. A brother-in-law of William T. Sherman, Ewing
22. Don Bowen, "Guerrilla Warfare in Western Missouri, 1862–1865: Historical Extensions of the Relative Deprivation Hypothesis," Comparative Studies in Society and History (1977), 30–51. I am indebted to my colleague Richard D. Challener for calling this article to my attention.
had learned what Sherman was learning—that this was a war between peoples, not simply between armies. The wives and sisters of Quantrill's men fed and sheltered the guerrillas. Ewing arrested these women and lodged them under guard in Kansas City. There on August 14 a building containing many of them collapsed, killing five of the women.
This tragedy set in motion a greater one. Inflamed by a passion for revenge, the raiders combined in one large band of 450 men under Quantrill (including the Younger brothers and Frank James) and headed for Lawrence, Kansas, the hated center of free soilism since Bleeding Kansas days. After crossing the Kansas line they kidnapped ten farmers to guide them toward Lawrence and murdered each one after his usefulness was over. Approaching the town at dawn on August 21, Quantrill ordered his followers: "Kill every male and burn every house." They almost did. The first to die was a United Brethren clergyman, shot through the head while he sat milking his cow. During the next three hours Quantrill's band murdered another 182 men and boys and burned 185 buildings in Lawrence. They rode out of town ahead of pursuing Union cavalry and after a harrowing chase made it back to their Missouri sanctuary, where they scattered to the woods.23
This shocking act roused the whole country. A manhunt for Quantrill's outlaws netted a few of them, who were promptly hanged or shot. An enraged General Ewing issued his famous Order No. 11 for the forcible removal of civilians from large parts of four Missouri counties bordering Kansas. Union soldiers ruthlessly enforced this banishment of ten thousand people, leaving these counties a wasteland for years. None of this stopped the guerrillas, however. Quite the contrary, their raids became more daring and destructive during the following year.
General Sterling Price, who longed to redeem Missouri from the Yankees, was impressed by Quantrill's prowess. In November 1863 Price sent him words of "high appreciation of the hardships you . . . and your gallant command . . . have so nobly endured and the gallant struggle you have made against despotism and the oppression of our
23. Jay Monaghan, Civil War on the Western Border 1854–1865 (New York, 1955), 274–89; Richard S. Brownlee, Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy: Guerrilla Warfare in the West, 1861–186; (Baton Rouge, 1958), 110–57; Albert E. Castel, A Frontier State at War: Kansas, 1861–186; (Ithaca, 1950), 124–41. The best study of Quantrill is Albert E. Castel, William Clarke Quantrill: His Life and Times (New York, 1962).
State, with the confident hope that success will soon crown our efforts."24 Guerrilla chieftains convinced Price that Missourians would rise en masse if a Confederate army invaded the state, which had been denuded of first-line Union troops to deal with Forrest in Tennessee. Scraping together 12,000 cavalry from the trans-Mississippi, Price moved northward through Arkansas and entered Missouri in September 1864. He instructed partisan bands to spread chaos in the Union rear, while the O.A.K. mobilized civilians to welcome the invaders. The latter enterprise came to nothing, for when Union officers arrested the Order's leaders the organization proved to be an empty shell. The guerrillas were another matter. Raiding in small bands all over central Missouri they brought railroad and wagon transportation to a standstill and even halted boat traffic on the Missouri.
The most effective partisan was "Bloody Bill" Anderson, who had split from Quantrill with about fifty followers—all of them pathological killers like their leader. Through August and September, Anderson's band struck isolated garrisons and posts, murdering and scalping teamsters, cooks, and other unarmed personnel as well as soldiers. The climax of this saturnalia came at Centralia on September 27. With thirty men including Frank and Jesse James, Bloody Bill rode into town, burned a train and robbed its passengers, and murdered twenty-four unarmed northern soldiers traveling home on furlough. Chased out of town by three companies of militia, the guerrillas picked up 175 allies from other bands, turned on their pursuers, and slaughtered 124 of the 147 men, including the wounded, whom they shot in the head.
That same day, September 27, Price's invasion met its first setback 140 miles to the south at Pilot Knob, Missouri. There a Union force of 1,000 men under Thomas Ewing held a fort against assaults by 7,000 rebels and inflicted on them 1,500 casualties at the cost of only 200. Deflected by this action from his initial objective of St. Louis—which was filling up with Union reinforcements—Price turned westward toward the capital at Jefferson City. Here he expected to inaugurate a Confederate governor who had accompanied him. But the Federals had strengthened its defenses, so the rebels continued to plunder their way westward along the south bank of the Missouri. Recruits and guerrilla bands swelled Price's ranks—he welcomed Bloody Bill Anderson to Boonville on October 11—but now they were beginning to think of flight rather than attack. Missouri and Kansas militia were swarming in
24. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 53, p. 908.
their front; Union cavalry were coming up from behind; and a veteran infantry division was marching fast to cut off escape to the south. In skirmishes and battles east and south of Kansas City from October 20 to 28, these Union forces pummelled Price and drove him south along the border all the way back to Arkansas via the Indian Territory and Texas. Although Price put the best possible face on his invasion—boasting that he had marched 1,400 miles from beginning to end, far more than any other Confederate army—it was a greater disaster than any other southern foray into Union territory. Though he had started with 12,000 men and picked up thousands of recruits along the way, he returned to Arkansas with fewer than 6,000. Organized Confederate resistance in Missouri came to an end.
Best of all from a Union standpoint, the fighting had wrecked most of the guerrilla bands and killed many of their leaders, including Bloody Bill Anderson. Quantrill left Missouri and headed east with the avowed intent of assassinating Lincoln. But he ran afoul of a Union patrol in Kentucky and was killed. In the presidential election, meanwhile, Lincoln had carried Missouri with 70 percent of the vote (most southern sympathizers, of course, were excluded from the polls by refusal or inability to take the loyalty oath). The radical Republican faction triumphed over the conservatives and called a constitutional convention which abolished slavery in Missouri in January 1865. The state's troubles were not over, however, for when the war ended the James and Younger brothers along with other surviving guerrillas were allowed to surrender as soldiers and go free.