Transcript File

Bushwhackers, Beecher’s BiBles, and
Bandits: The Story of Bleeding
Kansas and the Missouri-Kansas
region in the Civil War
JAYHAWKERS WERE HONORABLE ABOLITIONISTS...OR LOWLIFE HORSETHIEVES.
BUSHWHACKERS WERE PATRIOTIC DEFENDERS... OR MURDEROUS BANDITS... IT'S EASIER TO
FIGHT PEOPLE YOU SEE AS LESS THAN HUMAN. – GE RULE, WWW.CIVILWARSTLOUIS.COM
Jayhawkers v. bushwhackers
“Jayhawkers” and “Bushwhackers” are names used to refer to bands of
men who launched guerilla-style raids in western Missouri and
Eastern Kansas in the 1850’s and during the Civil War. The
Jayhawkers, or Kansans, were “Free-Staters” who initially opposed
the expansion of slavery in the territory, and later sided with the
Union in the Civil War. The Bushwhackers, or Missourians, supported
slavery, and later would side with the Confederacy in the Civil War.
Though slavery certainly was a divisive issue, the conflict between
these two groups was as much about the clash of cultures and
worldviews between them, and the settling of personal vendettas.
The conflict in this region was essentially a local phenomenon that
happened to mirror tensions that were building on a national scale.
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Internal Divisions While the term originated during the Bleeding
Kansas Affair, Civil War jayhawkers are to be distinguished from Free State
Jayhawkers who fought during Bleeding Kansas, which occurred in the
decade leading up to the Civil War. Some Civil War jayhawkers had in fact
supported Kansas' admission to the union as a slave state, and had fought
on the opposite side from the Free-Staters during the earlier conflict. Some
of their organizers, such as James H. Lane, were nonetheless prominent
abolitionist politicians. Well-known jayhawkers include Lane and Charles
"Doc" Jennison. Jennison's vicious raids into Missouri were thorough and
indiscriminate, and left five counties in western Missouri wasted, save for
the standing brick chimneys of the two-storey period houses, which are still
called "Jennison Monuments" in the areas. Lane and his band of militants
wore red gaiters, earning them the nickname "Redlegs", or "Redleggers".
This moniker was often used interchangeably with the term "jayhawkers,"
although it was sometimes used to refer specifically to jayhawkers who
refused to join units officially sanctioned by the U.S. Army.
Bandits or Heroes?In Missouri, secessionist bushwhackers operated
outside of the Confederate chain of command. On occasion, a prominent
bushwhacker chieftain might receive formal Confederate rank (notably
William Clarke Quantrill), or receive written orders from a Confederate
general (as "Bloody Bill" Anderson did in October 1864 during a large-scale
Confederate incursion into Missouri, or as when Joseph C. Porter was
authorized by Gen. Sterling Price to recruit in northeast Missouri). For the
most part, however, Missouri's bushwhacker squads were self-organized
groups of young men, predominantly from the slave holding counties along
the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, who took it upon themselves to attack
Federal forces and their Unionist neighbors, both in Kansas and in response
to Federal invasions of their home state.
 Guerrillas on both sides of the Missouri-Kansas border achieved some
measure of legitimacy through sanction from the Federal and Confederate
governments, and the bands who scorned such sanction were typically even
more vicious and indiscriminate in their methods than their bureaucratically
recognized counterparts. Even within Kansas, the jayhawkers were not
always popular because, in the absence of federal support, they supplied
themselves by stealing horses and supplies from farmers.
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Bleeding Kansas was a series of violent political confrontations involving anti-slavery Free-
Staters and pro-slavery "Border Ruffian" elements, that took place in the Kansas Territory and
the neighboring towns of Missouri between 1854 and 1861. At the heart of the conflict was the
question of whether Kansas would enter the Union as a free state or slave state. As such,
Bleeding Kansas was a proxy war between Northerners and Southerners over the issue of
slavery in the United States. The term "Bleeding Kansas" was coined by Horace Greeley of the
New York Tribune; the events it encompasses directly presaged the American Civil War.
Congress had long struggled to balance the interests of slaveholders and abolitionists. The
events later known as Bleeding Kansas were set into motion by the Kansas–Nebraska Act of
1854, which nullified the Missouri Compromise and instead implemented the concept of
popular sovereignty. An ostensibly democratic idea, popular sovereignty stated that the
inhabitants of each territory or state should decide whether it would be a free or slave state;
however, this resulted in immigration en masse to Kansas by activists from both sides. At one
point, Kansas had two separate governments, each with its own constitution, although only one
was federally recognized. On January 29, 1861, Kansas was admitted to the Union as a free
state, less than three months before the Battle of Fort Sumter which began the Civil War.
IT IS A LITTLE KNOWN FACT THAT OUT OF THE 6,600 BATTLES FOUGHT DURING THE CIVIL WAR,
1,100 OF THOSE BATTLES WERE FOUGHT IN MISSOURI.
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THE CIVIL WAR As is often the case in insurgencies, the conflict between bushwhackers and
jayhawkers rapidly escalated into a succession of atrocities committed by both sides. Tensions
raged for years in the borderlands during Bloody Kansas, and armed bands from both sides
would frequently travel into the others’ territory to kill suspected enemies and terrorize the
general population. When the Civil War began, these patterns were repeated on even larger
scale on both sides. Union troops often executed or tortured suspects without trial and burned
the homes of suspected guerrillas and those suspected of aiding or harboring them. Where
credentials were suspect, the accused bushwhacker was often executed, as in the case of Lt.
Col. Frisby McCullough after the Battle of Kirksville. Bushwhackers frequently went house to
house, executing Unionist farmers.
In response to the Kansas Jayhawkers sacking Osceola, Missouri, in which the entire town was
set aflame and nearly all of the male residents killed, and the collapse of a Kansas Ciity
Missouri. jail in which female relatives of bushwhackers were incarcerated and many killed in
the collapse, Bill Quantrill led a raid in August 1863 on Lawrence, Kansas, burning the town
and murdering some 200 men and boys. In response, the Union district commander, Thomas
Ewing, Jr., ordered the total depopulation of all men, women, and children (both Unionists and
Southern sympathizers) of three and a half Missouri counties along the Kansas border from
Kansas City, Missouri south, under his infamous Order No. 11. In other areas, individual
families (including that of Jesse and Frank James and the grandparents and mother of future
President Harry Truman) were banished from Missouri.
Next to the attack on Lawrence. the most notorious atrocity by Confederate bushwhackers was
the murder of 22 unarmed Union soldiers pulled from a train in the Centralia Massacre in
retaliation for the earlier execution of a number of “Bloody Bill” Anderson's own men. In an
ambush of pursuing Union forces shortly thereafter, the bushwhackers killed well over 100
Federal troops. In October 1864, "Bloody Bill" Anderson was tricked into an ambush and killed
by state militiamen under the command of Col. Samuel P. Cox. Anderson's body was displayed
and his head was severed.
HATRED RUNS DEEP TWO OPPOSING VIEWPOINTS ON THE COMBATANTS FROM
CONTEMPORARY SOURCES:
The Kansas Jayhawker by John N. Edwards
The original Jayhawker was a growth indigenous to the soil of Kansas. There belonged to him
as things of course a pre-emption, a chronic case of chills and fevers, one starved cow and
seven dogs, a longing for his neighbor’s goods and chattels, a Sharpe’s rifle, when he could get
it, and something of a Bible for hypocrisy’s sake—something that savored of the real presence
of the book to give backbone to his canting and snuffling. In some respects a mountebank, in
others a scoundrel, and in all a thief—he was a character eminently adapted for civil war which
produces more adventurers than heroes. His hands were large, hairy, and red—proof of
inherited laziness—and a slouching gait added to the ungainliness of his figure when he walked.
The type was all of a kind. The mouth generally wore a calculating smile—the only
distinguishable gift remaining of a Puritan ancestry—but when he felt that he was looked at the
calculating smile became sanctimonious. Slavery concerned him only as the slaveholder was
supposed to be rich; and just so long as Beecher presided over emigration aid societies,
preached highway robbery, defended political murder, and sent something to the Jayhawkers in
the way of real fruits and funds, there surely was a God in Israel and Beecher was his great
high priest. Otherwise they all might go to the devil together. The Jayhawker was not brave. He
would fight when he had to fight, but he would not stand in the last ditch and shoot away his
last cartridge. Born to nothing, and eternally out at the elbows, what else could he do but laugh
and be glad when chance kicked a country into war and gave purple and fine linen to a whole
lot of bummers and beggars? In the saddle he rode like a sand bag or a sack of meal. The
eternal "ager cake" made a trotting horse his abomination, and he had no use for a
thoroughbred, save to steal him. When he abandoned John Brown and rallied to the standard
of Jim Lane—when he gave up the fanatic and clove unto the thief—he simply changed his
leader without changing his principles.
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Excerpted and introduced by G. E. Rule, from “Noted Guerrillas or the Warfare of the Border”, by John N. Edwards, 1877
For Edwards' view of the Bushwhackers read Making of a Confederate Guerrilla
Major John N. Edwards, CSA, was General Jo. Shelby’s adjutant and chronicler. At war’s end Edwards chose to share Mexican exile with Shelby as well. When they returned to the U.S. in
1867, Edwards rapidly published three large volumes of wartime experiences. Two dealt specifically with Shelby, “Shelby and his Men”, 1867 and “Shelby’s Expedition to Mexico”, 1872. In
1874 he published “Noted Guerrillas”, a broad handling of the Confederate irregulars in Missouri during the war. Edwards also founded the Kansas City Times and was its editor for many
years.
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The Missouri Bushwhacker by John McElroy
Next to Slavery, the South had been cursed by the importation of paupers and criminals who had been
transported from England for England’s good, in the early history of the Colonies, to work the new lands. The
negro proving the better worker in servitude than this class, they had been driven off the plantations to squat
on unoccupied lands, where they bred like the beasts of the field, getting a precarious living from hunting the
forest, and the bolder eking out this by depredations upon their thriftier neighbors. Their forebears had been
paupers and criminals when sent from England, and the descendants continued to be paupers and criminals
in the new country, forming a clearly marked social class, so distinct as to warrant the surmise that they
belonged to a different race. As the eastern part of the South and the administration of the laws improved,
this element was to some extent forced out, and spread in a noisome trail over Mississippi, Arkansas, and
Missouri. While other immigrants went into the unbroken forest with a few rude tools and in the course of
several years built up comfortable homes, theirs never rose above abject squalor. The crudest of cabins
sufficed them for shelter, beds of beech leaves were all the couches they required; they had more guns in
their huts than agricultural or mechanical implements; they scarcely pretended to raise anything more than a
scanty patch of corn; and when they could not put on their tables the flesh of the almost wild razorback hog
which roamed the woods, they made meat of woodchucks, raccoons, opossums or any other "varmint" their
guns could bring down. They did not scorn hawks or owls if hunger demanded and no better meat could be
found.
It was this "White Trash" which added so much to the horrors of the war, especially in Missouri, and so little to
its real prosecution. Wolf-like in ferocity, when the advantages were on their side, they were wolf-like in
cowardice when the terms were at all equal. They were the Croats, Cossacks, Tolpatches, Pandours of the
Confederacy—of little value in battle, but terrible as guerrillas and bushwhackers. From this "White Trash"
came the gangs of murderers and robbers, like those led by the Youngers, Jameses, Quantrills, and scores of
other names of criminal memory.
As has been the case in all times and countries, these dregs of society became the willing tools of the
Slaveholding aristocrats. With dog-like fidelity they followed and served the class which despised and
overrode them. Somehow, by inherited habits likely, they seemed to avoid the more fertile parts of the State.
Excerpted and introduced by G.E. Rule, from “The Struggle for Missouri”, John McElroy, 1909
In 1863, at the age of sixteen, John McElroy joined an Illinois cavalry regiment. Six months later he was taken prisoner and remained so until the end of the war, spending much of the time
at the infamous Andersonville prison. In 1879 he wrote a book about his experiences, “Andersonville: A Story of Rebel Military Prisons. Fifteen Months a Guest of the so-called Southern
Confederacy”. In 1909 he was back with “Struggle for Missouri”,
ORDER NO. 11
Below is the actual order that forced Missouri families in 31/2 counties along the border with Kansas to leave
their homes.
First: All persons living in Cass, Jackson, and Bates counties, and in that part of Vernon county within the
District, with the exception of those residing within one mile of Union-held towns and except those in that
part of Kaw Township, Jackson county, north of Brush Creek and west of the Big Blue River, embracing
Kansas City and Westport, are hereby ordered to move from their present places of residence within 15
days. Those who within that time establish their loyalty to the satisfaction of the commanding officer of the
military station nearest their present place of residence, will received from him certificates stating that facts
of their loyalty and the names by whom it can be shown. All who receive such certificates will be permitted to
remove to any military station in this district or to any part of the state of Kansas, except all the counties on
the eastern border of the state. All others shall remain out of the district.
Second: all grain or hay in the fields or under shelter in the District from which the inhabitants are required to
move within reach of military stations, after the ninth of September will be taken to such stations and turned
over to the proper officers there; and report of the amount so turned over made to the district headquarters
specifying the names of all loyal owners and the amount of such produce taken from them. All grain and hay
found in such district after the ninth of September next, not removed to such stations will be destroyed.
fun fact- ‘Beecher’s BiBles” Sharps rifles, which were shipped to
Kansas by eastern abolitionist groups to aid in the fight against proslavery forces were termed “Beecher’s Bibles” after the printing of
the following article in the New York Tribune on February 8, 1856
about prominent abolitionist and preacher Henry Ward Beecher:
 He (Henry W. Beecher) believed that the Sharps Rifle was a truly
moral agency, and that there was more moral power in one of those
instruments, so far as the slaveholders of Kansas were concerned,
than in a hundred Bibles. You might just as well. . . read the Bible to
Buffaloes as to those fellows who follow Atchison and Stringfellow;
buy they have a supreme respect for the logic that is embodied in
Sharp's rifle.
 There is even anecdotal evidence that the rifles were often shipped
in crates marked “books” or “Bibles” to escape detection by proslavery forces.
QUESTIONS
1.
2.
3.
How did the Kansas-Nebraska Act lead to the
violence along the border of Kansas and
Missouri?
What was more responsible for the violencelocal groups, or national politics?
Was the violence along the border ever
justified? Why/why not?