The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory

How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West

Matthew Hulbert, Stephen Berry, Amy Taylor

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780820350028
  9780820350011
• eBook ISBN:
  9780820350004
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

The Civil War tends to be remembered as a vast sequence of battles, with a turning point at Gettysburg and a culmination at Appomattox. But in the guerrilla theater, the conflict was a vast sequence of home invasions, local traumas, and social degeneration that did not necessarily end in 1865. This book chronicles the history of "guerrilla memory," the collision of the Civil War memory "industry" with the somber realities of irregular warfare in the borderlands of Missouri and Kansas.

In the first accounting of its kind, Matthew Christopher Hulbert's book analyzes the cultural politics behind how Americans have remembered, misremembered, and re-remembered guerrilla warfare in political rhetoric, historical scholarship, literature, and film and at reunions and on the stage. By probing how memories of the guerrilla war were intentionally designed, created, silenced, updated, and even destroyed, Hulbert ultimately reveals a continent-wide story in which Confederate bushwhackers—pariahs of the eastern struggle over slavery—were transformed into the vanguards of American imperialism in the West.

ONE
The Nastiest Bits

There were scores of little camps scattered over Missouri where the same thing was happening. These camps were composed of young men who had been born and reared to a sturdy independence, and who did not know what it meant to be ordered around by Tom, Dick, and Harry, whom they had known familiarly all their lives, in the village, or on the farm.

—Mark Twain, “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed”

Late in the summer of 1862, G. W. Ballow offered his thoughts on the untamed nature of war in Missouri. “I am happy to state,” he informed a friend, “that guerrilla warfare is rapidly playing out in all parts of Missouri.”¹ Ballow, as it turned out, was not much of a clairvoyant; the sky still represented the virtual limit for irregular activity in Missouri. Even the massacres at Lawrence (1863) and Centralia (1864)—easily the best-known incidents of the Missouri-Kansas guerrilla conflict and arguably of the entire Civil War—only constituted drops in a deluge of violence that left both states nearly drowned. In reality, counties, towns, hamlets, and neighbors hitherto bound by communal interest or kinship ties stood bitterly opposed and remunerated blood with blood.

All of this bloodletting leads to an obvious question: why Missouri? What couldn’t an insider such as G. W. Ballow see about his native soil that allowed—if not encouraged—guerrilla violence to germinate at such a prodigious tempo? What could have made the state’s populace so obstreperous for such an extended period of time? While it would be easier to assume that something nefarious was in the water (and many Kansans at the time might have agreed), this chapter actually begins with a brief rundown of the state’s history, one equal measures natural, political, and cultural: its geography, its agriculture, its peoples, and how their life cycles produced—and replicated—the tendencies that seemingly primed men, women, and children for an explosion of irregular violence.

This chapter aims to sample the borderlands’ stock of guerrilla memory straight from the barrel, unfiltered and uncut. This is not to suggest that “unfiltered” means more objective or historically accurate—only more accurate in terms of how people desired their experiences be remembered by posterity. Accordingly, the vignettes around which the chapter revolves are relayed mostly as narrative and with minimal interruption of perspective. This is because great weight will be placed on how these stories were designed to sound, their adherence to the local and to family matters, and what emotional and intellectual responses they were penned to elicit—confusion, misstatements of fact, fabrications, and all. The vast majority of analysis, both individual and comparative, will come toward the end of the chapter.²

These memory narratives, encountered at their original proofs (or as close to them as possible), will also serve as a comparative benchmark for the rest of our trek through the history of guerrilla memory. Subsequent chapters will chronicle the collectivization, the reboots, the evolutions, and the elisions of that story—but these developments only realize their full effect if we are able to recall the design, the lack of polish, and the intent beneath each individualized account. Put another way, we must not lose sight of the units with which traumas in the guerrilla theater were first experienced, first measured, and first remembered.³

In 1803 a special envoy acting on behalf of President Thomas Jefferson purchased a tract of western land ranging from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. These negotiators had originally intended to acquire only the city of New Orleans from France—but the cash-strapped regime of Napoleon Bonaparte made an offer the Americans simply could not refuse. In dire need of capital to continue his military campaigning, the soon-to-becrowned emperor abandoned plans to establish new colonies in North America and liquidated the vast Louisiana Territory. Surveyors soon carved the Missouri Territory from this broader landscape.⁴ By 1821, owing to the compromise of a year prior that bore its name, Missouri officially entered the Union as a slave state. The decision to allow the spread of slavery westward proved fateful; it began a chain reaction of violent disputes that would not cease until the entire nation plunged itself into civil war.⁵

Centuries before such political wheeling and dealing gave way to the rumbling of cannons, forces of the natural world had determined that Missouri would be a place utterly defined by its waterways: the Mississippi River and the Missouri River. Their tides made the land exceptionally fertile for agriculture; their currents provided transport for both man and the fruits of his labor; their intermingling with the shore created natural trade centers around which urban dwellings could multiply. No matter their distance from the banks of either artery, Missouri’s residents were all river people—and their life cycles ebbed and flowed as such.⁶

From ancient basins in the Upper Midwest, the Mississippi River courses south through Minnesota and Wisconsin toward the Gulf of Mexico. The waterway that Abraham Lincoln hailed as the “Father of Waters” cleaved its way between Iowa and Illinois before rounding the northeastern corner of Missouri. Then as now, the river formed Missouri’s entire eastern border. Positioned along this riverine boundary, Saint Louis marks the spot where the Missouri River collided with the Mississippi and from which Missouri’s most developed network of railways commenced. The city also harbored the largest urban population in an overwhelmingly rural state. These characteristics made Saint Louis a thoroughfare for all manner of immigrants hoping to prosper along both rivers—but particularly those of German or Bavarian descent. After escaping the political upheavals and economic inequalities of Europe, these family farmers came in search of cheap, arable land and the ability to own it for themselves. They had little sympathy for slavery and consistently championed free labor.⁷ Thus, despite the fact that a significant cluster of slave owners resided in Saint Louis when the Civil War broke out, the city and its surrounding counties represented Missouri’s greatest stronghold of wartime Unionism and Republican support.⁸

After gathering in Montana’s share of the Rocky Mountains, the headwaters of the Missouri River push east into North Dakota before turning southward into the Midwest. Flowing through South Dakota and then bisecting Nebraska and Iowa, the river eventually courses into Kansas City on the state’s western border—at nearly the same latitude as Saint Louis. Though lacking in the railroad infrastructure of the East, Kansas City constituted a major trade outlet for the western territories. As an emanation point for the Santa Fe and Oregon Trails used by pioneers to reach Kansas, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Oregon, and California, it was also an outpost of sorts for travelers to the far frontier.

Perhaps more importantly, Kansas City’s location involved it in a pair of extremely violent, interconnected conflicts. On one hand, Missouri’s internal debate over slavery remolded the sectional crisis of North versus South to fit a contest of East versus West. In much the same way that Saint Louis was a mainstay of Unionism, Kansas City functioned as its pro-Confederate counterpart. On the other hand, Kansas City’s situation along the Missouri-Kansas border placed it at the center of a strife that raged long before boisterous South Carolinians ever lobbed a shell at Fort Sumter. The people in and around Kansas City had clashed with the likes of John Brown, they had massacred Kansans along the Marais des Cygnes—and they had even sacked the antislavery town of Lawrence, Kansas, in 1856. It would not be a coincidence that the counties nearest Kansas City—Platte, Jackson, Clay, Ray, Cass, and Lafayette—produced many of Missouri’s most diehard guerrillas, the Andersons, Jameses, and Youngers among them.⁹

At Kansas City the Missouri redirects toward a junction with the Mississippi in Saint Louis, meandering through the state’s central corridor. This stretch of counties—coined “Little Dixie” on account of its high concentration of pro-Confederate slaveholders—was renowned for rich soil and violent origins. Here second- and third-generation Missourians managed farms; their forebears, land-hungry homesteaders from Kentucky and Virginia, had opened the territory for settlement by force, clearing tree and Indian from the land with equal vigor. Subsequently, in the 1830s, they clashed violently with Iowans over coveted farmland along the Missouri-Iowa border and waged a war against Mormon settlers, eventually driving the latter from western Missouri. In the 1840s and 1850s, most of these pioneering families threw their support behind the institution of slavery. On average, the number of slaves owned per household in Little Dixie resembled the Confederate South, though variations in crop selection produced a key difference.¹⁰

The state of Missouri, by county, on the eve of the Civil War. The region known as “Little Dixie” paralleling the Missouri River was home to many of the state’s most active irregular combatants. Data courtesy of the Minnesota Population Center. National Historical Geographic Information System: Version 2.0. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota, 2011. Map by Andrew W. Fialka.

Whereas the cotton, rice, and indigo plantations of the Deep South thrived on slave labor, profitable agriculture along the Missouri River did not depend on slavery. Most of the people in these counties, slave owners or not, harvested bushels of cereal grains (corn, wheat, oats, and rye) by the hundreds and thousands. They also raised livestock and produced various types of hemp. Still others cultivated tobacco, typically with the aid of human chattel, but not always. Agricultural diversity begot competition between free and enslaved laborers—and ensured a collision of worldviews. Expressed another way, this arrangement forced freelaboring farmers, native and foreign-born, to toil in unusually close proximity to their neighbors’ slaves. Moreover, it placed them in the shadow of an inherently violent, paternalistic culture founded on the very institution that provided their economic competitors with said labor advantage in the first place. Over time, combined with the region’s propensity for partisan bloodshed, these interwoven social and economic tensions made Little Dixie a ticking time bomb of irregular violence.

The dual concentration of slaves and self-identified “southerners” in Little Dixie notwithstanding, the overwhelming majority of cotton grown and ginned in Missouri blossomed well south of the Missouri River. Much of this area was known as the Ozarks, so named for the mountain range that juts up and across Missouri’s southern border. Rail lines from Saint Louis only stretched a few counties into this lower third of the state—locales where slavery did exist, but in much more isolated instances than in the rest of Missouri. And not unlike members of communities nestled in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, Ozark residents fashioned their own mountain culture unique to the region—mores exemplified by local feuds and vigilantism (most notably the “Bald Knobbers” of the 1880s). As Union forces occupied (and plundered) mountain neighborhoods, locals balked and tempers flared. In retributive raids, pro-Confederate bushwhackers such as William Wilson—the guerrilla on whom the eponymous lead character of The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) was based—clashed regularly with federal troops to defend their homes and families.¹¹

All things considered, by 1860 Missouri was a state in name only—an unstable dot on the political map, cobbled together from distinct territories. Kansas City was a world apart from Saint Louis. The Ozarks resembled neither. Political inflection even within Little Dixie could vary by the mile, even by the boundary between neighboring farms. These were places and spaces with life cycles defined by their local geographic features, with their own ideologies, social hierarchies, religious devotions, and cultural traditions. So when the matter of secession came to a head and the influence of Saint Louis—with its disproportionate population and diversity, its industrial might, and its corresponding political clout—overrode the state’s more rural pro-Confederate contingents, Missouri took on the appearance of a place at war with itself.

On one side, antebellum governor and proslavery advocate Claiborne Jackson desperately wanted to deliver Missouri for the Confederacy. When the state convention, led by Republicans from Saint Louis, voted against an ordinance of secession, Jackson called up the state militia anyway. He headquartered them at “Camp Jackson” on the outskirts of Saint Louis—a move that outraged prominent Unionists. On the other side was Nathaniel Lyon. As commander of the federal arsenal in Saint Louis, Lyon understood both the importance of holding the city to the Union cause and thereby the potential danger of a pro-Confederate force gathering on its doorstep. In response, Lyon captured Jackson’s militia (sparking a riot in the process) and forced the governor to flee. At Neosho, Missouri, Jackson gathered a select group of state legislators and prompted them to vote for secession. The Lincoln administration effectively ignored the decree, declared Jackson a traitor, and reset the state government.¹²

Slaveholder population vs. foreign-born population in Missouri, 1860. Conflict between slaveholders and foreign-born residents unfolded all over the state, but most of all in Little Dixie. Not coincidentally, irregular violence followed a similar pattern. Data courtesy of the Minnesota Population Center. National Historical Geographic Information System: Version 2.0. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota, 2011. Map by Andrew W. Fialka.

Missouri crop diversity and slavery, 1860. Crop diversity in Missouri included grains, cotton, hemp, and tobacco—and of all these crops, the institution of slavery coincided with cotton the least frequently. Data courtesy of the Minnesota Population Center. National Historical Geographic Information System: Version 2.0. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota, 2011. Map by Andrew W. Fialka.

As these macro-level political events unfolded, the situation on the ground was much more complicated. Pro-Confederates did dominate the territory around Kansas City while Unionists ruled in the vicinity of Saint Louis. But supporters of each cause were dispersed throughout the rest of the state. In this way, it embodied a near-perfect microcosm of the Republic’s existential crisis as the Civil War began. Except in Missouri, regular military campaigns, marked by very early Confederate victories at Wilson’s Creek and Lexington in 1861, quickly yielded to irregular warfare. This was a stage set for guerrillas—and the Toms, Dicks, and Harrys occupying the camps described by Twain took to it with unprecedented ferocity.

With a working knowledge of Missouri’s backstory now in hand, the point of this chapter is to tell stories—admittedly not with the concern for their accuracy that one might expect. By design, this approach allows the residents of those towns and hamlets to speak for themselves—not simply to explain the blood they shed but to explore how and why they constructed those explanations. Observing the war from the vantage of their memories, we can begin to understand the kaleidoscopic quality of Civil War memory in the guerrilla theater, a place where violence tended to be hyperlocal and hyperpersonal and where commemoration was never so pronounced as it was in places such as Virginia. And only after first diagnosing why it was so difficult for veterans of irregular warfare to create metanarratives of it can we assess the products of their alternative approach to remembering: a patchwork of anarchic images and half-resolved traumas that could never be either fully celebrated or fully forgotten.

Without hallmark battlefields such as Manassas, Gettysburg, Antietam, or Shiloh, the war along and around the Missouri-Kansas border crystallized from an incalculable number of local, unpublicized, though still politically inflected conflicts.¹³ Thus, distinctions between “the battlefield” and “the homefront” were not just blurred but impossible—and pointless—to demarcate. In a letter demonstrative of such, one Union soldier wrote to his wife that the execution of guerrilla combatants had become so pedestrian they were now doubling as social soirees. He remarked, rather casually given the circumstances, that a sizable gathering of local ladies had recently attended—and apparently very much enjoyed—the hanging of an accused pro-Confederate bushwhacker in town. Though unnamed, the short-lived life of the party had allegedly been one of “Holtzclaw’s gang.”¹⁴

Broadly speaking, the borderland’s profusion of guerrilla violence had left it without a standard, battle-driven narrative to guide commemoration efforts for either side. Nor could Missouri or Kansas brandish an archetypal icon or “Marble Man” on which to hang popular mythologies ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. The Borderlands of Memory
• Chapter One. The Nastiest Bits
• Chapter Two. An Irregular Lost Cause
• Chapter Three. Rebooting Guerrilla Memory
• Chapter Four. Getting the Band Back Together
• Chapter Five. The Gatekeepers’ Conundrum
• Chapter Six. The Unionists Strike Back
• Chapter Seven. Guerrillas Gone Wild in the West
• Chapter Eight. Black Flags and Silver Screens
• Epilogue. Notes from the [Disappearing] Guerrilla Theater
• Appendix One. Quantrill Reunion Logistics
• Appendix Two. Quantrill Family Hereditary Vice Tree
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index