THE MISSOURI/KANSAS CONFLICTS 1854 - 1865
by Kathy Dhalle
The original time span of this presentation was to have been from 1854 to 1859, however as I began to
prepare this presentation, I felt that I needed to go back further, to the 1830s, to give you a very important
look at that period of Missouri history. The build-up of beliefs, fears, and activities of this earlier period
give some "understanding" of the incredible torment that was present at the "official" start period of this
forum in 1854. So I hope you will forgive my "straying" a bit. You will also notice that I am speaking
with the "Eyes of Missouri". That is because the state of Missouri existed first and the forces that flowed
over into Kansas Territory and later the state of Kansas were already in motion in Missouri.
Ten years after Missouri became a state, a band of settlers, believing that Missouri was a holy land,
appeared in Jackson County. With the arrival of this advance party of the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints, followers of Joseph Smith, Missouri began times of great torment. These Saints, often
called Mormons, were eventually expelled following much brutality. Soon thereafter, bloody conflicts
over the future of slavery broke out between Missouri and Kansas. Then came the appalling Civil War
years in which Missouri's distress was beyond that of most other states in the Union or the Confederacy.
After the North's victory, ten years of bitter controversy began over the character of a new Missouri.
Finally, an era of lawlessness brought sections of Missouri in virtual anarchy. Order was restored in the
1880s, ending what had been fifty years of internal torment and leaving Missouri with terrible memories.
When the Mormons arrived in 1831, western Missouri seemed to embody America's future. With amazing swiftness, disciples of Joseph Smith and, later, followers of John Brown aroused intolerance and hatred in the area. Smith was certain that God had selected Jackson County as the place where the Saints could gather to await the holy summons. Independence thus became the Saints' Zion. Such a proprietary outlook unnerved or angered many other Jackson County inhabitants who feared that the Saints' highly efficient organization would surely drive all others away. By 1833, one-third of Jackson County's population was Mormon. However, the area's first settlers had come mostly from the South.
Living precariously on the edge of civilization and clinging to their slaves and to their beginnings in agriculture or commerce, these pioneer Missourians peered uneasily at the Mormons as well as at the Indians just across the border. Life was uncertain, especially for many who had moved several times and who usually had no opportunity for education. Most of these citizens took comfort in the Baptist faith with its
own explicitness and were much displeased with Mormon ideas about representing Christ's true church, and
expecting momentarily to be gathered to Heaven, leaving behind unbelievers.
It troubled many observers also that most Mormons were "Yankees" who often had some education.
Claiming to converse with a God who directed them to be cordial to the Indians, the Mormons wanted to make the "Native Americans" welcome at the gathering of the faithful. For many skeptics, this view about Indians was alone sufficient to prove the Saints either seditious or insane, or both. Most Jackson County citizens could see nothing saintly in the Indian who was reportedly lurking over the border with murder and pillage on his mind. Even more alarming was the Mormon attitude toward the free blacks. Not only were the Saints opposed to bondage, but they were ready to admit the freedman into their circle. In addition to such "striking views", the Mormons were clannish, working closely amid themselves and seeming to ignore the needs of the larger community. Their disapproval of whiskey and tobacco also astounded some hard-bitten sinners who were members of the "First Families" of western Missouri.
Beginning in 1833 these Saints endured six years of brutality. The war upon the Mormons was intermittent, ranging through such counties as Jackson, Clay, Ray, Caldwell, and Daviess, with the victims occasionally managing to stand against their molesters. The persecution began with one of the "Great Meteor Showers" which occurred in November of 1833. Many Jackson County citizens took this as a sign that the end predicted by the Mormons was at hand, and they hastened to drive the Saints out of their area. Rarely did the Saints have any peace, although they seemed to prosper wherever they were. ost of them were pushed into the prairie countryside of Caldwell County, which a desperate Missouri legislature created in 1836 with the understanding that it would be a preserve for the Saints. With awesome and dismaying growth, the Mormons spread even into the adjacent Daviess County on the north.
Their endurance however, did not prevent the Saints from quarreling over tactics. Should force replace moral example? Should they develop a secret police system? These questions were roused by the suffering from years of pillaging and murder. While the prophet, Joseph Smith, wavered on the issues, usually counseling patience until the "Lord's time" should arrive, not all of his lieutenants were so pacific. On 4 July 1838, Sidney Rigdon, a power among the Saints, made a notorious address to a throng in Far West, a town in Caldwell County which had become the Mormons' capital. Rigdon announced that patience was at an end, and thereafter all foes would move against the saints at peril of their lives. This speech was reprinted across Missouri, intensifying the alarm about rumors concerning Joseph Smith's new "Armies of Israel". After the Mormons found themselves barred from voting, their forces appeared to be moving in a threatening manner during August 1838. Other Missourians quickly responded, out of terror, greed, or bloodthirstiness, so that murder, burning, looting, and whipping became commonplace around Caldwell County.
For a time the worst was probably postponed by the curious fact that the prophet's attorneys, Alexander W. Doniphan and David R. Atchison, each commanded a detachment of militia assigned to keep order. After these two persuaded Smith to refrain from reprisals, the Mormons appealed for general support and restitution to Gov. Lilburn W. Boggs. No aid was forthcoming since Boggs's residence and political base were in Jackson County, where no one dared display sympathy for the Saints. Discouraged, Smith finally accepted the advice of his more militant associates. In October 1838, the prophet announced that since soft answers had not turned away wrath, the Saints would fight. Had not Governor Boggs advised
them to take care of themselves?
Brief though it was, Missouri's first civil war then began in earnest. Frustrated Mormons attacked the town of Gallatin, looting and burning in a style matching that of their foes. This and other deeds were signals to the Saints' neighbors and to Jefferson City that the Mormons intended to lay waste northwestern Missouri. On 27 October, Governor Boggs issued orders which the militia had early awaited. Labeling the Saints an outrage upon the name of Missouri, the governor directed that they be driven from the state or exterminated; meanwhile he took the precaution of removing the peaceable David Atchison from any command. Three days later, militiamen gave a terrible indication of how literally the governor's command was followed. Two hundred men fell upon a Mormon hamlet at Haun's Mill and quickly killed seventeen Saints, of whom the lucky ones were shot, the less fortunate hacked to death with corn choppers. Only by fleeing to the woods were some Mormons able to escape; the militia spared not even children, and departed leaving the dead unburied and the wounded begging for help.
When news of the massacre reached the main body of Mormons gathered at Far West with Joseph Smith, they chose to parley with the governor's army encamped outside the town. Amid confusion over the conditions, Smith and other leaders surrendered for what they thought were discussions. Immediately the town of Far West was plundered by the troops, with all Mormons forced to yield their land and property as payment for the trouble they were said to have caused. The militia commander, Maj. Gen. Samuel D. Lucas, gave Smith and his associates a court-martial and ordered their public execution. As it happened, Alexander Doniphan was the officer in charge of the prisoners. He announced that if executions occurred,
he would see Lucas prosecuted for murder. Facing an implacable Doniphan, Lucas relented.
With their leaders imprisoned, the Mormons made one last attempt to remain in their chosen land. They appealed in December 1838 to the Missouri General Assembly, recounting their years of injury from mob violence, property expropriation, and now an order by Governor Boggs to leave the state. Requesting restitution, the Saints pleaded to stay in Missouri. The legislators faced an awkward situation. A significant part of the state was becoming indignant at the horrors in the northwestern counties. However, not only was the dignity of the governor at stake, but the legislators knew that a revelation of the facts would disclose how a member of their own body had participated in the slaughter at Haun's Mill. Consequently, the truth was suppressed and the Saints were told to depart. Led by the rising figure of Brigham Young, most of the 15,000 surviving Mormons left Missouri for Illinois in February 1839. In April, Joseph Smith apparently had the inspiration to bribe a guard with a jug of Missouri corn whiskey. The prophet and his lieutenants escaped, heading for Nauvoo, Illinois, where Smith would be even less fortunate.
After the slaying of Joseph Smith in 1844, most of the Mormons chose to leave the United States (in 1844) for life near the Great Salt Lake. There were some, however, who clung to the early belief that God's Zion was in Jackson County, Missouri. Many of these faithful also refused to accept the stories about their prophet's supposed indiscretions, including alleged sexual liaisons with a number of his women followers. Rejecting the leadership of Brigham Young, these members gathered around Smith's widow, Emma, and her son. They began returning in 1867 to a Jackson County exhausted and sobered by
long years of Civil War. Independence once again became Zion, this time for the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Results from this renewal were quite the reverse of experiences in the 1830s, and the thriving Saints became an invaluable element as western Missouri struggled to rebuild. As for Independence, the old frontier town settled back with the Saints to watch the rise of Zion.
When the Saints returned to Jackson County, the region was trying to forget the devastating anguish which came after 1850. In what should then have been her best years of growth and maturation, Missouri was emaciated by a generation of hatred and fear. The tragedy was the more unspeakable since the objects of such feeling were often other Missourians, and internal conflict brought a long oppression of Missouri's spirit. Harry Truman's mother, for instance, never forgot the unrelenting terror and wide brutality which began in the 1850s over slavery. The causes of the distress had also entailed repudiating Thomas Hart Benton, David R. Atchison, who had been Benton's senatorial colleague since 1843, differed with Benton almost at much as David Barton had. Now it was Atchison who had Missouri's support, leaving Benton behind. This stunning reversal came from the issue of slavery, once considered forever buried by the Missouri Compromise.
With the discovery of gold in California in 1849, ownership of the Indian country west of Missouri became controversial, for it was evident that the area, to be known as Kansas and Nebraska, needed territorial organization if dependable lines of communication where to stretch between the Mississippi valley and the glittering Pacific Coast. As the future of Kansas was debated, geography and politics began once more to torment Missouri and the nation, for even with Missouri's Atchison championing slavery's migration to Kansas, the Missouri Compromise was in peril. As a slave state, Missouri tended to sympathize when southerners claimed a right to enter new federal land with their bondsmen. Additionally, one of the few areas where slavery actually appeared to thrive in Missouri was along the Kansas border. Counties like Jackson feared that a free state just to the west could tempt slaves to escape. Consequently, much of Missouri approved when the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 made slavery possible if the settlers of Kansas wished it. This now brings us to the "official" start of 1854 and my "straying" is over.
With an apprehensive nation watching, western Missouri began behaving as if determined to have slaves in Kansas at any price. The issue seemed to turn the onetime guardian of peace, David Atchison, into an engineer of violence. Atchison openly began encouraging what he enjoyed calling "border ruffians." those Missourians who rushed into the new Kansas Territory to assure political decisions favoring a slave society. The unusual feature was after voting in Kansas, these interested parties would immediately return to their Missouri homes. In the first Kansas election in Nov. 1854, more that half the votes were cast by
Missourians, although the territorial governor had begged that Kansas be left alone. As a result, a territorial delegate who favored slavery was dispatched to Congress.
When Kansas Territory chose her first legislature in March 1855, nearly 5,000 Missourians, including students from the university, marched into the area to vote with flags, firearms, knives, and whiskey. The American people watched an amazing outcome, which was not that the proslavery side won, but that more than 6,000 votes were cast in a territory boasting barely 2,000 eligible voters. Senator Atchison himself led a large group of these Missourians, who he claimed were acting to assure slavery's safety across to the Pacific Coast and to preserve the principle of unrestricted territories.
The controversy did not stop, however, with the dubious voting practices. Arrival of the New England Emigrant Aid Society and other eastern organizations so outraged many western Missourians that they agreed with Senator Atchison's astounding talk of treating these "Negro heroes" as Mormons. This treatment was known to mean shooting, burning, and hanging, methods doubly senseless since slaveholders were a distinct minority in Missouri. On the western border, however, owners of 50,000 slaves were a
significant group, and a threat to them quickly became to many sympathetic neighbors a menace to Missouri generally.
Nevertheless, opposition to slavery appeared to increase in Kansas. David Atchison gave himself entirely to the challenge, scarcely attending to senatorial duties and refusing to stand for re-election in 1856. Yet despite Atchison and the men he summoned to join him with their firearms, the opponents of slavery managed to enter Kansas. Attempts at blocking their passage on the Missouri River were fruitless since most free-soilers entered Kansas from Iowa. Making the town of Lawrence their center, the antislavery
forces asserted that the Missouri-inspired government for Kansas was a nullity, inciting a band that included Atchison and other Missourians to raid Lawrence in the spring of 1856. The town was pillaged and three citizens died, so enraging an abolitionist named John Brown (of the Harper's Ferry Raid fame) who lived nearby in Osawatomie that he quickly struck back, thereby gaining national notoriety. Brown led raiders to a proslave settlement on Pottawatomie Creek, where five of the squatters were murdered. This is know today as the Marais des Cygnes Massacre.
Nothing less than war between Missouri and Kansas ensued. Atchison brought a retaliatory force of a thousand men to put down Brown and others of like mind while the free-state men organized for defense. Violent encounters resulted until the autumn of 1857 when fresh election returns showed that Kansas had been claimed by free-soil sentiment, despite everything Missouri had done. Then the scene shifted to Missouri as Kansan's took their turn in making forays into Missouri, motivated at times by what they only imagined to be threats, and at other times by vengeance. The assailants from Kansas, known as The Jayhawkers, included John Brown , who on one occasion carried away eleven slaves after slaying their Missouri owner.
Eventually, the two governors managed to calm the violence until the election of 1860 brought new terrors in the border area, producing horrors that made western Missouri a most melancholy area in this time of greatest torment. Meanwhile, David Atchison returned to private life as a farmer, having helped mightily to make "Bleeding Kansas" a national outcry. He emerged momentarily during the Civil War, but only to seek aid from his old friend, Jefferson Davis, for Missouri's secessionists.
Curiously, at the height of the bloodletting between Missouri and Kansas, the federal Supreme Court chose in 1857 to speak on the disputed question of congressional power over slavery in the territories. At issue was the effort of a Missouri slave from the St. Louis area, Dred Scott, to secure his freedom. Scott's owner had once taken him north into a region presumably closed by the Missouri Compromise. When the Court held that Congress was powerless to exercise such restrictions on property, many persons thought this decision against Dred Scott implied that slavery would be safe anywhere. Missouri's notoriety from this case and from the border brutalities had an ironic feature, however, for while the nation prepared to split over issues heavily involving the state, a spirit of moderation seemed to arise in Missouri.
At no time was Missouri's political caution better exhibited than during the election of 1860 and the months thereafter. Slavery may have been a unifying element in the statehood excitement around 1820, but it was not a compelling force in the minds of most Missourians in 1860. In that year slaves constituted less than 10 percent of the population. Out of Missouri's nearly 1.2 million citizens, fewer than 25,000 were slaveholders. While the Negro bondsman doubtless had an important moral meaning for many citizens, especially the German and Irish laboring community around St. Louis, much of the state entered the war era more concerned about pitfalls along the political paths taken by extremists in both North and South. Most Missourians probably would gladly have watched the war from the sidelines, waiting to study the meaning of its outcome. Instead, the war years entangled Missouri perhaps more thoroughly than any other states except Virginia and Tennessee.
Missouri's outlook took shape between the 1860 elections and the meeting of an extraordinary state convention in February and March 1861. In November 1860, most voting Missourians clearly preferred the cautious posture associated with John Bell's Constitutional Union movement or that of the Douglas Democrats. More than 70 percent of the electorate urged accommodation and compromise as approaches to the national crisis. Abraham Lincoln drew only 10 percent of the voters, with the modest balance going to the pro-Southern Democrats. In August, Claiborne Fox Jackson had been elected governor as a moderate Democrat, but three months later he was beginning to talk of great dangers to the state and of the advantages of secession. Toward the end, Jackson urged that Missourians call a special convention to discuss the state's future. Meanwhile, the retiring governor, Robert M. Stewart, remained closer to the state's mood when he pleaded in a farewell address that Missouri not be frightened or stampeded away from the Union into the calamities of secession.
To the astonishment of Claiborne Jackson, the voters followed Stewart's advice and chose not a single advocate of secession to the special 1861 convention. Of the 140,000 votes cast in selecting delegates, only 30,000 went to secessionists. Most of the state's agricultural and business community saw no future in the Confederacy, and even in the principal slave counties sentiment for the Union prevailed. Most Missouri slaveowners took Lincoln at his word that no threat was intended to those regions where
bondage existed. Thus, in sharp contrast to the tradition of furor on the state's western border, at St. Louis the ninety-nine convention delegates retained a Stoic calm. The convention agreed that there was no reason to leave the Union and urged every means to reconcile the nation's sections. Similarly, the delegates opposed the use of force against seceding states, and called for a federal constitutional convention.
In spite of this lofty sentiment at St. Louis, Missouri was dragged into the war. The state remained loyal to the Union, although a few secessionist politicians mounted a government in exile which received skeptical recognition by the Confederacy. Perhaps most Missourians were not enthusiastic about either side, but events and the state's location overcame the mood of withdrawal displayed at the
convention. More than a thousand battles and skirmishes were fought in Missouri, a number of Civil War conflicts
that was exceeded only in Virginia and Tennessee. Conflicts such as Westport, Lexington, Byram's Ford, Pilot Knob, Belmont and Wilson's Creek were the major engagements fought on Missouri soil. Sixty percent of Missouri's eligible men served in the war, with nearly three-fourths of them fighting for the Union. Beyond formal encounters between Federal and Confederate forces was a second kind of conflict, guerrilla action which devastated entire counties and left perhaps 27,000 "non-military" citizens dead. This evil had the more dreadful and enduring feature for it meant violence between neighbors who had been forced out of desperation to suspect one another of conspiracy and brigandage. You will recognize the names of "Bloody Bill" Anderson, Quantrill, the James boys, the Youngers. All of these were products of that desperate time.
As a "Missourian" myself, with all my ancestors living and dying on that western border in Bates County, my interest in this period has been prodigious. An example is the burning of Lawrence, Kansas. William Clarke Quantrill was a veteran of the guerrilla fighting between free state and slave state forces along
the Kansas-Missouri border during the 1850s. After the outbreak of the Civil War, he led a band of partisans in raids on Kansas. In the summer of 1863, he targeted the town of Lawrence. His men considered their
raid to be in retaliation for the deaths in August of five women held by Federal authorities in Kansas City who had died when their prison cell collapsed. That particular incident was initiated by Brigadier General Thomas Ewing, in an attempt to curb the activities of Confederate guerrillas. Ewing ordered that any women (perceived) to be aiding and abetting the raiders should be detained in Kansas City. The building in which the women were held collapsed, killing five and injuring many others, spurring-on Quantrill and his men to their "act of revenge".
On August 19, 1863, Quantrill headed west with over 300 men. He crossed into Kansas, arriving on the outskirts of Lawrence near dawn on August 21st. Encountering no organized resistance, the raiders burned over 100 homes, looted banks and stores, and killed some 150 male civilians. Alerted belatedly to the raid, Federal forces in Kansas gave chase, skirmishing with Quantrill's men on the 21st as they headed back to Missouri. A brief fight occurred on August 22nd, but the raiders escaped. Principally as a result of the Lawrence Massacre, Federal Gen. Thomas Ewing ordered the forced evacuation of four Missouri counties bordering Kansas. This "Order No. 11" made Ewing as infamous in Missouri as Quantrill was in Kansas.
One of the counties effected by this incredible order was Bates County, Missouri. The residents of Bates County (included about 25 of my ancestors), regardless of affiliation were given 48 hours to vacate. Anyone caught in the county after the 48 hour warning were arrested and taken to Kansas City. This order remained in effect until the end of the Civil War in 1865. When the residents returned to Bates County, there wasn't one head of livestock remaining, not a building left standing (except for one store-front in Butler, Missouri, and no bridges left intact. It was a devastating impact to those counties, and they were years, and years recovering from it.
An interesting sidelight to this was the founding of "The Old Settlers Society" in Bates County. To be a member you needed to be considered an original setter family in the county, and to stay a member, you HAD to refrain from talking about politics and religion or you were immediately expelled. Their peaceful intent was to share the old settler stories and show old family artifacts at the monthly gatherings in front of the Butler County Courthouse. I have a picture of this group in 1889 and there sits 4 great great
grandmothers and two great great grandfathers, one of which fought for the Union.
I wish to credit Professor Paul C. Nagel who authored the book "Missouri - A History" that was written as a part of a series on THE STATES AND THE NATION, published for the national Bicentennial of the American Revolution. Much of my early information source came from his book, and the remainder from my own research and various sources from my good friend John Foster, Head Librarian at the Mid-Continent Library on Truman Road in Independence, Missouri.
by Kathy Dhalle