Order 11 by Albert Castel

©Albert Castel, published with permission

“Order No. 11 and the Civil War on the Border”

by Albert Castel

Copyright 1963 Albert Castel. Used with Permission.

This is copyrighted material–the article, the pictures, and the introduction–and may not be copied or reproduced in any form, including on other websites, without permission of the authors.
Books by Albert Castel

available from Amazon.com

Articles of War: Winners, Losers, and Some Who Were Both During the Civil War

Tom Taylor’s Civil War

General Sterling Price and the Civil War in the West

Bloody Bill Anderson: The Short, Savage Life of a Civil War Guerrilla

William Clarke Quantrill: His Life and Times

Decision in the West

More books by Albert Castel

Introduced by G. E. Rule

Albert Castel, over a published career that is approaching fifty years, has proven himself to be the leading historian of the Civil War in the West. With titles like General Sterling Price and the Civil War in the West (1968), William Clarke Quantrill: His Life and Times (1962), and Bloody Bill Anderson: The Short Savage Life of a Civil War Guerrilla (with Thomas Goodrich, 1998), none of those who are serious about studying the war in Missouri can consider themselves well-read on the subject if they have not read Castel. His other titles on the war in the West will also be read for many years to come, and his Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864 (1992) is an award-winning title that is likely to remain the definitive statement on what was arguably the most important campaign of the war. Dr. Castel’s most recent title, Articles of War: Winners, Losers, and Some Who Were Both in the Civil War, Stackpole Books, 2001, is available from Amazon.com.

“Order No. 11 and the Civil War on the Border” originally appeared in the Missouri Historical Review 57 (State Historical Society of Missouri, July 1963): 357-68 and was reprinted in Winning and Losing in the Civil War (University of South Carolina, 1996), which is an excellent compilation of dry wit and sharp observations on a variety of issues and incidents of the war. As an example of the former, Castel skewers one academic colleague by noting “he achieves a truly remarkable originality when he refers to McClellan’s operations as commander of the Army of the Potomac as ‘lightning maneuvers.’” The current article, below, is an example of the latter.

Castel reports this article has been largely ignored by his fellow historians, while also noting “so far no one has directly challenged these findings, much less rebutted them.” Civilwarstlouis.com is pleased to give “Order No. 11 and the Civil War on the Border” a home on the internet, and to offer a balanced and thoughtful appraisal of one of the most emotional issues of the war in Missouri. Indeed, one can speculate this balance has been a factor in the neglect Castel notes; his article does not offer either side the unqualified brick-bat they would like to belabor the other with. While each side could pick telling phrases to hurl at the other, they would immediately find themselves confronted with an equally powerful excerpt from the same source that they would find distasteful.


Order No. 11 was the most drastic and repressive military measure directed against civilians by the Union Army during the Civil War. In fact, with the exception of the hysteria-motivated herding of Japanese-Americans into concentration camps during World War II, it stands as the harshest treatment ever imposed on United States citizens under the plea of military necessity in our nation’s history.

Issued August 25, 1863, by Brigadier General Thomas Ewing, Jr., commander of the District of the Border, with headquarters at Kansas City, Order No. 11 required all the inhabitants of the Western Missouri counties of Jackson, Cass, and Bates not living within one mile of specified military posts to vacate their homes by September 9. Those who by that date established their loyalty to the United States government with the commanding officer of the military station nearest their place of residence would be permitted to remove to any military station in the District of the Border or to any part of Kansas except the counties on the eastern border of that state. Persons failing to establish their loyalty were to move out of the district completely or be subject to military punishment.[1]

Lawrence ruins from Harpers

The general public at the time, as well as most historians since, regarded the order as an act of retaliation for the destruction of Lawrence, Kansas, and the massacre of c. 200 of its male residents by William Clarke Quantrill’s Missouri guerrillas on August 21, 1863. Critics of the order both then and thereafter condemned it as being cruel, unjust, and unnecessary.[2]Its defenders, on the other hand, while admitting its severity, maintained that it was fully warranted by the military situation and that it achieved the results intended—the forcing of Quantrill’s bushwhackers out of the border region of Missouri and the ending of guerrilla raids into Kansas.[3]

Both parties to the controversy over Order No. 11 have usually dwelt upon the circumstances immediately preceding its promulgation and upon the short-range impact of its execution. Rarely, if at all, have they examined its full background or its ultimate operation. Yet it is only through such an examination that a valid evaluation of the order can be made. Once this is done, then perhaps a definite answer can be given to the question, was Order No. 11 a justified act of military necessity or an unjustified deed of military tyranny?

The territorial conflict of the 1850s left a legacy of hatred between Kansas and Missouri. Kansans resented the invasions of the Missouri “Border Ruffians” and the Missourians bitterly recalled the incursions of John Brown, James Montgomery, and other Kansas “jayhawkers.” The outbreak of the Civil War intensified this mutual animosity. Kansas jayhawkers and Red Legs made devastating raids into Missouri during which they plundered and murdered, burned farmhouses and crops, and liberated hundreds of slaves. These forays in turn caused pro-Southern guerrilla bands to retaliate against Kansas. Led by Quantrill, the Missouri bushwhackers sacked Kansas border settlements and shot down unarmed civilians “like so many hogs.” At the same time they waged a deadly partisan warfare against Federal troops and Union adherents in Missouri itself.

The efforts of the Federal army to put down bushwhacking were frustrated by the skill of the guerrillas, the difficult nature of the countryside, and above all the assistance rendered the bushwhackers by the civilian population. Most of the people of Western Missouri looked upon the guerrillas as their avengers and defenders, and a large portion of them had friends and kinsmen riding with Quantrill. Consequently they aided them in every possible way, from feeding and sheltering them, to smuggling them ammunition and acting as spies. Even anti-Confederates assisted the partisans out of fear of reprisals. Thus in effect the Federal forces in Western Missouri were opposed by an entire people.[4]

By the spring of 1863 Union officers serving along the border had concluded that the bushwhackers could never be suppressed by ordinary tactics. “Good men and true,” wrote one of them, “have been for months trying to catch the bushwhackers, and I know it is, as they declare, almost an impossibility.”[5] And declared another: “If any one … can do better against bushwhackers than we have done, let him try this country, where the people and bushwhackers are allied against the United States and its soldiers.”[6]

In June 1863, Brigadier General Thomas Ewing, Jr., took command of the District of the Border. Ewing, aged thirty-four, was a prominent Kansas Republican, former chief justice of Kansas, and the brother-in-law and one-time law partner of General William T. Sherman. A man who believed that he had “few equals in mental vigor,” he was intensely ambitious and hoped to secure election to the United States Senate. With that goal in mind he was at this period seeking the favor of Senator James H. Lane, the “King” of Kansas politics.

By the end of July Ewing decided that unless his forces were tripled the only possible way to destroy the guerrillas was to strike at the root of their power, the support they received from the civilian population. Therefore on August 3 he wrote his departmental commander, Major General John M. Schofield, stating that since two-thirds of the families in Western Missouri were kin to the bushwhackers and were “actively and heartily engaged in feeding, clothing, and sustaining them,” several hundred families of the “worst guerrillas” should be transported to Arkansas. This would not only deprive the guerrillas of their aid, but would cause the guerrillas whose families had been removed to follow them out of the state. Surrender terms could then be offered to the less offensive bushwhackers remaining.[7]

Schofield approved the plan, and on August 18 Ewing put it into effect by issuing General Order No. 10.[8] Then, three days later, Quantrill and 440 bushwhackers destroyed Lawrence. This deed, which was not only the climax of the Kansas-Missouri Border War but also the most horrible atrocity of the entire Civil War, shocked, frightened, and enraged Unionists in both Kansas and Missouri, and caused them to demand that the bushwhackers be crushed once and for all so as to prevent further raids of this kind. Ewing, who likewise believed that drastic action was needed, responded to their clamor by promulgating Order No. 11 on August 25.

Immediately large numbers of pro-Southern and Conservative Union Missourians denounced the order as “inhuman, unmanly, and barbarous.”[9]Most prominent and vehement among the critics was George Caleb Bingham, the famous artist. Although a Unionist, Bingham hated Kansans in general and Ewing in particular. After Order No. 11 was announced he went to Ewing’s headquarters in Kansas City and demanded that it be rescinded. Ewing refused, and the interview became highly acrimonious. Finally, as he departed, Bingham warned: “If you persist in executing that order, I will make you infamous with pen and brush as far as I am able.”[10]

Photographic reproductions of the George Caleb Bingham painting “Order No. 11” are available from the State Historical Society of Missouri

Bingham carried out his threat in both respects. First he produced a painting entitled “Order No. 11 .” It showed Ewing astride a horse complacently supervising his troops as they expel a Missouri family from its home. A Kansas Red Leg has just shot down a young man, and another is about to shoot the elderly head of the family, oblivious to the pleas of a beautiful young woman kneeling at his feet. The house is being pillaged by Union soldiers, one of whom bears a likeness to the noted jayhawker, Colonel Charles Jennison. In the background columns of smoke rise from burning fields and a long, funereal line of refugees wends its way along the road. The painting was mediocre art but excellent propaganda, and it did more than anything else to create the popular conception of Order No. 11.[11]

What he depicted in the painting Bingham also expressed in various writings which may be regarded as representative of all the criticisms of Order No. 11. According to him the order was “an act of purely arbitrary power, directed against a disarmed and defenseless population” in violation of “every principle of justice.” It was inspired by vengeance and was issued by Ewing in order to curry favor with the Kansas “mob” and advance his political ambitions. It resulted in “barefooted and bareheaded women and children, stripped of every article of clothing except a scant covering for their bodies,” being “exposed to the heat of an August sun and compelled to struggle through the dust on foot.” Under it men “were shot down in the very act of obeying the order, and their wagons and effects seized by their murderers.” Union soldiers and Red Legs burned dwellings and sent long wagon trains of plunder into Kansas. Refugees “crowded by hundreds upon the banks of the Missouri River, and were indebted to the charity of benevolent steamboat conductors for transportation to places of safety where friendly aid could be extended to them without danger to those who ventured to contribute it.”

There was neither need nor cause for Order No. 11, asserted Bingham. Most of the real bandits on the border were not Quantrill’s bushwhackers but Kansas Red Legs who carried on their “nefarious operations under the protection and patronage of General Ewing. . . . The bushwhackers were but small in number, “at all times insignificant in comparison with the Federal troops. . . .” The guerrillas could “at any time have been exterminated or driven from the country had there been an earnest purpose on the part of the Federal forces in that direction, properly braced by a willingness to incur such personal risks as become the profession of a soldier.”

Finally, the order did not accomplish its professed purpose. Instead of driving them out, it gave up the country to the bushwhackers, “who, until the close of the war, continued to stop the stages and rob the mails and passengers, and no one wearing the Federal uniform dared to risk his life within the desolated district.”[12]

Much of Bingham’s pictorial and verbal condemnation of Ewing and Order No. 11 was false and unfair, and motivated by personal malice. It is extremely unlikely, for instance, that Ewing, as the painting “Order No. 11” would imply, ever sat about on his horse callously watching the Red Legs slay defenseless men. The charge that the Red Legs enjoyed Ewing’s “protection and patronage” was viciously absurd, since Ewing, while in command of the District of the Border, made constant and earnest efforts to suppress the Red Legs and stop jayhawking.[13]As for the assertion that bushwhacking did not become widespread until after Order No. 11, this is so obviously contrary to facts as not to require refutation.

Other of Bingham’s accusations, however, had at least some basis in fact. Thus, in issuing the order, Ewing was motivated in part by a desire to satisfy the clamor for revenge in Kansas. In addition there can be little question that he was also concerned about his political prospects. Many Kansans criticized his conduct of affairs along the border and declared that he should be removed from command. Senator Lane warned him that unless he took harsh measures against the guerrillas, he would be a “dead dog” politically.[14]

However, these were not the sole motives, nor even necessarily the main ones, behind the issuance of Order No. 11. Other important considerations were Ewing’s desire to reassure the badly frightened people of Kansas, and to forestall a threatened mob invasion of Western Missouri. Shortly after the Lawrence Massacre, Senator Lane called on the men of Kansas to assemble on the border for the purpose of marching into Missouri and carrying out a campaign of “devastation and extermination.” Had it not been for Order No. 11 this invasion probably would have taken place; as it was, even after issuing the order Ewing had a great deal of difficulty heading off Lane’s proposed expedition.[15] Thus it can be argued that however drastic Order No. 11 was, it helped prevent much worse.

Still another reason for Order No. 11, and probably the main one, was the military situation. The Lawrence Massacre made it obvious that all previous efforts to combat the guerrillas had been unavailing, and that they threatened to drive all Unionists from the border. Therefore the only thing that could be done, for it was the only thing left to be done, was to direct measures against the civilian population which contributed so much to the success of the bushwhackers. Although the timing and circumstances of the order made such an assumption natural and plausible, it was not, except in a limited sense, a retaliation for the massacre. It had been presaged by Order No. 10, and was essentially an extension of a policy already in effect, a policy suddenly made more drastic as a result of a shockingly horrible event.[16]

Finally, even if Ewing had not issued Order No. 11, a similar program would have gone into effect. For on the very same day that Ewing published the order, Schofield sent him the draft of an almost identical order. The major difference between the two was that Schofield’s draft was much harsher than Ewing’s order. Schofield believed that “nothing short of total devastation of the districts which are made the haunts of the guerrillas will be sufficient to put a stop to the evils.” Unlike Order No. 11, Schofield’s proposal established no method of differentiating between Union and Confederate adherents.[17] All in all, Bingham’s criticism of Ewing’s motives in issuing Order No. 11 were for the most part either erroneous, pointless, or both. In any case, Schofield must share the responsibility for the order with Ewing.

Bingham was on much firmer ground in denouncing the severity of the order. There can be no doubt that its execution resulted in a great deal of hardship and suffering. H. B. Bouton, a Unionist living near Kansas City, told of seeing large numbers of “poor people, widows and children, who, with little bundles of clothing, are crossing the river to be subsisted by the charities of the people amongst whom they might find shelter.”[18] Colonel Bazel Lazear, Federal commander at Lexington, Missouri, wrote his wife: “It is heartsickening to see what I have seen. . . . A desolated country and men & women and children, some of them all most [sic] naked. Some on foot and some in old wagons. Oh God.[19]

Marauding by Union troops increased the misery of the refugees. Most of the soldiers enforcing the order were vengeance-minded Kansans who welcomed such a splendid opportunity to punish the Missourians. Ewing, to be sure, repeatedly ordered his men not to engage in wanton pillaging, but his efforts were largely in vain.[20] By the end of September the depopulated district was a silent, forlorn land of stark chimney standing over charred ruins.[21]

But if Bingham had some justification for denouncing the hardships caused by Order No. 11, he was almost totally wrong in contending that it was unnecessary and that the inefficiency and cowardice of the Federal forces were alone responsible for the success of the bushwhackers. Schofield, a competent professional soldier who ultimately became the commanding general of the United States Army, personally investigated the situation in Western Missouri after the issuance of the order and concluded that it was “wise and just—in fact a necessity.”[22] For over two years the guerrillas had been attacking Federal posts and patrols, terrorizing Unionists, and raiding border settlements, and doing so with ever-mounting intensity. As anyone familiar with the nature and history of partisan warfare knows, not only are guerrillas extremely exasperating but also terribly difficult to combat, and that one of the most effective ways (sometimes the only way) to defeat them is to deprive them of their civilian support as Orders No. 10 and 11 contemplated.[23] Such tactics, for example, were employed successfully in South Africa by Lord Kitchener against the Boer commandos, partisans who had many characteristics in common with the Missouri bushwhackers. According to the British military historian, Cyril Falls, Kitchener resorted to “destroying farmhouses and their stores . . . and placing the inhabitants, mostly women, old people, and children, in camps, wherein the death-toll from sickness was high.”[24] And along the same line, it should be noted that Grant in 1864 became so annoyed by Mosby’s raids that he instructed Sheridan to send a cavalry division through Loudon County, Virginia “to destroy and carry off the crops, animals, Negroes, and all men under 50 years of age capable of bearing arms.”[25]

Order No. 11, moreover, was imposed on a predominantly enemy population which was willingly aiding and abetting the bushwhackers. Neither Bingham nor any of the other critics of the order maintained otherwise. The most they claimed was that “hundreds” of the people subjected to the order were “true and loyal” to the Union.[26] But even if this were true the loyalists constituted only a small fraction of those affected by the order. Ewing, it will be recalled, estimated that two-thirds of the families in Jackson, Cass, and Bates counties were voluntarily helping the bushwhackers. This contention is supported by the Kansas City Western Journal of Commerce, which declared that most of the inhabitants of these counties were disloyal, and that the few remaining Unionists were terrorized by the guerrillas into aiding them.[27] The Reverend George Miller, who lived in Kansas City during most of the war and opposed Order No. 11, stated in his memoirs that over four-fifths of the people in that region were secessionists.[28] In connection with this last statement, it is interesting to note that a Federal officer engaged in carrying out the order wrote in his diary that only one person in five was being permitted to remain in the district as being loyal to the Union.[29]

As a final answer to this particular criticism of Bingham’s, it should be pointed out that under the laws and practices of war, whenever enemy civilians willingly assist guerrillas, then they must expect to take the consequences, and that among the consequences is forced evacuation of their homes.

The last, and in a way the most important, of Bingham’s strictures on Order No. 11 was that it utterly failed to attain its avowed objective: the destruction of the guerrillas. This charge, to the extent it referred to the immediate effect of the order, was well founded. On this matter we have the testimony of one of the bushwhackers, who later recalled that despite the order,

Quantrill was in no hurry to leave the country for the South. The farmhouses were nearly all vacated as required by Order No. 11, but in every smoke house there hung from the rafters hams and bacon, and the country was full of stray hogs, cattle, and chickens which the owners had been forced to leave behind. There was plenty of feed for horses, and the men gathered the food at night.[30]

When Quantrill left Missouri early in October he did so only because of the approach of cold weather.

Thus the immediate effectiveness of Order No. 11 was practically nil. What, then, was its ultimate result? To this question, unfortunately, there can be no definite answer, for the simple reason that the order was not allowed to function as originally intended. First, Ewing himself relaxed its terms by issuing, on November 20, Order No. 20. This provided for a limited resettlement of the depopulated district by “loyal persons” under a strict system of screening and accountability.[31] Then, in January 1864, as part of a general re-organization of military affairs in the West, the border counties came under the command of Brigadier General Egbert B. Brown, a Missouri militia officer who disapproved of Order No. 11. Acting without prior consultation with Schofield or his approval, Brown on January 14 issued an order permitting all persons not “disloyal or unworthy” to return to their homes in the district.[32] Although nominally similar to Order No. 20, Brown’s order set up a very loose procedure for determining loyalty and disloyalty, and it seemingly ignored the existence of Ewing’s resettlement program, under which, according to the Kansas City Western Journal of Commerce, “nine-tenths of all the really loyal who intend to return have done so.”[33] Ewing at once protested the new order to Schofield, declaring that it would undo all that Order No. 11 had accomplished, and that “General Brown will let disloyal refugees return, and following them will return the guerrillas.”[34] But Schofield soon ceased to command in Missouri, and Brown’s policy remained in effect.

As a consequence Ewing’s prediction was fulfilled. By May Colonel James H. Ford, commander of Union forces in Jackson County, was writing that “the county is full of bushwhackers, and they have friends all through the country who furnish them with food . . . . I am satisfied that there are many families that are feeding them that have proved their loyalty. . . .”[35] And in June, following a scout through Jackson County, another Federal officer reported that “wherever we found settlements there we found signs of bushwhackers, and vice versa. Around Hickman Mills, Pleasant Hill, and the Sni Hills there are a good many families returned under the orders of General Brown, all of them bearing protection papers, either from General Brown’s headquarters or headquarters at St. Louis.”[36]

Significantly, not one of the bushwhackers in his memoirs indicates that Order No. 11 in any way handicapped their operations in 1864. On the contrary, one of them related that Quantrill’s band, when it returned to Missouri in the spring, stopped off at a farmhouse and “got a good breakfast of biscuits and bacon . . . prepared by the woman of the house.”[37]

To be sure, it might be argued that Order No. 11 was successful since there were no more guerrilla raids into Kansas from Missouri following its issuance. But it is extremely doubtful that the order as such was more than a minor and indirect factor in achieving this result. Of greater importance were the strengthened border defenses of Kansas following the Lawrence Massacre, an improved home guard system in that state, and above all the fact that the bushwhackers during the summer of 1864 concentrated their operation in Northern and Central Missouri so as to prepare the way for Sterling Price’s invasion that fall.[38] If the guerrillas had wanted to make another foray into Kansas they could have done so at almost any time. Certainly all through 1864 and even in 1865 Kansas communities were in a constant fret over being raided, a good indication that they placed little faith in the effectiveness of the badly watered-down Order No. 11.[39]

Regarded objectively from the standpoint of historical perspective Order No. 11 was a natural and perhaps inevitable response on the part of the Federal military authorities to a situation which had become intolerable. It was, by mid-Victorian if not by modern standards, very cruel. Yet this cruelty, in the final analysis, merely reflected the cruelty of the Kansas-Missouri Border War, without doubt the most savage and bitter phase of the entire Civil War.

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NOTES


[1]U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 128 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880-1901), Series I, 22, pt. 2, 473 (hereinafter cited as O.R., followed by series number, volume number, part number [if any], and page). The terms of the order also included a narrow strip of the northern part of Vernon County. In all, the region affected by the order had a population of about 40,000 at the beginning of the war.

[2] For example, see Jay Monaghan, Civil War on the Western Border (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955), 287; Carl W. Breihan, Quantrill and his Civil War Guerrillas (Denver: Sage, 1959), 135-39; Darrell Garwood, Crossroads of America: The Story of Kansas City (New York: Norton, 1948), 320-21; John N. Edwards, Noted Guerrillas; or, The Warfare of the Border (St. Louis: Bryan, Brand, 1877), 205; Charles Robinson, The Kansas Conflict (Lawrence, Kans.: Privately printed, 1898), 447-48.

Editor’s Note: The article as published in MHR in 1963 uses a death toll of 150 from the raid on Lawrence, which was the standard figure used at the time. Castel reports he later came to the conclusion the actual number was probably closer to 180, and that he now accepts the estimate of “around two hundred” as given by Edward E. Leslie in The Devil Knows How to Ride: William Clarke Quantrill and His Confederate Raiders, Random House, 1996, p.237. We have made this correction at the author’s request.

[3] See Lt. Col. R. H. Hunt, General Order No. 11 (Topeka: Kansas Commandery of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, 1908), 3-7; Henry E. Palmer, “The Lawrence Raid,” Kansas Historical Collections, 6 (18971900): 317-25; Shalor W. Eldridge, Recollections of Early Days in Kansas (Topeka: Kansas State Printing Plant, 1920), 197.

[4] The Kansas City Western Journal of Commerce, January 23, 1864, estimated that in 1863 nine-tenths of the people in Jackson, Cass, and Bates counties “supplied and aided” the guerrillas.

[5] Ibid., June 13, 1863.

[6] Ibid., May 2, 1863.

[7] O.R., I, 22, pt. 2, 428-29.

[8] Ibid., 450-51, 460-61.

[9] Kansas City Western Journal of Commerce, September 5, October 3, October 10, 1863, quoting the Lexington Union and the St. Louis Republican.

[10] C. B. Rollins, ed., “Letters of George Caleb Bingham to James S. Rollins,” Missouri Historical Review, 33 (October 1938): 62.

[11] Bingham completed the painting in November 1868. The original hangs in the art gallery of the State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia.

[12] The above statements and quotations are from a public letter written by Bingham in 1877, most conveniently found in William L. Webb, Battles and Biographies of Missourians (Kansas City: Hudson-Kimberly, 1900), 256-64.

[13] Albert Castel, Frontier State at War. Kansas, 1861-1865 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958), 111-12.

[14] William E. Connelly, Quantrill and the Border Wars (Cedar Rapids, Iowa: Torch Press, 1910), 417-18.

[15] Castel, Frontier State at War, 146-49.

[16] Kansas City Western Journal of Commerce, September 5, 1863; Schofield to Ewing, January 25, 1877, in Webb, Battles and Biographies, 265.

[17] O.R., I, 22, pt. 2, 471-72. John N. Edwards, Noted Guerrillas, 205-6, who got most of the material for his book from former guerrillas, even stated, mistakenly, that the order actually originated with Schofield, who in turn got his instructions from Washington.

[18] Kansas City Western Journal of Commerce, September 19, 1863.

[19] Vivian K. McLarty, ed., “The Civil War Letters of Colonel Bazel Lazear,” Missouri Historical Review, 44 (July 1950): 390.

[20] O.R., I, 22, pt. 2, 570-71, 591; ibid., 34, pt. 2, 326, 375; Kansas City Western Journal of Commerce, September 19, November 23, 1863, January 30, 1864. John N. Edwards, who rarely missed an opportunity to berate the Kansans, declared that Ewing executed Order No. 11 “mercifully.” Edwards, Noted Guerrillas, 206.

[21] About one-half of the refugees crossed into North Missouri, while most of the other half went South. O.R., I, 22, pt. 2, 753. Only about 600 of the 10,000 some inhabitants of Cass County remained there by September 9. Richard S. Brownlee, Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958), 126.

[22] John M. Schofield, Forty-six Years in the Army (New York: Century, 1897), 83.

[23] Theodore Ropp, War in the Modern World (Durham: Duke University Press, 1959), 77; Cyril Falls, A Hundred Years of War (London: Duckworth, 1953), 278, 282, 288-89.

[24] Ibid., 148, 279.

[25] Virgil Carrington Jones, Gray Ghosts and Rebel Raiders (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 279.

[26] O.R., I, 22, pt. 2, 484; ibid., 34, pt. 2, 242-43; Webb, Battles and Biographies, 261.

[27] Kansas City Western Journal of Commerce, September 5, 1863.

[28] George Miller, Missouri’s Memorable Decade, 1860-1870 (Columbia, Mo.: Press of E. W. Stephens, 1898), 36.

[29] Diary of Sherman Bodwell, MS, Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka, August 29, 1863.

[30] MS Memoirs of Frank Smith, copy of original in possession of author.

[31] O.R., I, 22, pt. 2, 693-94, 702-3, 713-14; Kansas City Western Journal of Commerce, November 21, 1863.

[32] O.R., I, 34, pt. 2, 79-80.

[33] Kansas City Western Journal of Commerce, January 23, 30, 1864. About 250 families were allowed to resettle under Order No. 20, according to Ewing’s chief quartermaster. William Birdsall, comp., The History of Jackson County, Missouri (Kansas City: Union Historical Co., 1881), 290-91.

[34] O.R., I, 34, pt. 2, 81, 89.

[35] Ibid., pt. 3, 623.

[36] Ibid., pt. 1, 1022.

[37] MS Memoirs of Frank Smith.

[38] Brownlee, Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy, 206-9.

[39] Kansas City Western Journal of Commerce, June 18, July 2, 1864; O.R., I, 34, pt. 3, 401, 502; ibid., pt. 4, 25, 54-55; Charles Robinson to Mrs. Charles Robinson, February 5, 1865, Charles Robinson Papers, Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka.