Disunion August 23, 2013, Tom Ewing’s Dirty War By NICOLE ETCHESON Thomas Ewing Jr. was a conscientious man. Though never as flamboyant as his foster brother, William Tecumseh Sherman, Ewing was ambitious for political fame and fortune, as befitted the son of one of Ohio’s leading Whig politicians. His father had served both in the United States Senate and in the cabinets of Presidents William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor. Thomas Ewing Jr., or Tom, was his father’s personal secretary when the elder Ewing ran Taylor’s Department of the Interior. Tom Ewing graduated from Brown University and became a lawyer. He migrated to Kansas Territory and settled in Leavenworth, where he practiced law, speculated in land and railroads, and engaged in free-state politics. Kenneth J. Heineman, a biographer of the Ewing family, believes Tom wanted to re-create in Kansas his father’s rise to wealth and power a generation earlier on the Ohio frontier. But drought and political instability in Kansas rendered Ewing’s land speculations unprofitable, leaving him in debt and reliant on income from his law practice when the secession crisis came. The Ewings hoped for compromise with the South. Both father and son attended the Washington Peace Conference, one of the efforts at compromise that preceded Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration; the elder Ewing represented Ohio, the younger Kansas. Tom wrote to his brother Hugh that he hoped to see the Republican Party “extend to the south the olive branch — and if that is refused, draw the sword.” Southern secession coincided with Kansas’ admission to the Union in January 1861. Tom Ewing hoped to become one of the new state’s United States senators but was out-maneuvered in the balloting. Instead, he received the chief justiceship of the Kansas Supreme Court. Late in the summer of 1862, Tom Ewing resigned his judicial post over his wife’s fierce objections. As he explained to his father, “During the war the Chief Justice of Kansas should be an old man or a cripple.” Three of the Ewing brothers served in the Union Army during the Civil War. Tom’s older brother Hugh fought at Antietam, Vicksburg and Missionary Ridge. His younger brother Charles followed Sherman, their foster brother and brother-in-law, in marching through Georgia. But Heineman argues that, of all the brothers, “Tom Ewing had the dirtiest war.” Tom became colonel of the 11th Kansas Infantry, which stayed in the Midwest. Early on, Tom had not seen the Missourians as a threat to Kansas, and doubted that they would disturb “the Kansas Hornets nest.” Considering the Missourians “devils, but also cowards,” he was actually more worried about the destabilizing incursions of Kansas Jayhawkers into Missouri. In late 1862, Ewing served under Gen. James G. Blunt in Arkansas and saw battle at Cane Hill and Prairie Grove. As a reward for his performance in the Arkansas campaign, Ewing was promoted to brigadier general, and then received his assignment as commander of the District of the Border. Along the border, Kansans and Missourians had persisted in the animosities of the pre-war period. Kansas Jayhawkers, under leaders like the fiery James H. Lane, who had received one of the Kansas senate seats, had been sent away from the border because of their depredations against Missourians. Yet increasingly, the problem was that of bushwhackers, pro-Confederate guerrillas, who attacked Union troops and targets inside Missouri, and occasionally raided across the border into Kansas. Ewing received command of the District of the Border because the Lincoln administration saw him as a moderate Unionist, who was neither so radical as to offend Missourians nor so conservative as to put off the Kansans. Ewing and the 11th Kansas, which he had commanded, were seen as disciplined, in sharp contrast to the marauding Seventh Kansas — the infamous Jayhawkers. Publicly at least, Ewing downplayed the bushwhacker threat to Kansas. In the summer of 1863, he told a meeting in Olathe, Kan.: “There is little at present to fear on this side of the border from guerilla bands.” Nonetheless, Ewing established posts inside Kansas at Aubry, Olathe, Mound City and Paola. Indeed, Ewing soon proved less equanimous than his superiors had hoped. Before Ewing took command, Union officers in Kansas and Missouri had accepted the necessity of retaliating against civilians, including women. By early 1862 Gen. Henry Halleck, commanding in St. Louis, had ordered that women and children, as well as men not in arms, were to be regarded “as non-combatants” unless they provided aid to the enemy, in which case they became “belligerents, and will be treated as such.” That order gave the local commanders wide latitude – and they took advantage of it. Ewing claimed that family members, especially women, were “actively and heartily engaged in feeding, clothing and sustaining” the bushwhackers and, at his direction, a number of women were arrested and jailed in a Kansas City building. Missouri guerrillas claimed that the subsequent collapse of that building, which claimed the lives of five women related to the bushwhackers, provoked William Clarke Quantrill’s band to attack Lawrence, Kan., in August 1863. The brutal deaths of 150 men and boys in the raid shocked the border. Quantrill’s guerrillas shot civilians in cold blood, often in front of their wives and children, then set fire to homes and businesses. Corpses were burned beyond recognition, and some bodies were never recovered. Ewing was then in Leavenworth, where he took command of five companies of the 11th Ohio Cavalry and joined the fruitless pursuit of Quantrill. Both Ewing and his defenders had many excuses for his failure to protect Lawrence: it was unprecedented for a guerrilla force of that size to penetrate 50 miles into Kansas and attack a still-sleeping civilian target; even though the guerrillas had been sighted on their 11-hour journey from the border to Lawrence, no one alerted the town; and the Vicksburg campaign had stripped the Kansas border of Union troops just as paroles granted to Confederates had swelled the bushwhacker forces. Ewing was supported by his superior, Maj. Gen. John M. Schofield, who had already been considering depopulating the areas that sustained bushwhacking before the attack on Lawrence. Still, Ewing expected to be made a scapegoat by Kansas politicians, “a burnt offering to satisfy the just and terrible passion of the people.” Instead, those passions turned across the state line. “I must hold Missouri responsible for this fearful, fiendish raid,” Kanas Gov. Thomas Carney warned Schofield. Carney did not believe that such a large bushwhacking force, estimated at 400 men, could have been assembled without the complicity of western Missouri residents. Fanning the clamor for revenge was Senator Lane, who had been forced to flee into the cornfields around Lawrence, clad only in his nightshirt, to evade Quantrill’s raiders. Not only did he want Ewing removed, but he told a Leavenworth audience he wanted to “see every foot of ground in Jackson, Cass, and Bates counties [Missouri] burned over — everything laid waste.” Schofield feared that the ever-volatile Lane might raise his own force of Kansans to invade Missouri and wreak revenge; he wrote Governor Carney of his fear that a retaliatory expedition under Lane would not limit its “vengeance . . . to those who were actually guilty.” Instead such “an irrepressible organization of enraged citizens” would carry out “indiscriminate retaliation upon innocent and guilty alike.” Schofield informed Carney, “You cannot expect me to permit anything of the sort. My plainest duty requires me to prevent it at all hazards.” Four days after Quantrill’s raid, Ewing issued General Order No. 11, which expelled almost the entire population from the western Missouri counties of Bates, Cass and Jackson and part of Vernon. Anyone living outside a one-mile radius from military posts had to leave. If residents of those counties could procure a certificate of loyalty, they could relocate to a military station within the district; without such a certificate, however, they had to vacate the district altogether. Whether loyal or disloyal, an estimated 20,000 civilians were given two weeks to pack and leave their homes. The historian Daniel E. Sutherland calls Order No. 11 “the most repressive U.S. military measure of the war against civilians.” Another historian, Michael Fellman, has placed Order No. 11 second only to Sherman’s March through Georgia for its harsh impact on a civilian population – and unlike Georgia, Fellman points out, Missouri was a Union state. Why did the erstwhile even-tempered Ewing take such a drastic action? According to Sutherland, he said he hoped the order “would placate Kansans and spare Missouri a potentially ruthless invasion.” Schofield certainly considered the evacuation less punitive than allowing Lane’s proposed expedition. In later years, Schofield would argue that the guerrilla war had largely depopulated that part of Missouri already. Halleck, now general in chief, defended Order No. 11 as “within the recognized laws of war” and cited historical precedents from the Napoleonic wars. Yet Order No. 11 in fact did little to solve the guerrilla problem. The Confederate general Jo Shelby did complain that Order No. 11 “cut off a large amount of supplies” and “removed a large number of our friends and sympathizers.” Similarly, the guerrilla William Gregg said that the bushwhackers had only apples to eat in the counties affected by Order No. 11 and nearly starved. Fellman, however, writes that the Missouri bushwhackers simply shifted their activities to other parts of Missouri. The Confederate guerrillas typically left Missouri during the fall, in any case, as the foliage — the bush that hid them — thinned with the colder weather. Quantrill’s band spent the winter after the Lawrence raid in northern Texas. By November, Ewing allowed loyal residents who could procure permits to return. At the beginning of 1864, another commander allowed all the displaced people, regardless of loyalty, to come home. Although many of the refugees did not return until the war was over, by spring 1864, a Union officer was reporting that western Missouri was again “full of bushwhackers, and they have friends all through the country who furnish them with food.” But Missourians never forgot the toll taken by Order No. 11. Kansas troops oversaw the evacuation and were not gentle with the Missourians. They stole from the refugees, on the pretext of recovering property pillaged from Lawrence, and set fire to homes and crops. Horrified observers noted the trail of women, children and the elderly who marched along dusty roads, under a scorching August sun, sometimes pulling carts filled with their possessions. Even Unionists in Missouri considered the order “inhuman, unmanly, and barbarous.” In St. Louis, the politician Thomas J. Gantt agreed that Quantrill and his men “deserve the treatment of wolves,” but recoiled from subjecting the innocent to such punishment. Ewing suffered an enormous personal cost from the Lawrence massacre, both professionally and physically, as stress caused boils to erupt over his body. But Order No. 11 helped salvage his career. Ewing and his defenders always insisted that the guerrilla war had been uniquely cruel, and that General Order No. 11 had been a necessary measure – “an act of wisdom, courage, and humanity,” in Schofield’s words — to suppress the bushwhackers. Whether or not that judgment was correct, there’s little doubt that Ewing both reacted to and helped foment the “dirty war” on the border. Follow Disunion at twitter/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Nicole Etcheson Nicole Etcheson is a professor of history at Ball State University and the author of the prize-winning “A Generation at War: The Civil War Era in a Northern Community.”
Posted on: Sat, 24 Aug 2013 05:11:35 +0000
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