The Confederate guerrilla insurgency in Missouri ...

Bushwhacking and the Self-Destruction of Missouri’s Planter Elite, 1862-1865 Mark W. Geiger Paper presented at the American Historical Association annual conference, January 2006 in Philadelphia, PA ABSTRACT This paper links the guerrilla fighting in Civil War Missouri with a previously unknown Confederate financial conspiracy that originated at the outset of the War. In 1861, a small group of highly placed politicians and wealthy southern sympathizers secretly planned to divert money from the state treasury and the banks, in order to arm rebel military units. The conspiracy failed, but set in motion a series of events that virtually wiped out Missouri’s antebellum slaveholding elite, which in turn aggravated the guerrilla violence in the central and western parts of the state. In the estimation of some historians, the Confederate guerrilla insurgency in Missouri was the worst such conflict ever to occur on American soil. Frederick Dyer’s list of military engagements drawn from the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion supports this view. Missouri ranked third among the states in the number of military engagements fought within its borders; only Virginia and Tennessee had more. In those two other states, the regular armies did most of the fighting in bloody, set-piece battles. In Missouri, most of the engagements were clashes between Unionist militia and free-floating bands of Confederate bushwhackers. On the eve of the Civil War Kentucky, another state that invites comparison, resembled Missouri more than any other state. Both were Border slave states with populations drawn mainly from the South, and of the same mixed loyalties. The two states had ties of family, as well: prior to the Civil War Missouri received more settlers from Kentucky than from any other state. Yet Kentucky had fewer than half as many military engagements as Missouri, ranking ninth overall.1 During the War itself, conditions in Missouri were infamous. Over the course of the War, the New York Times alone reported on the Missouri bushwhackers nearly four hundred times. On September 22, 1863 the Times had this to say: Missouri is today more dangerously disturbed if not more dangerously disloyal than Mississippi. More contempt for the army and the Government is daily poured forth there—more turbulence in talk and in action is indulged in—and human life is less safe than anywhere else within all the military lines of the United States. In this latter respect the condition of Missouri is fearful. Not a day passes that does not chronicle house-burnings and murders.2 One month before this story appeared, Confederate guerrillas from Missouri perpetrated the bloodiest civilian massacre of the entire War, depicted here on the front page of Harper’s Weekly [SLIDE 1: LAWRENCE MASSACRE]: the 1 geiger_AHA_2006_ppr_1 1/31/2014

Bushwhacking and the Self-Destruction of Missouri’s Planter Elite, 1862-1865 Mark W. Geiger raid on Lawrence, Kansas, in which combined guerrilla bands under Quantrill, Todd, and Anderson murdered over two hundred unarmed men and boys. A year later, Ulysses S. Grant also wrote that he considered Missouri (and Kentucky) more difficult to control than Mississippi.3 Lawrence notwithstanding, what distinguished Missouri’s guerrilla war was not that it was more atrocious, but that there was more of it. Border States from Kentucky to Maryland experienced guerrilla fighting and had their own lists of atrocities, and of atrocious individuals. More guerrilla incidents in Missouri suggest that there were more guerrillas, not that the Missourians were for some reason working double shifts. Following this line of reasoning, the question becomes, why should more men join guerrilla bands in Missouri than elsewhere?4 The answer, I believe, is this. All the usual reasons for joining guerrilla bands were present in Missouri: mixed loyalties of the population, a breakdown of civil administration, hostile armies fighting on the state’s soil, and atrocities and reprisals by both sides. But there was another factor at work in Missouri. In about a third of the state, the region in which the majority of the reported guerrilla incidents occurred, I have discovered that many of the state’s wealthy pro-southern families and their extended kinfolk suffered greater material and monetary losses than their counterparts elsewhere. These losses were not the result of physical destruction of property or emancipation of slaves, but of litigation. The extent of this litigation was so large, and the effects so severe, that a large portion of the state’s antebellum slaveholding elite was economically shattered, to an extent not seen in other formerly slave states. The episode I’m about to describe was previously unnoticed because the relevant data set is very large, and dispersed over a wide geographic area. I realized that something was amiss because I used to manage an audit department that investigated fraud. Beginning in mid-1861 Missouri’s Governor Claiborne Fox Jackson, formerly the State Banking Commissioner [SLIDE 2: CLAIBORNE FOX JACKSON], and a group of highly placed politicians and bankers secretly planned to divert a half million dollars from the banks and the state treasury to arm the pro-Confederate Missouri State Guard. The plan was that when the South won, the new Confederate state government of Missouri would reimburse the banks directly. The original scheme was aborted following pre-emptive Union military strikes first in St. Louis, and later in Boonville, in May and June of 1861. The Jackson government was overturned and for the rest of the War was a government in exile.5 Missouri’s bankers had been ready to hand over the money directly to the Jackson government, but after June 1861 that government only existed on paper. So instead, the bankers granted thousands of loans to leading southern men, channeling the money through the branch banks in the interior of the state. On the face of them these loans were legitimate business transactions, made in 2 geiger_AHA_2006_ppr_1 1/31/2014

Bushwhacking and the Self-Destruction of Missouri’s Planter Elite, 1862-1865 Mark W. Geiger return for promissory notes such as this one [SLIDE 3: PROMISSORY NOTE]. The money was then used to arm and provision rebel forces. Ultimately, over twenty-eight hundred borrowers signed such notes in thirtyseven different counties where southern sympathy was strongest, as shown in the map [SLIDE 4: DISTRIBUTION OF PROMISSORY-NOTE LAWSUITS]. Bankers and borrowers alike expected the South to win quickly, and the Confederate state government-in-exile had pledged to reimburse the costs of the War. With this supposed safety net in place, the borrowers took far more money than they could repay, and the banks handed out such large sums that they were virtually drained of cash. This was a massive fraud against all the banks’ other depositors, customers, and investors; but the rapidly escalating war was far more pressing. The majority of the state’s branch banks were involved in this lending, which eventually totaled about three million dollars. That was a huge sum of money in 1861, when a state-of-the-art military sidearm, a Colt Army model .44, sold for thirteen dollars and seventy-five cents.6 In researching this paper, I looked closely at over three hundred of these loan cases litigated in three contiguous counties in Missouri’s Boonslick region, Cooper, Pettis and Saline Counties, on the south bank of the Missouri River. I found that the recipients of the money were not a representative sample of secessionist sentiment in their home counties in 1861. I found that, in the crony capitalism typical of the day, almost all the funds went to the bankers’ own relatives, which was to say the much-interrelated families of the ruling elite: wealthy merchants and traders, planters, and local politicians. Three or four intermarriages between the same two families were common, sometimes in the same generation. Family connections were frequently generations old, surviving multiple migrations and going back to the pre-Revolutionary southern Tidewater region.7 A typical promissory-note signer was Walker H. Finley of Saline County, a fortyone-year-old native Kentuckian, county judge, and stock dealer. In 1860 Finley owned fourteen slaves and real and personal property worth nearly sixty thousand dollars. Between mid-1861 and early 1862 he, with twenty-three cosigners, most of them relatives, signed twenty different promissory notes that were then cashed at cooperating banks. The money, some thirty-eight thousand dollars, evidently went to purchase livestock for the rebel forces. In 1862, while driving ninety-five head of cattle down to the rebel lines, Finley was arrested and charged with communicating with the enemy.8 Missouri’s Unionists were not able to halt the removal of the banks’ money until it was largely too late. After several ham-handed attempts to seize the banks’ funds, in late 1861 Missouri’s Union government began purging pro-southern bankers, which meant nearly all of them, from their positions, and replacing them with Union men. This policy finally stanched the flow of money to the rebel forces, but also had important collateral effects. The War, of course, lasted far 3 geiger_AHA_2006_ppr_1 1/31/2014

Bushwhacking and the Self-Destruction of Missouri’s Planter Elite, 1862-1865 Mark W. Geiger longer than anyone expected. The majority of the loans were written for four months, and defaulted. The Unionists who controlled the banks after mid-1862 proceeded to file civil suits to recover on the defaulted loans. With regard to Finley, he and his fellow cosigners were named as defendants in twenty different lawsuits, one apiece for each defaulted promissory note. Judgments totaled over forty thousand dollars. None of the defendants had that kind of money―or credit―in 1863 and 1864, and their farms were all sold at auction by the county sheriff.9 In the 1870 census Finley is listed as a tenant farmer owning no real estate and personal property worth four hundred dollars, or less than one percent of his 1860 holdings. What happened to Finley was typical. Defendants were, on average, sued in two to three cases at once, for far more money than they could pay. Also, each promissory note was generally cosigned by two or three defendants, ironically for the sake of security. Consequently, on average each defendant was a codefendant with four or five other persons, each of whom was jointly and severally liable— that is, each defendant was liable for the entire debt or any portion of it, at the plaintiff’s option. Since there was no bankruptcy law, state or federal, in force when these suits were litigated, and no state law for relief of insolvents, there was no established procedure for distributing the assets of an insolvent debtor among multiple creditors. Judgments were awarded and paid on a first come, first served basis, and the last creditor in line might receive nothing. Thus if one creditor filed suit, often the defendant’s other creditors filed as well, in effect making all of an individual’s outstanding debts immediately payable. This situation was even worse than it sounds. Missouri before the War was, like much of the South and West, a cash-poor and credit-poor economy. Indebtedness was consequently inevitable, and also served to cement social connections and patronage relationships between family members, neighbors, landlords and tenants. The laws and the complex tangle of prewar indebtedness meant that many more people would ultimately be dragged into insolvency than had originally signed the notes, though this was a large enough group. Anyone being sued for debt and facing the prospect of a sheriff’s auction would immediately call in any debts owed him.10 Between the thousands of suits arising from the rebel loans and the ripple effects out into the surrounding communities, entire families and neighborhoods could be taken down at once. By 1864 and 1865 surviving newspapers in this region have entire pages filled with notices of sheriffs’ auctions, and hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland were sold to satisfy these judgments. Thus, the courts accomplished in Missouri what the Radical Republicans could not in the Confederacy proper: there, the antebellum gentry retained much of their land and social position after 1865. Persistence rates for Missouri’s planters are significantly lower than in other former slave states.11 4 geiger_AHA_2006_ppr_1 1/31/2014

Bushwhacking and the Self-Destruction of Missouri’s Planter Elite, 1862-1865 Mark W. Geiger This brings me back to the bushwhacking. Though other regions of the state experienced guerrilla violence [SLIDE 5: DISTRIBUTION OF RECORDED GUERRILLA INCIDENTS], the majority of the reported guerrilla incidents occurred in the same counties as where the debts were litigated [SLIDE 6: COMPARISON OF MAPS 1 AND 2]. To investigate the relationship between the debts and the bushwhacking, I looked at an expanded sample of five counties that had both―Chariton, Cooper, Lafayette, Pettis, and Saline Counties, in the central region along the Missouri River, where I was able to identify sixty bushwhackers who had resided there before the War. I found that while about twenty-five percent of the families actively supporting the rebellion in these counties became embroiled in the debts, eighty percent of the bushwhackers from these counties came from indebted families. Put another way, members of indebted families were twelve times more likely to join bushwhacker bands than were members of other pro-Confederate families. Finally, I found significant demographic differences between these bushwhackers and another sample from southwest Missouri where no debts were litigated. I found that many bushwhackers from the five counties came from quite wealthy backgrounds, whereas this was not true of the sample from the southwest counties. Southwest Missouri was generally poorer than the counties bordering the Missouri River, but this does not account for the different results. The point is, sons of elite families joined guerrilla bands in the central and western counties, and this was not true in the southwest.12 The history of the Warrens of Lafayette County typifies what happened to indebted families. The Warrens originally came from Virginia by way of Kentucky, and by the outbreak of the Civil War had lived in Missouri for decades. In 1860 they were a thriving clan in Lafayette County, with nine households comprising fifty-one family members, with ties of blood and marriage to nearly a dozen other families. Altogether, the nine Warren households owned seventyeight slaves. With the outbreak of fighting in 1861, eight Warrens—fathers, sons, brothers, uncles and cousins—from four different households cosigned eleven different promissory notes. Since the notes had been cosigned, when they were defaulted each of the eight signers was sued an average of twice; each household was sued on average four times. Judgments in the eleven cases were in excess of thirty-six hundred dollars, forcing the sale of the entire property of these four households in 1864. By 1870, of the eight Warrens who were sued, two had left the state, two had disappeared, one was dead, and three remained in Lafayette County, owning only modest property. Three of these four households were gone.13 In 1863, while lawsuits against the Warrens were in court, the newspapers and military dispatches name three sons of these indebted households as members of a bushwhacker band led by Dave Poole, shown here pointing a revolver at his chin. [SLIDE 7: CLEMENT, POOLE, HENDRICKS] In July, 1863 a gang of bushwhackers led by Poole and including the Warrens shot their way through a 5 geiger_AHA_2006_ppr_1 1/31/2014

Bushwhacking and the Self-Destruction of Missouri’s Planter Elite, 1862-1865 Mark W. Geiger German community in the Warrens’ old neighborhood, indiscriminately killing four people and wounding six or seven more. A month later Poole and the Warrens participated in the massacre at Lawrence, Kansas.14 James Waller, also of Lafayette County, had a similar story; but Waller’s case also shows how these events were subsequently recast in family memory. In 1861 Waller was a prosperous, thirty-one-year-old farmer, married with six children, and the owner of six slaves. When the War broke out, Waller and two other cosigners executed two promissory notes. By early 1863 the suits were in court; by mid-1864 the property of the three men was sold at public auction. Shortly before this happened, Waller’s name appears in federal military dispatches, described as a “notorious” member of Andy Blunt’s band of bushwhackers. Waller was shot by a federal patrol in March, 1864. Waller’s descendants, however, remember his story differently. In the family version, Waller owned a large plantation in Lafayette County (which incidentally he did not), and was murdered by Union troops when he refused to reveal where the family’s “fortune” was hidden. The soldiers then burned Waller’s house and set his slaves free, over their objections. So the family version preserves the outlines of the story: Union authorities took Waller’s property, and killed him. Lawsuits are not the stuff of legend, however, and as the family tells it, the soldiers took Waller’s property, not the courts. Also, the family story fails to mention that the troops killed Waller because he and Blunt’s band had murdered unarmed civilians and prisoners, and stormed a jail. Waller had also bragged of having personally killed fourteen men at Lawrence.15 To summarize my findings thus far, a minority of the pro-Confederate citizenry in the interior counties of Missouri was stripped of its property through lawsuits, but this minority contained many of the counties’ wealthiest residents and their extended families. Also, four-fifths of the now identifiable bushwhackers from these counties came from these indebted families. Lastly, bushwhackers from indebted counties have a different demographic profile from bushwhackers from other counties. These findings support a theory of Missouri’s guerrilla war that was put forward in a 1977 article by Don Bowen. Bowen studied bushwhackers from Jackson County, Missouri, where, as it happened, about a hundred and twenty debt cases were litigated. Bowen noted that a number of the bushwhackers came from prosperous, even leading, families. Bowen argued that his findings fit the relative deprivation hypothesis, as it is known in political science. According to this theory, when people are prevented from achieving the goals they seek, or are threatened with the loss of values and a way of life already attained, then violence can be expected—political violence in particular. Bowen goes on to state that “if relative deprivation is a plausible explanation of participation in the [Missouri guerrilla] uprising, then something must have happened to the participants in 1861–1865 so that values which they expected to attain became unattainable. Moreover, what occurred cannot have fallen with equal weight upon those who didn’t participate or it cannot be the explanatory 6 geiger_AHA_2006_ppr_1 1/31/2014

Bushwhacking and the Self-Destruction of Missouri’s Planter Elite, 1862-1865 Mark W. Geiger factor.” That something, Bowen wrote, was the prospect of permanent loss of fortune and social position in families that drove some of their men to join bushwhacker bands. Bowen, however, was silent on the question of why sons of some well-off slaveholding families became bushwhackers, while the sons of others—in Missouri and in the other slaveholding elites farther South—did not. I would argue that the consequences of the indebtedness created precisely this condition of “relative deprivation” to which Bowen alluded, depriving these Missourians of what they had and thought they would continue to have. 16 To conclude, in this paper I have tried to contribute to the larger debate over why guerrilla insurgencies occur in some places and not in others, and why some men join guerrilla forces and others do not. The consequences of the failed financial conspiracy of 1861 created a terrible burden that fell selectively on a portion of Missouri’s pro-Confederate population, a population already in crisis. No one who has ever been party to a lawsuit will wish to repeat the experience, and these families were being sued several times apiece. All around them, they would have seen their relatives caught up in similar litigation, a process that inevitably resulted in the forced sale of their land. In the mainly insular, small towns and rural neighborhoods of this region, it must have seemed the whole social order was being taken apart by an implacable, punitive justice system, enforced at the point of federal bayonets. One can only imagine the anger and desperation of the people at the receiving end of that justice.

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Bushwhacking and the Self-Destruction of Missouri’s Planter Elite, 1862-1865 Mark W. Geiger ENDNOTES Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War, (New York, 1989), xvi; Sutherland, “Guerrilla Warfare,” 263; Frederick H. Dyer, in his Compendium of the War of the Rebellion counted military movements of all sorts in eighteen states and territories listed in the Official Records. Counting only those actions that indicate actual armed conflict took place (‘battles,’ ‘engagements,’ ‘combats,’ ‘actions,’ ‘assaults,’ ‘skirmishes,’ ‘sieges,’ ‘raids,’ ‘affairs,’ and ‘captures’), gives a total for Missouri of 892. This still makes Missouri third in the country after Virginia with 1,813 and Tennessee with 1,213. Regarding the size of these battles, the Civil War Sites Advisory Commission Report, completed by the National Park Service, classifies battles from A to D, in order of importance. Using this classification, Missouri had 29 total battles, A, through D, again making Missouri the third-ranked state in this respect as well, after Virginia and Tennessee. Most of the rest of Missouri’s 864 battles were guerrilla skirmishes. Frederick H. Dyer, A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion (3 vols., New York, 1959), II, 582; Civil War Sites Advisory Commission report: hearing before the Subcommittee on Public Lands, National Parks, and Forests of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, United States Senate, One Hundred Third Congress, first session .. September 14, 1993, (Washington, D. C., 1994), Table 2, (February 2005), http://www.cr.nps.gov/hps/abpp/cwsac/cwstab2.html. Kentucky had 453 actions of all kinds, by Dyer’s count, making it ninth among all the states. Of these, 391 were engagements between hostile forces, counted as above. Ranked in this fashion, Kentucky still ranks ninth among all the states. Dyer, Compendium, 582. 1

2

“Trouble in Missouri,” New York Times, September 22, 1863, 4.

3T.

J. Stiles, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, (New York, 2002), 95. John Y. Simon, editor, The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967, Volume 11, 155. Quoted in Mark E. Neely, Jr. “Was the Civil War a Total War?” Civil War History I (No. 4, 2004): 454. Harper’s Weekly, September 23, 1865; New York Times, Aug. 15, 1865, 3; October 2, 1865, 1; Troy D. Smith, “Don’t You Beg, and Don’t You Dodge,” Civil War Times Illustrated, 40, No. 6 (2001), 40–46, 72–73. 4

Engraving courtesy of the State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri. Christopher Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of Southern Identity in the Border West. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 242–62, 272–3. William E. Parrish, History of Missouri 1860–1875 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 3:2–3. New York Times, December 8, 1861, 3; reprinting from the St. Louis Missouri 5

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Bushwhacking and the Self-Destruction of Missouri’s Planter Elite, 1862-1865 Mark W. Geiger Republican, December 3, 1861. “An Act for the Relief of the Bank of the State of Missouri, the Merchants Bank, the Mechanics’ Bank, the Exchange Bank, the Southern Bank, the Bank of St. Louis, the Farmers’ Bank of Missouri, and the Western Bank of Missouri,” Laws of the State of Missouri, Passed at the Regular Session of the 21st General Assembly, Begun and Held at the City of Jefferson, on Monday, December 31, 1860 (Jefferson City, W. G. Cheeney, Public Printer, 1861). Timothy W. Hubbard and Lewis E. Davids, Banking in Mid-America: A History of Missouri Banks (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1969), 93. New York Times, June 18, 1861, 4. “An Act to Provide for the Defense of the State of Missouri,” Journal of the Senate, Extra Session of the Rebel Legislature Called Together by a Proclamation of C. F. Jackson, Begun and Held at Neosho, Newton County, Missouri, on the Twenty-First of October, 1861 (Jefferson City: Emory S. Foster, Public Printer, 1865), 34–5. Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of Southern Identity in the Border West, 253 note 15. “An Act to Raise Money to Arm the State, Repel Invasion, and Protect the Lives and Property of the People of Missouri,” approved May 13, 1861. Laws of the State of Missouri Passed at the Called Session of the Twenty-First General Assembly, Begun and Held at the City of Jefferson, on Thursday, May 2, 1861, (Jefferson City, Mo. 1861), 52-55. Mark W. Geiger, “Missouri’s Hidden Civil War: Financial Conspiracy and the End of the Planter Elite, 1861–1865” (PhD dissertation, University of Missouri— Columbia, 2006), 76-7. I estimate the total amount of money raised in the Confederate loans statewide as follows: $1061.18 per case in the three-county sample, times 2815 cases statewide = $2,987,221.70. “Weapons of the Civil War,” URL: http://members. tripod.com/~ProlificPains/wpns.htm (viewed February 2, 2005). The United States Army standard sidearm is presently the Beretta FS92, with a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $715. Beretta USA official website, http://www.berettausa.com /product/product_pistols_main.htm (viewed February 3, 2005). John R. Cable, The Bank of the State of Missouri, Studies in History, Economics and Public Law 102 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923), 273. 6

7Bertram

Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics & Behavior in the Old South (New York, 1986), 345–46; Ralph Mann, “Mountains, Land, and Kin Networks: Burkes Garden, Virginia, in the 1840s and 1850s,” Journal of Southern History, 58 (August 1992), 412; Robert C. Kenzer, Kinship and Neighborhood in a Southern Community: Orange County, North Carolina, 1849–1881 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1987), 37–38; Harold Woodman describes the relationship between farmers and shopkeepers in King Cotton & His Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 1800–1925 (Lexington, Ky., 1968), 79. Antebellum American banks themselves grew out of these networks of personal relations, as noted by Naomi Lamoreaux, Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections, and Economic Development in Industrial New England (New 9 geiger_AHA_2006_ppr_1 1/31/2014

Bushwhacking and the Self-Destruction of Missouri’s Planter Elite, 1862-1865 Mark W. Geiger York, 1994), 4, 23–28; also Larry Schweikart, Banking in the American South from the Age of Jackson to Reconstruction (Baton Rouge, 1987), 213. Geiger, “Missouri’s Hidden Civil War,” 83–90. Only about five percent of the adult white males in the 1860 for the three counties, and seven percent of the household heads, signed for these loans. Source: Manuscript Census Returns, Eighth Census of the United States, Schedule 1, Population, Cooper, Pettis, and Saline Counties, Missouri, http://www.ancestry.com/default.aspx, hereinafter cited as Eighth Census of the United States. Of 369 defendants and 74 bankers in the sample, a total of 382, or eighty-six percent, had a kinship connection to other members of the sample. High as this number appears, it is in fact conservative, based only on surviving genealogical sources; records and memory of some relationships will have been lost. Kin relationships in the sample group are consistent with what is known about the relationships of other southern whites in this period. Joan E. Cashin, “The Structure of Antebellum Planter Families: ‘The Ties that Bound us was Strong’,” Journal of Southern History 56 (February 1990): 55–70; Ralph Mann, “Mountains, Land and Kin Networks: Burkes Garden, Virginia, in the 1840s and 1850s,” Journal of Southern History 58 (August 1992): 411–434. Eighth Census of the United States, Saline County, Missouri, Schedule 1, Population, Roll M653_645, frame 13; and Schedule 2, Slaves, Roll M653, frame 2; Provost Marshal’s File on Confederate Civilians, Missouri State Archives, Jefferson City, Missouri; Saline County Circuit Court Records, Marshall, Missouri; Eighth Census of the United States, Pettis County, Missouri, Schedule 1, Population, Roll M653_638, frame 13, and Schedule 2, Slaves, Roll M653, frame 12; Pettis County Circuit Court Records, Sedalia, Missouri; Taylor’s codefendants included an uncle (John Taylor), a brother (William Taylor), a cousin (William M. Taylor) and a cousin’s brother-in-law (James A. Hughes). Pettis County Circuit Court Records, Sedalia, Missouri; Civil War Service Records, Missouri State Archives, Jefferson City, Missouri; Service Records for Confederate General and Staff Officers, series M331, roll 242. Quoted in Cynthia Dehaven Pitcock and Bill J. Gurley, “I Acted from Principle”: The Civil War Diary of Dr. William M. McPheeters, Confederate Surgeon in the TransMississippi (Fayetteville, Ark., 2002), 348n29; Manuscript Census Returns, Seventh Census of the United States, Cooper County, Missouri, Schedule 1, Population, Roll M432_397, frame 102; Manuscript Census Returns, Eighth Census of the United States, Cooper County, Missouri Schedule 1, Population, Roll M653_616, frame 13; Marshall (Mo.) Saline County Weekly Progress, March 19, 1915, 1, col. 5. 8

The judgments totaled $40,066.15 in principal, interest and court costs. Cooper County Circuit Court Records, Boonville, Missouri, 1862–1864 sessions; Pettis County Circuit Court Records, Sedalia, Missouri, 1862–1864 sessions; Saline County Circuit Court Records, Marshall, Missouri, 1862–1864 sessions. Taylor’s 9

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Bushwhacking and the Self-Destruction of Missouri’s Planter Elite, 1862-1865 Mark W. Geiger cases were heard in the Pettis County Circuit Court, Sedalia, Missouri, 1862-1864 sessions. Judgments totaled $853.59, in principal, interest, and court costs. Manuscript census returns, Ninth Census of the United States for Saline Counties, Missouri, Schedule I, Population. Manuscript census returns, Ninth Census of the United States for Pettis Counties, Missouri, Schedule I, Population. Ancestry.com official site, http://content.ancestry.com/iexec/?htx=View&r=an&dbid=7163&iid=MOM593 _804-0114&fn=Walker&ln=Finley&pid=2716644; http://content.ancestry.com/iexec/?htx=View&r=an&dbid=7163&iid=MOM593 _797-0284&fn=Henry+C&ln=Taylor&pid=2606172, (viewed December 11, 2005). Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 30, 215. The only law the state had regarding insolvents was “An Act for the Relief of Insolvent Persons Confined on Criminal Process, approved November 23, 1855.” This law provided for court fees arising from criminal charges to be waived for insolvent persons. Charles H. Hardin, Commissioner, Revised Statutes of the State of Missouri Revised and Digested by the Eighteenth General Assembly, (2 vols., City of Jefferson, Mo. 1856), I:236, 255; Bruce H. Mann, Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence, (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 48. On how these interconnecting debts could drag large numbers of people down see Edward J. Balleisen, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, 2001), 80–82; Mann, Republic of Debtors, 16–17; Schweikart, Banking in the American South, 199. 10

11Jonathan

Wiener summarizes views concerning social persistence among the planter class in “Planter Persistence and Social Change, Alabama, 1850 – 1870.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 7 (Autumn 1976): 237n6. Additional scholarship since Wiener’s article include Randolph B. Campbell, ”Population Persistence and Social change in Nineteenth-Century Texas: Harrison County, 1850–1880,” Journal of Southern History 48, no. 2 (May 1982): 185–204; A. Jane Townes, “The Effect of Emancipation on Large Landholdings, Nelson and Goochland Counties, Virginia,” Journal of Southern History 45 (August 1979): 403 – 12; and Lacy K. Ford, “Rednecks and Merchants: Economic Development and Social Tension in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1865–1900.” Journal of Southern History 71, no. 2 (Sept. 1984): 294 – 318. To employ Gavin Wright’s terminology, the planters were able to transform themselves from “laborlords” before the Civil War, to landlords after the war. Gavin Wright, Old South New South (New York, 1966), 47 – 51. Geiger, “Missouri’s Hidden Civil War,” 139–48. In over ninety percent of the cases where debts are found, so is a high level of reported bushwhacker activity. Geiger, “Missouri’s Hidden Civil War,” 154. Debt-case defendants and bushwhackers can in theory be compared to whitemale supporters of the rebellion, but the available sources for identifying these 12

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Bushwhacking and the Self-Destruction of Missouri’s Planter Elite, 1862-1865 Mark W. Geiger populations do not allow for an exact comparison: for instance, many of the bushwhackers were minors, and could not have been named as defendants in the debt cases. Also, lists of voters rejected in 1866 for supporting the rebellion do not include persons who died or emigrated during the War, but does include persons who immigrated to the area and who came of age between 1861 and 1866. However, it is possible to get an idea of the relative magnitude of these populations in selected counties. In Cooper County, however, 464 voters (out of a total of 1995) were disqualified from voting in the elections of 1866, owing to their support of the rebellion. In the debt cases studied, 106 defendants were residents of Cooper County, equivalent to twenty-three percent of rejected voters in that county. Looking at surnames only, in Cooper County there were 265 family names of rejected voters, compared to 74 surnames of signers, or 28%. Undated clipping, Boonville (Mo.) Central Missouri Advertiser, William H. Trigg Papers. Mss. 281, Western Manuscripts Collection, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri; Missouri County Circuit Court Records (microform), Missouri Local Records Preservation Program, Missouri State Archives, Jefferson City, Missouri; Eighth Census of the United States, Schedule 1, Population; Missouri State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, Jefferson City, Missouri; Missouri's Union Provost Marshal Papers: 1861–1866, Soldiers Database: War of 1812–World War I, http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/soldiers/. The five counties had a total of 684 debt cases, and 887 defendants. Sixty bushwhackers could be identified as being from the five counties, as follows: Chariton – 10; Cooper – 1; Lafayette – 26; Pettis – 3; Saline – 20. Of these, 12 (20%) have no family connection to the debt defendants; 48 (80%) do. Geiger, “Missouri’s Hidden Civil War,” 163-4. Union Provost Marshal Papers, Missouri State Archives, Jefferson City, Missouri; Manuscript Census Returns, Eighth Census of the United States, Cooper County, Missouri, Schedule 2, Slaves, Roll M653, frame 5; Eighth Census of the United States, Howard County, Missouri, Schedule 2, Slaves, Roll M653, frame 1; Howard L. Conrad, Encyclopedia of the History of Missouri, (New York, 1901), 296–97; Kenneth W. Noe, “Who Were the Bushwhackers?” 6; Ralph Mann, “Ezekiel Counts’s Sand Lick Company: Civil War and Localism in the Mountain South” in Kenneth Noe and Shannon H. Wilson, The Civil War in Appalacia: Collected Essays, (Knoxville, 1997), 78–103; Noel C. Fisher, War at Every Door: Partisan Politics and Guerrilla Violence in East Tennessee, 1860– 1869, (Chapel Hill, 1997), 122. In 1860 the Warrens were a thriving clan, with nine separate households in Lafayette County, comprising fifty-one individual members. Altogether, the Warrens owned 78 slaves. Manuscript Census Returns, Eighth Census of the United States, Lafayette County, Missouri. Ancstry.com official site, http://search.ancestry.com/cgibin/sse.dll?gsfn=&gsln=warren&sx=&year=1860&yearend=1860&gskw=lafayett e&gsco=2%2CUnited+States&gspl=28%2CMissouri&gst=35&prox=0&sbo=0&ra nk=0&db=&ti=0&ti.si=0&gl=allgs&gss=ansmp&so=3 (viewed December 2, 13

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Bushwhacking and the Self-Destruction of Missouri’s Planter Elite, 1862-1865 Mark W. Geiger 2005). Ninth Census of the United States, Lafayette County, Missouri. Ancstry.com official site, http://search.ancestry.com/cgibin/sse.dll?gsfn=&gsln=warren&sx=&year=1870&yearend=1870&gskw=lafayett e&gsco=2%2CUnited+States&gspl=28%2CMissouri&gst=35&prox=0&sbo=0&ra nk=0&db=&ti=0&ti.si=0&gl=allgs&gss=ansmp&so=3 (viewed December 2, 2005). St. Joseph Daily Journal of Commerce, July 22, 1863. Joanne C. Eakin and Donald R. Hale. Branded as Rebels, Volume I. Independence: Wee Print, 1993: 451. 14

Manuscript Census Returns, Eighth Census of the United States, Lafayette County, Missouri. Ancstry.com official site, http://content.ancestry.com/iexec/?htx=View&r=an&dbid=7667&iid=MOM653 _628-0181&fn=Jas&ln=Waller&pid=40356894 (viewed December 2, 2005). Waller participated in the attempt to break another bushwhacker, Otho Hinton, out of jail in February, 1864, and in the murder of two Union men on the same night. Report of Capt. James B. Moore, First Missouri State Militia Cavalry, to Col. James McFerran, April 1, 1864. Official Records, Series I, Vol. 34, Part I: 861 – 2. According to the family history the slaves said, "We don't want to be set free—we want to stay with Mr. Waller.—We want to stay with Mr. Waller.” Bible presented to Riley Rosalie Callahan Dec. 25, 1934, cited on Ancestry.com official site, http://awt.ancestry.com/cgibin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=:1944857&id=I93616606, (viewed December 2, 2005). Columbia (Mo.) Statesman, April 15, 1864, 4. By 1870 James Waller’s surviving family had left the state. Manuscript Census Returns, Ninth Census of the United States, Lafayette County, Missouri Schedule 1, Population. Ancestry.com official site, http://www.ancestry.com/search/ (viewed December 2, 2005). 15

Bowen studied 194 bushwhackers from Jackson County. Bowen found that four of the eight families that owned more than fifty slaves in Jackson County in 1860 had family members that were bushwhackers. Many more bushwhackers came from families not quite as wealthy but still very well off. Don R. Bowen, “Guerilla War in Western Missouri, 1862–1865: Historical Extensions of the Relative Deprivation Hypothesis.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 19 (January, 1977): 30 – 51. 16

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