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About The Conservative (Nebraska City, Neb.) 1898-1902 | View Entire Issue (Nov. 3, 1898)
\ \ 13be Conservative * should. "You nsk an impossible thing , Mr. Secretary. This secession , or revo lution , or whatever you call it , cannot conquer without violence , nor can those who hate it and hope to stifle it , resist without vindictivencss. Every struggle has its philosophy , but this is not the hour for philosophers. Your young confederacy wants victory , and champ ions who are not judges. Men must be killed. To impel the people to passion there must be some slight illusion min gled with the truth ; to arouse them to enthusiam something out of nature must occur. That illusion should bo a cru sade in the name of conquest , and that something out of nature should bo the black flag. Woe be unto all of you if the federals come with an oath of loy alty in one hand and a torch in the other. I have seen Missouri bound hand and foot by this Christle&s thing called conservatism , and where today she should have two hundred thousand heroes lighting for liberty , beneath her banners there are scarcely twenty thous- and. " " "What would you do , Captain Quan- trill , were your's the power and the op portunity ? " "Do , Mr. Secretary ? "Why I would wage such a war and have such a war waged by land and sea as to make sur render forever impossible. I would cover the armies of the confederacy all over with blood. I would invade. I would reward audacity. I would exter minate. I would break up foreign en listments by indiscriminate massacre. I would win the independence of my people ple or I would find them graves. " "And our prisoners , what of them ? " "Nothing of them ; there would be no nrisoners. Do they take any prisoners from me ? Surrounded , I do not sur render ; surprised , I do not give way to panic ; outnumbered , I rely upon com mon .sense and stubborn fighting ; pro scribed , I answer proclamation with proclamation ; outlawed , I feel through it my power ; hunted , I hunt my hunters in turn ; hated and made blacker than a dozen devils , T add to my hoofs the swiftness of a hoiso , and to my horns the terrors of a savage following. Kan sas should bo laid waste at once. Meet the torch with the torch , pillage with pillage , slaughter with slaughter , subju gation with extermination. You have my ideas of war , Mr. Secretary , and I am sorry they do not accord with your own , nor with the ideas of the govern ment you have the honor to represent so well. ' ' And Quantrill , without his com mission as a partisan ranger , or without any authorization to raise a regiment of partisan rangers , bowed himself away from the presence of the secretary and away from Richmond. j Gen. Thomas Ewing while in com- maud of the District of the Border , j headquarters at Kansas City , Mo. , detailed - tailed June 17 , 1808 , my company , A Eleventh Kansas cavalry , and fifty picked men from ton companies of cav alry to trail and hunt Quantrill , who had become the terror of the country. His men were mostly toughs and des peradoes from the plains of northern Texas and the Kansas border , were dead shots , best riders in the world ; and while ho could concentrate in a day or two 500 men , ho generally moved in small squads of from ten to forty men , and occupied the timber and brush of every border county south of the Mis souri river to the Boston mountains of Arkansas. He was enabled by his dar ing and dashing , unexpected attacks to keep fully 4,000 Federal cavalry busy for three years and 4,000 or 5,000 infan try guarding towns , trains and supply depots. The hair-breadth of this - escapes guer rilla chief ; the wonderful experiences of his men and the daily adventures of his pursuers , our men , who were lost in wonderment if we failed to have a halt a dozen fights with bushwhackers each week ; the miles of night riding , skulk ing through wooded ravines , the byroads and cow-paths traveled , hunting for an enemy worse than Indians ; houses , vil lages and cities sacked and burned by guerrillas and retaliatory acts by our in ' 'hell commanders resulting a perfect' of a war ; " the story of the events from Sterling Price's first march to the south ; of his several attempts to wrest Missouri from the Union ; of Joe Shelby's raids up to Price's last disastrous raid in Sep tember and October , 1804 ; of Quantrill'b Lawrence raid August 21,1803 , when he slaughtered in cold blood 143 unarmed non-combatants and sacked and burned the undefended city , of Quantrill's escape from eighty men of Pomeroy's command , Ninth Kansas , when they had him and five of his men in a house surrounded and the house on fire ; of the ambuscade and cowardly murder Jnno 17 , 1803 , of Capt. Flesher's men , Co. E of the Ninth Kansas cavalry at Brash Creek within a mile of West Port , Mo. , then a military station , by Bill Todd ; of Bill Anderson's wrecking and capturing a railroad train on the North Missouri railroad at Contralia in November , 1801 , and shuightoring eighty unarmed and wounded soldiers ; of the massacre of Blunt's band and teamsters at Baxter Springs , October , 0 , 1803 ; of Captain Cleveland's desertion with part of his company , the Seventh Kansas Black Horse cavalry , turning highway man ; how it took nearly 2,000 cavalry four months to disperse his band and kill him ; how Geo. H. Hoyt , the young Boston lawyer , came to Kansas after defending John Brown at Clmrlestown , Va. , was first captain Co. K , Seventh Kansas cavalry with John Brown , Jr. , as first lieutenant , and after resigning raised a band of over 800 Red Legs , an organization sworn to shoot i-obols , take no prisoners , free slaves and respect no property rights of rebels or of sympath izers ; of our chase for Qnantrill from the Missouri river to Arkansas and back , before and after the Lawrence raid ; how the sacking of Lawrence and the massa cre of 143 people might have been averted had it not been for a mistake of judgment on the part of one of our best and most loyal oflicers ; of how we t finally drove Quantrill and his men be yond the Mississippi and of his tragic death near Louisville , Ky. , in February , 1805 all these incidents como before my mind as a panorama , vivid as life , a story that can never be told , the record of which would fill a hundred volumes of intensely interesting matter ; a story which can never bo forgotten by any one of the men who were active wit nesses of the sickening details. I have cited a few instances to show barely a sketch of the "Border war" near the Kansas and Missouri line , a war that forced fully 80 per cent of the male pop ulation of that region between the ages of 15 and 50 into the army and made mourners in every household , and loft monuments of desolation and war in burned homes , marked by stone and brick chimneys from the north to I ho south lino. The two incidents cited near the be ginning of this story are given as ex tremely aggravating cases , not as every day common-place affairs. With the exception of the Seventh and Fifteenth Kansas cavalry there were no bettor dis ciplined or bettor behaved troops in the Union army than the Kansas men. The First Kansas infantry organized in May , 1801 , fought like regulars under General Lyon at Wilson Creek and lost in that fight August 10 , 1801 , 51 percent of the entire regiment in killed and wounded , stood their ground to the end , and won the fight. The seventeen Kan sas regiments , three batteries and throe colored regiments , with the exception above noted , gave the enemy no good cause for guerrilla warfare ; all left good records for bravo and soldierly conduct ; and the Seventh fully redeemed herself under Colonel Leo with Sherman's army from ' 02 to ' 04. The guerrillas who fought with Qnantrill under the black flag , excusing their blood-thirsty acts as deeds of revenge , charged the first cause to acts committed before the war , 1850 to 1801 , and to the early campaigning of Lane , Montgomery and Jonnison to October , ' 01. As all the guerrillas wore outlawed by that time , there was no possible way of ending their crimes , ex- capt in annihilation. While our men had become desperate hunters of desper ate criminals , and had for years given and asked no quarter , yet when Gen. Sterling Price and Joe Shelby led their armies into our field they wore met and fought with as much chivalry and sold ierly courtesy as was accorded to the regular con federate army by our men on the Potomac. When General Mar-