Mark W Geiger
- University : Independent scholar
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- Country : United States
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- Market Institutions and Organization
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"Indebtedness and the Origins of Guerrilla Violence in Civil War Missouri," Journal of Southern History 75, no. 1 (2009): 49-82.
By most measures, the Confederate guerrilla insurgency in Missouri during the Civil War was the most widespread such conflict ever to occur on American soil. By one calculation, nearly twenty-seven thousand Missourians died in the violence. Owing to these conditions, the state's population dropped by one-third during the war, though an unknown number of people later returned. Counterinsurgency measures tied up tens of thousands of Union troops in garrison and guard duty, search-and-destroy missions, and patrols. The relative level of guerrilla violence in the different states can be gauged by comparing the states' total recorded number of clashes between guerrillas and regular troops over the course of the war. Missouri had by far the highest number.
This article examines the reasons for the anomalously high level of guerrilla violence in pro-Confederate parts of Missouri compared to other districts that were occupied by Union troops, including conquered parts of the Confederacy proper. Pro-Confederate Missourians had all the same reasons for "going to the brush" as their counterparts elsewhere. But the Missourians had one additional grievance against Unionists that historians have previously missed. In 1861 the state's secessionist leaders hatched a large-scale financial conspiracy that failed with calamitous results, causing widespread indebtedness among Missouri's pro-Confederate population and the forced sale of hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland. Guerrillas from the counties with the heaviest land sales belonged disproportionately to these dispossessed families.
Historians have overlooked the indebtedness and the land sales because at the time there was almost no newspaper or other public commentary on these events. After mid-1861, Union authorities closed those newspapers that supported the South, and censored the rest. Anyway, most local newspapers in central Missouri suspended publication during the war, and only stray issues survive for many others. For much of the interior of the state no complete runs of newspaper issues exist before 1867 or 1868, long after the debt business was over. Massive documentation of the indebtedness survives, but it is buried in the county circuit court records of central and western Missouri, a region the size of West Virginia. The Missouri State Archives in Jefferson City has microfilms of the county circuit court records, but many of the films are of poor quality and unreadable. Often the only alternative was to go to the courthouse holding the original records.
Physically assembling the data was only the first of many obstacles to interpretation. Within the records of any single county the conspiracy-debt cases are difficult to identify. Such cases are intermingled with every other case heard during that court session, and individual conspiracy-debt cases look like ordinary suits for bad debts. The pattern is only identifiable when large groups of debt cases are viewed together. In the special cases the same defendants appear many times, writing multiple promissory notes back and forth to each other. Besides the court records, the other main primary source is an array of financial data on the state's banks, published in the St. Louis newspapers. As with the court records, the bank data could not be interpreted until they were collected and used to reconstruct financial statements.
This article, then, describes what distinguished the Missouri guerrillas' motives and aims from those of guerrillas in other areas. That forced sales of thousands of family farms would lead to communal violence and insurrection is a common-sense outcome. Also, the indebtedness was specific to Missouri, except for some limited property sales in Kentucky. The character of the guerrilla violence in Missouri does suggest the state was somehow different from other occupied areas of mixed loyalties. First, the violence in Missouri was more extensive than elsewhere. Second, the violence continued at a high level long after there was any chance of Missouri's fighting its way into the Confederacy. Both conditions suggest there were more guerrillas in Missouri than elsewhere, rather than that the Missourians were for some reason working double shifts. This article will explore where these "extra" guerrillas came from.
The chain of events that resulted in the indebtedness and attendant land sales was as follows. In early 1861 Missouri's Governor Claiborne Fox Jackson, formerly the state banking commissioner, and a group of senior state politicians and bankers plotted to divert half a million dollars from the banks and the state treasury. The money would pay to arm the state militia, the Missouri State Guard, who would defend the state's anticipated secession. The governor and his friends expected the South, including Missouri, to successfully secede, after which the new Confederate state government of Missouri would repay the banks through a sale of bonds to the public. In May and June of 1861, however, preemptive Union military strikes in St. Louis and in Boonville ended the plan. Federal troops overturned the Jackson government, which became a government in exile for the rest of the war.
Missouri's bankers had been willing to give the money to the Jackson government, but after mid-June that government was in flight from federal forces. So instead, the bankers granted thousands of unsecured loans to leading pro-Confederate citizens, channeling the money through the branch banks in the interior of the state. Local volunteer military units used the money to buy arms and supplies. Eventually, over twenty-eight hundred borrowers signed promissory notes, which are essentially postdated checks, in forty-one counties, one-third of the state, where Confederate sympathy was strongest. Most of these notes were written between May and September of 1861.
Bankers and borrowers alike expected the South to win quickly, and from its temporary seat in southwest Missouri the state's Confederate government-in-exile had pledged to repay the costs of the war. With this supposed safety net in place, the borrowers took far more money than they could repay, and the bankers drained their institutions of cash. This was a massive fraud against all the banks' other depositors, customers, and investors. Most of the state's branch banks took part in this lending, which eventually totaled about three million dollars. That was a huge sum of money in 1861, when the latest military sidearm, a Colt Army model .44, sold for $13.75.
Missouri's Unionists could not halt the removal of the banks' money until it was largely too late. After several ham-handed efforts to seize the banks' funds, in late 1861 Missouri's Union government began purging pro-Confederate bankers, which meant nearly every banker in the state, from their positions, and replacing them with Union men. This policy stanched the flow of money to the rebel forces, but had other effects as well. The war lasted far longer than anyone expected. Since most of the promissory notes were payable in one hundred and twenty days, large numbers of defaults began in October, 1861 and continued for the next several months. The Unionists who controlled the banks after mid-1862 filed civil suits in the county circuit courts to recover the money. Had the banks been able to transfer money to the Jackson government as originally planned, at worst Missouri's victorious Union forces would have inherited an empty state treasury and insolvent banks. Instead, with hope for Missouri's secession dashed after mid-1862, this grassroots money-raising made wealthy Confederate sympathizers all over the state liable for ordinary debts, not compensable war claims.
The fund-raising, the resulting indebtedness, and its effects were researched mainly through court records of three adjoining counties in Missouri's Boonslick region, on the south bank of the Missouri River. There, in Cooper, Pettis and Saline Counties, the courts heard over three hundred of these loan cases between mid-1862 and mid-1864. A typical promissory-note signer was Walker H. Finley of Saline County, a forty-one-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 and twenty-three cosigners, most of them Finley's relatives, signed twenty different promissory notes and cashed them at cooperating banks. The money, some thirty-eight thousand dollars, probably went to buy supplies and livestock for the rebel forces. In 1862, federal militia caught Finley with incriminating documents in his possession, while he was driving ninety-five head of cattle down to the rebel lines. The troops arrested Finley and charged him with communicating with the enemy. Finley narrowly escaped hanging, but the banks sued him and the other cosigners in twenty separate actions, one apiece for each defaulted note. The judgments against this one cluster of cosigners totaled over forty thousand dollars. None of the defendants had that much money-or credit-in 1863 and 1864, and the Saline County sheriff sold their farms at auction. The 1870 census lists Finley as a tenant farmer owning no real property and with personal property worth four hundred dollars, less than one percent of his 1860 holdings.
Finley's actions-writing multiple promissory notes to arm military volunteers-were typical of what was happening all over the country. Missourians were not the only private citizens buying military supplies to arm their young men. At the beginning of the secession crisis, neither the U.S. nor the nascent Confederate States had any military establishment to speak of. On December 1, 1860 U.S. forces numbered sixteen thousand men, with a supply capacity to match. Through early 1861 Lincoln continued Buchanan's wait-and-see policy toward the South, and took no steps to prepare for war. The President's first call for volunteers-asking for seventy-five thousand men-was on April 15, the day after Fort Sumter surrendered. But by that point, the states in both sections had already started arming. By December 31, 1860, three and a half months before the President's call, five hundred thousand men in the loyal states alone had already volunteered for military service. The South, for its part, started 1861 with no organized armed forces at all, though about one quarter of the U.S. military officer corps resigned their commissions and went south. Other than career officers, estimates vary on how many men volunteered for military service in the Confederate States in early 1861. All sources agree, however, that volunteers came forward in such numbers that they swamped recruiters. State legislatures everywhere harnessed this enthusiasm through laws allowing citizens and local governments to raise troops on their own, and claim compensation for expenses from the state. By long-established custom and legal precedent, the federal government would then in turn repay the states.
North and South, the states passed similar legislation to help raise military volunteers. In January, 1861 the South Carolina legislature granted corporate charters to early volunteer companies. Legally, these companies were then corporations, able to borrow money in their own names (and to be sued for repayment, if necessary). In April, Virginia's secession convention created a review board to pay expenses incurred by private citizens to help raise troops. Illinois and Iowa passed similar laws in May. Also in May, North Carolina retroactively legalized measures the counties had taken to provide for volunteers responding to the state adjutant general's call for troops. The same North Carolina law allowed counties to levy taxes to repay individuals who had advanced their own money and means to buy military supplies. Moving more slowly, Georgia's law allowing volunteer companies to organize and make a financial claim on the state passed in December, 1861. Just so, Missouri's secessionist state government, elected November, 1860 and forcibly overturned in June, passed its own laws. On May 11, 1861, the same day that saw the passage of the North Carolina law, the Missouri General Assembly authorized Governor Jackson to accept military loans from banks, savings institutions, and individuals. Another Missouri law passed the same day created a board to review all other claims for compensation, and allowed counties to advance money for military expenses on the state's behalf.
What happened to these claims depended on region and loyalty. In the North, the federal government paid those state and individual claims judged valid, though sometimes decades later. By an 1871 federal law, citizens of former Confederate states able to prove unbroken loyalty to the U.S. could claim compensation for property seized by federal troops. While it existed, the Confederate government passed similar legislation to compensate the various states for their military spending. By its law of August 30, 1861, the Confederate government requested all states to audit and present their claims as quickly as possible. But in the South, the hyperinflation of the currency made debts from early in the war worthless. Also, when the war was over, the victorious North forced the southern states to renounce all debts incurred to further the rebellion. These conditions-hyperinflation and debt repudiation-were a disaster for southern creditors, including banks, but left former debtors whole.
Pro-Confederate Missourians, however, were caught between two wheels, and wound up worse off than other, similarly placed private citizens in either section. The Missourians had, like other citizens North and South, in effect loaned money to their state government in the expectation that they would receive compensation at some later date. However, when Confederate forces were pushed out of Missouri and federal authority reestablished, these citizens were still liable for debts that had depreciated only moderately from their original value. And the destruction of Missouri's economy, the loss of slaves and other property, and the wartime confiscations and outright theft that had occurred left many unable to pay. Neither the federal government nor the Unionist Missouri state government provided any relief, understandably refusing to compensate debts incurred to arm the other side.
Some of Missouri's privately incurred Confederate military debts were indeed repaid, though in what turned out to be worthless currency. Governor Jackson, after fleeing Jefferson City in June, 1861, spent the rest of his life on the run from federal forces before dying in Helena, Arkansas in December, 1862. His successor, former Lieutenant Governor Thomas C. Reynolds, found on assuming office that Jackson had filed no claims with the Confederate government for compensation for Missouri's military outlays. By its August 30, 1861 law, the Confederacy had assumed liability for the expenses of the (pro-secession) Missouri State Guard between May 10, 1861, the date of its mobilization, and November 28, when the Guard mustered into Confederate service. Reynolds filed the first claim with the Confederate government in May, 1863, for compensation for military equipment that Missouri forces had transferred to the Confederacy. Reynolds then began reviewing the claims made against the state by her creditors, many of whom were former members of the Missouri State Guard. Reynolds drew up a payment schedule that gave priority to Missouri soldiers discharged because of wounds, second and third priorities to enlisted soldiers and officers still serving, and last priority to other creditors. For the balance of the war, Reynolds made a good-faith effort to pay war claims against the state. However, the only means of repayment at Reynolds' disposal were Confederate treasury notes or Missouri defense bonds. Both were worthless by the end of the war.
In Missouri, a key feature of the indebtedness arising from the defaulted promissory notes was that bankers did not simply hand over their institutions' money to anyone sympathetic to the Confederate cause. In the three counties studied, only about five percent of the adult white males listed in the 1860 census, and seven percent of the household heads, signed for these loans. In the crony capitalism typical of the day, almost all the funds went to the bankers' own relatives, who were members of the local gentry: wealthy merchants and traders, planters, and local politicians. These families intermarried to a degree that most modern Americans would find unfamiliar. Three or four intermarriages between the same two families were common, sometimes in the same generation. Family connections were often generations old, surviving multiple migrations and going back to the pre-Revolutionary southern Tidewater region.
Because of the bankers' lending policy, if it can be called that, the debts crippled the rural elite in the areas of Missouri where southern settlement was heaviest, and sympathy for the southern cause strongest. In the three-county sample that formed the core of this study, eighty-six percent of the defendants who signed the promissory notes and the bankers who cashed them were related to each other. High as this number appears, it is conservative, based only on surviving genealogical sources; records and memory of some relationships will have been lost. Kin relationships in this group are consistent with other historians' findings about southern white families in this period. Antebellum American banks themselves grew out of these networks of personal relations.
Defendants were, on average, sued in two to three cases at once, for far more money than they could pay. Since several people usually cosigned each note, ironically for the sake of security, on average each defendant was a codefendant with four or five others. Under the law, each defendant was jointly and severally liable-that is, liable for the entire debt or any portion of it, at the plaintiff's option. Eventually, owing to these lawsuits, over six hundred thousand acres of farmland were sold at sheriffs' auctions, and this was a time when a hundred and sixty acres was a large farm. By 1864 and 1865 surviving newspapers in the Missouri River counties had entire pages filled with legal notices of land sales arising from these cases.
The state of the laws and a complex tangle of prewar indebtedness probably dragged many more people into insolvency than had originally signed the notes, though the latter was a large enough group. Antebellum Missouri was, like much of the South and West, a cash-poor and credit-poor economy. Indebtedness was thus unavoidable, and served to cement social and patronage connections between family members, neighbors, landlords, and tenants. Also, there was then no bankruptcy law, state or federal, and no law for relief of insolvents, and thus no fixed procedure for dividing an insolvent debtor's assets among multiple creditors. Judgments were awarded on a first-come, first-served basis, so the last creditor in line might receive nothing. Thus if one creditor filed suit, others would often hasten to do so as well, making all of a borrower's debts immediately payable. Anyone sued for debt and facing the prospect of a sheriff's auction would immediately call in any debts owed him. Insolvency could thus spread from house to house, like a fire. The date of the earliest hearings on the debt cases varied, because the widespread violence had forced the courts to suspend in many counties. Statewide, the courts heard the earliest cases in the spring of 1862; the last cases settled in late 1864 and early 1865.
During this same period, the guerrilla violence was at its worst in Missouri. No statistics were gathered on the total number of guerrilla attacks on civilians during the Civil War, in Missouri or elsewhere. The best proxy measure is the number of military engagements in each state, which includes fights between regular military forces and guerrillas. This measure does give a good idea of the relative level of violence in each state, as troops conducted more search-and-destroy missions where the guerrillas were most active. Frederick Dyer's list of military engagements drawn from the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion shows that 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. But in Missouri, most of the engagements were clashes between Union militia and free-floating bands of armed men, only loosely allied with regular Confederate forces. We can make a comparison with events in Kentucky, the state that most resembled Missouri in 1860. Both were Border slave states with populations of comparable size drawn mainly from the South, and of the same mixed loyalties. The two states had ties of family, as well. Before the 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.
During the war, conditions in Missouri were infamous. Over the course of the war, the New York Times alone reported on the violence in Missouri over two 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.
One month before this story appeared, Confederate guerrillas from Missouri committed the bloodiest civilian massacre of the entire war. On August 21, 1863 combined guerrilla bands under Quantrill, Todd, and Anderson descended on Lawrence, Kansas and murdered at least one hundred and fifty unarmed men and boys. A year later, Ulysses S. Grant wrote that he considered Missouri (and Kentucky) more difficult to control than Mississippi.
Both the forced sale of thousands of family farms and the extent of the guerrilla violence set Missouri's war apart from what was happening elsewhere. It seems likely the land sales and the violence were linked, but enough contemporary source material survives to perform evidentiary tests as well. Missouri's guerrillas themselves, however, left few personal accounts. During the war the guerrillas' families, too, kept silent about what their young men were up to. Unionist militia routinely targeted guerrillas' families for revenge. After the war, feelings ran high for years, and too much talk could lead to a murder indictment or a lynching.
Three surviving guerrillas from Missouri's central-west counties, which had been the epicenter of the indebtedness, did publish their memoirs after the war. These accounts, however, mainly describe thrilling exploits, and explain little beyond the writers' own experiences. The ex-guerrillas, Hampton Boone Watts, Cole Younger, and John McCorkle, only briefly mention why they joined the guerrillas, and say almost nothing about why others did. Watts was only fourteen when he joined Bloody Bill Anderson's band for a few weeks in 1864. Watts briefly mentions the strong southern sentiments in his native Howard County, Missouri, but he gives a clearer signal of his reasons for joining when he discusses, at length, how well-mannered, well-dressed, and well-mounted Anderson and his men were-gentlemen all. Watts plainly adored these daring, dangerous men, many of them little older than Watts himself. At twenty, Cole Younger was more mature when he joined William Clarke Quantrill's guerrillas in 1862. Younger had had a clearer reason for joining the guerrillas than did Watts: He wanted revenge for his father's murder. McCorkle, for his part, joined the guerrillas for protection from Unionist militia who were harassing and threatening him for serving in the Confederate Army.
Despite the lack of certain kinds of narrative primary-source materials, the connection the guerrillas and the debts can still be researched quantitatively. Before going to this analysis, the state of our current understanding of the causes of Civil War guerrilla violence needs to be clarified. Historians have researched the guerrillas for decades. Taken together, the existing studies explain most of the guerrilla activity that occurred during the war, and describe what motivated the guerrillas, in Missouri and out. This scholarship does not fully explain, however, why the violence in Missouri was so much worse than in other places. The present article is concerned solely with that difference, and hopes to take existing scholarship as a point of departure and to add something new. What follows is a brief discussion of our current understanding of Civil War guerrillas, how these findings apply to Missouri, and where they fall short.
Missouri's guerrillas have always received much attention from the media, and our first available sources on them are contemporary. The earliest reference to Missouri guerrillas in the New York Times appeared in July, 1861 (and the first novel about them was published, also in New York, the same year). Most of this material is sensational, however, and of little use in understanding the guerrillas' motives. Some of the coverage was positive. After the war, the Missouri Confederate veteran John Newman Edwards wrote prolifically about the guerrillas. But Edwards was a popular journalist, and gave his readers what sold, namely gunfights, and Three-Musketeers-style bravery against dastardly enemies. Though Edwards had known many of the guerrillas personally, he gave no individual particulars or details about their reasons for joining, instead referring darkly to "unnumbered wrongs." Union spokespeople were as slanted as Edwards, though in the other direction. In their public pronouncements, military men, politicians, and journalists excoriated the guerrillas as bushwhackers. This was a pejorative term that probably first came into use in western Virginia in 1861, referring to depraved thieves and cutthroats, whose sole objectives were plunder and mayhem. This was not just propaganda. The breakdown of the normal civilian constraints in the war zones, including Missouri, does appear to have unleashed a crime wave, with roving bands of armed men preying on civilians regardless of their politics.
But besides bandits, there were politically motivated guerrillas as well, and the military men were the first to treat them as worthy of serious study. Despite the anger and frustration that senior Union military commanders publicly expressed, they took a more sophisticated view of the guerrillas than the name-calling implied. Irregular warfare is the oldest warfare there is, and many military theorists have written on the subject. By the mid-nineteenth century the ideas of von Clausewitz and Jomini dominated military thinking in the United States and Europe, including on the topic of guerrilla warfare. Drawing on their writings, in 1862 the American jurist Francis Lieber summed up contemporary thinking on the topic in his pamphlet Guerrilla Parties Considered with Reference to the Laws and Usages of War. The Union high command made Lieber's ideas on irregular warfare official policy, published throughout the Union Army in 1863 as General Orders Number 100.
Lieber evaluated irregulars through their aims, as paramilitary forces contributing to a larger war effort. He drew a sharp distinction between guerrillas and partisans, the latter being small, elite conventional forces, given an unconventional military role. Nathan Bedford Forrest, John Hunt Morgan, and John Singleton Mosby were partisan leaders, commanding disciplined military units that raided within Union-held territory and then retired behind Confederate lines. Partisan forces such as these were part of the regular Confederate Army, and coordinated with conventional troops. By contrast, Lieber defined guerrillas as "self-constituted groups of armed men, in times of war, who form no integrant part of the organized army, do not stand on the regular pay-roll of the army, or are not paid at all, take up arms and lay them down at intervals, and carry on petty war (guerrilla) chiefly by raids, extortion, destruction, and massacre, and who cannot encumber themselves with many prisoners, and will therefore generally give no quarter." Unlike partisans, captured guerrillas were not considered prisoners of war. Guerrillas, according to Lieber, should "be treated summarily as highway robbers or pirates." In other words, captured guerrillas were subject to immediate execution.
The Confederacy's military leaders had attended the same service academies as their Union counterparts, and studied the same theory. The Confederate Congress' Partisan Ranger Act of April 21, 1862, however, did not distinguish between partisans and guerrillas. In vague language, the law empowered President Davis to commission officers who would recruit irregular forces. Then, these units, "after being regularly received in the service, shall be entitled to the same pay, rations, and quarters during the term of service, and be subject to the same regulations as other soldiers." The language of the law suggested that such troops would act independently, but still report to the regular army command. In practice, though officers commissioned under the act included some famous partisan leaders such as John Singleton Mosby, most such officers, and the units they recruited, were guerrillas by Lieber's definition. That is, they lived behind enemy lines, and moved in and out of uniform and civilian life between raids.
Many Confederate leaders, including Lee, feared they would be unable to control the partisan ranger units, and these fears proved justified. In Missouri, Bloody Bill Anderson claimed to fight for the South, and no one was about to argue with him. Nevertheless, in late 1861 Anderson said to a neighbor whom he hoped to recruit, "I don't care any more for the South than you, [Charles] Strieby, but there is a lot of money in this [bushwhacking] business." In the South, the Partisan Ranger Act was controversial from the start and the Confederate Congress repealed it in February, 1864.
Both partisans and guerrillas fought in Missouri's war. Confederate General Joseph Orville Shelby, originally of Waverly, Lafayette County, Missouri, led what was clearly a partisan unit. Shelby's Iron Brigade raided behind enemy lines, but also formed the cavalry arm of the forces led by Confederate Generals Price and Marmaduke. But it was guerrillas, not partisans, who made the war in Missouri an appalling spectacle. Some of Missouri's guerrilla leaders, such as William C. Quantrill, held commissions in the Confederate Army. Others, such as Bill Anderson, did not. It made no difference. Missouri's guerrilla commanders were never subject to military discipline or integrated into the regular Confederate command. The guerrilla bands of Quantrill, Anderson, Todd, Thrailkill, Blunt, Coffee, and many others, though they cooperated at times with regular Confederate forces, acted on their own and as they saw fit. Major General Henry Halleck, the ranking Union military commander in Missouri from November, 1861 to July, 1862, understood the distinction between partisans and guerrillas. To make sure that his entire command understood as well, Halleck issued several general orders on the subject during his tenure in Missouri.
Modern historians of Civil War guerrilla violence have mostly bypassed Lieber's classifications of irregulars. Historians do, however, agree with Lieber that in some parts of the occupied South the guerrilla violence formed an insurrection. Lieber defined insurrection as "the rising of people in arms against their Government or a portion of it, or against one or more of its laws, or against an officer or officers of the Government. It may be confined to mere armed resistance or it may have greater ends in view." Writing about the occupied South in general, Steven V. Ash describes just this situation in When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861-1865. Ash argues that guerrillas who harassed Union troops were not soldiers, but citizens. The guerrillas were thus an arm of their communities rather than of the Confederacy. In a passage that would apply to Missouri as well, Ash writes, "Though they saw themselves in a general way as part of the Confederate war effort, their war was really a personal and communal one. They rarely traveled far from their home county and were unresponsive to Confederate authority." In Ash's view, the invading Union army was itself a causal agent that created guerrilla warfare. The guerrillas shared a widely held southern ethos of ennoblement through violence, and they acted to defend their honor against a degrading military occupation.
The Confederacy, for its part, had its own problems with disloyal citizens in its border regions. The pattern of guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency measures was the same as in federally occupied areas. In War at Every Door: Partisan Politics and Guerrilla Violence in East Tennessee, 1860-1869 Noel C. Fisher describes guerrilla war on the southern side of the military lines. Once again the pattern is of a civilian insurgency, or uprising against occupying troops, and not an organized resistance coordinated with a conventional military force. Mirroring what was happening in some Union-occupied areas, during its two-year tenure in east Tennessee, the Confederate government faced spiraling guerrilla violence, growing frustration among regular troops charged with keeping the peace, and blurred distinctions between civilian, guerrilla, and robber. The arrival of Union forces in 1863 did not bring peace. Instead, the balance of power shifted to the east Tennessee Unionists in their struggles against their pro-southern neighbors, many of whom fled the area.
Civilian insurrection and a violent, hostile reaction to occupying troops occurred in Missouri as well. In his classic Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy; Guerrilla Warfare in the West, 1861-1865, Richard Brownlee argues that Union military forces provoked the "great insurrection" on Missouri's western border after 1861. Much evidence supports this view. Responding to a mass outcry against the behavior of Unionist militia, in 1863 the Missouri General Assembly investigated the conduct of the troops. The legislators found problems everywhere, from simple thievery and officers exceeding their authority to rogue units and outright murder. The General Assembly also condemned the behavior of troops brought in from outside the state, especially the Kansans. But Brownlee's explanation is incomplete. Union troops occupied vast sections of the South as well, where the population was overwhelmingly pro-Confederate, rather than of mixed loyalties as in Missouri. Yet Missouri experienced more irregular war and higher levels of violence.
Michael Fellman, in his influential Inside War: the Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War, finds, as do Ash, Fisher, and Brownlee, that occupying military forces in a hostile civilian population contributed to the violence. In Missouri, however, Fellman argues that ethnic prejudices worsened matters, as many of the Union soldiers there were German-Americans policing "English" areas. But Fellman's key argument is that fighting between pro- and antislavery militias along the Kansas-Missouri border in the 1850s gave the region a head start on the guerrilla war. The cycle of reprisals and counter-reprisals between Missourians and Kansans was already well underway by 1861. Following the outbreak of the war, the Kansas troops who were sent to Missouri victimized civilians, and the Missourians responded in kind.
Brownlee and Fellman are surely correct that the Kansas legacy was important. At the time, many well-placed people believed the Kansas-Missouri feud contributed to the guerrilla war. In January 1862, General Halleck directed his subordinate, General John Pope, to drive the Kansas troops out of the state, or, failing that, to disarm them and hold them prisoner. Five months later, in May, Halleck's successor Major General John M. Schofield wrote to Secretary of War Stanton to urge the removal of all Kansas troops from Missouri. After mid-1862, military and civilian authorities largely kept Kansas troops out of Missouri, except for the tier of counties on the western border. There, Colorado troops replaced the Kansans in mid-1864. But ill will between Kansans and Missourians was a major issue mainly in these counties, and in the next tier of counties to the east. The guerrilla conflict also raged in parts of the state where the Kansans never set foot, a pattern that calls for explanation.
Besides the overall consensus that guerrilla warfare along the Middle Border represented part of a civilian insurrection, most Civil War historians agree that social attitudes, rather than economic issues, were behind the guerrilla violence. Ash, for instance, discounts class warfare as an important issue for the guerrillas, even though poor people in occupied zones sometimes turned against the middle and upper classes, absent the usual peacetime restraints. Instead, Ash views guerrilla warfare as one expression of a larger pattern of extralegal violence directed not only at the invaders but also at other southerners. Ash notes that guerrillas came from every social class, and that rich and poor alike in the occupied areas cooperated to intimidate the freedmen and keep them in their place.
A significant exception to the consensus on the primacy of social attitudes is the work of Don Bowen, which anticipates my own findings. Bowen, who also viewed Missouri's irregular war as a civilian insurrection, did find that economic causes played an important role in the violence. In a well-known 1977 article, Bowen noted that some guerrillas from Jackson County, Missouri came from prosperous, even leading, families. Bowen argued that the violence in Missouri was consistent with the political-science theory of relative deprivation. According to this theory, when people cannot achieve the goals they seek, or face the loss of a way of life already attained, then violence can be expected-political violence in particular. Bowen wrote, "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 factor." According to Bowen, it was the prospect of permanent loss of fortune and social position that drove some of these families' young men into guerrilla bands.
Bowen's article is frequently cited, but his ideas have inspired little follow-up work. Moreover, Bowen did not address the question why the sons of some well-off slaveholding families became guerrillas, while the sons of others-in Missouri and in the other slaveholding elites farther South-did not. However, Bowen's research findings and conclusions about guerrillas from Jackson County are fully consistent with my own discovery of the indebtedness. The indebtedness in central and western Missouri (including Jackson County, which had 123 debt cases) created precisely the condition of selective relative deprivation which Bowen had deduced. Pro-Confederate citizens there had indeed suffered a loss, which did not fall with equal weight elsewhere, or even within their own communities. Besides the violence, the widespread loss of property contributed to other severe social and economic dislocations affecting Missouri's postwar planter persistence, land ownership, agricultural practices, and migration patterns. Many of these aftereffects have drawn the attention of historians who have missed the indebtedness itself.
Argument is one thing; evidence is another. Moving now to some tests for linkage between the indebtedness and the violence, a quantitative strategy faces two big, but not insurmountable, difficulties. First, while the court records contain the names of all the debtors, there is no comparable source for guerrillas' names. Federal troops shot guerrillas on sight, often without knowing who they were or bothering to find out. In the Official Records, a typical report might read 'Went on patrol-killed three bushwhackers.' (The officers who wrote these reports typically ignored finer distinctions when describing their enemies.) Also, no one knows how many guerrillas there were in Missouri, a number which presumably varied over time, so it is impossible to tell how many names are missing. Put another way, twenty percent of the guerrillas' names may be lost, or fifty percent, or eighty percent. There is no way to tell.
The second problem is that available sources are too imprecise to make a large control group of pro-Confederate white males who did not become guerrillas. "Supported the rebellion" is a vague term that includes lukewarm, conditional Confederate supporters as well as red-hot secessionists. Also, people's political commitment varied over the course of the war. Some switched sides altogether. With a control group, it would be possible to compare the likelihood that a member of an indebted family would join the guerrillas, compared to a member of a nonindebted family. On the other hand, as described below, it is possible to set up a small control group.
When dealing with incomplete data, the most promising research strategy is to use several different analytical approaches and look for a preponderance of evidence. The following analysis will explore a possible linkage in three ways, using data culled from the circuit court records, the military and provost-marshal records, and Eakin and Hale's Branded as Rebels. The first strategy is to compare geographical concentrations of indebtedness and of guerrilla violence in the state as a whole. The second method is to look for personal connections between specific known guerrillas and debtors. Finally, guerrillas from indebted families can be compared on various demographic measures with guerrillas from nonindebted families, to see if patterns emerge.
Considering first the summary data available, the facts of geography and timing are consistent with linkage. Though other regions of Missouri experienced guerrilla violence, most incidents occurred in the indebted counties. Over ninety percent of the heavily indebted counties also turn out to have had had severe problems with guerrillas (on Map II, a "high" number of reported incidents). Over the course of the war, indebted counties had on average over twice as many reported guerrilla incidents as nonindebted counties, 11.4 incidents versus 5.5 incidents, respectively. Geographic coincidence, however, only takes us so far. Guerrillas and debtors may have had nothing to do with one another.
The second research strategy is to look for connections between specific guerrillas and debtors. To do this, five sample counties were selected within the region of overlapping indebtedness and high guerrilla violence. Between March 1, 1861 and June 30, 1862, Confederate sympathizers signed 535 promissory notes that were later litigated in Chariton, Cooper, Lafayette, Pettis, and Saline Counties, in the state's central-west region along the Missouri River. In these same counties, Dyer's Compendium lists 112 military engagements, almost all of them guerrilla incidents. (Dyer's count understates the violence by excluding depredations against civilians. These counties were dangerous places.) Circuit court papers for the debt cases preserve the names of the defendants, and the 1860 census identifies which ones lived in the five counties before the war. The census also contains details on the defendants' families and households.
Study of the guerrillas, too, depends on detailed family and household data. Since the debts affected entire families, the fortunes of the family as a whole are the key concern. Bowen, in his 1977 study, faced a version of the same issue. The guerrillas he studied were too young to own much property. What mattered was how much property their families owned. Bowen pointed out that earlier researchers had overlooked this problem and come to a false conclusion-namely, that since the guerrillas themselves owned little or no property, they must have come from poor families. Bowen showed that, in fact, the opposite was true. The sample used here, therefore, contains only the 53 guerrillas whose families could be identified and who lived within the five counties before the war. Once having identified the guerrillas for the sample, their family data are clearly important for another reason, as well. Twenty-three of the 53, or over 40 percent, were 17 years old or under in 1861; the youngest was 9. Boys this young would not have signed promissory notes, though older family members might have.
Using these two sample groups, most of the guerrillas had close family connections to the debtors. Of the 53 guerrillas, 5 were defendants in one or more of the promissory note cases. Another 39 had at least one close family member who was a defendant, "close" meaning a father, uncle, brother, or brother-in-law. Most of the 39 had multiple family members who were defendants. The guerrilla Tom Woodson of Pettis County, for example, had a brother and an uncle who were defendants, both of whom were fighting in the Confederate army. Two guerrilla brothers, George and Isaac Cruzen of Saline County, had another brother and two brothers-in-law being sued. The guerrilla David Ferrell, also of Saline County, had a brother, a brother-in-law, and an uncle being sued. The guerrilla Dr. John W. Benson of Saline County, who was an orphan raised by his uncles, had two of these uncles and six cousins being sued.
The issue of timing deserves a brief comment here. Except for leaders, guerrillas' names usually survive in one, or at most two, primary sources. All these sources show is that an individual was a guerrilla at the date of the document. There is no way to find out when he became a guerrilla. However, no primary source names any of the 44 guerrillas who had either signed notes themselves or else came from indebted families as guerrillas before the litigation started. Though guerrilla warfare in Missouri dates from the first months of the war, there is no evidence that any of these men joined the guerrillas before becoming defendants in the debt cases. These three findings-geographic overlap, family, and timing-all suggest a link between indebtedness and guerrilla violence. But these are necessary, rather than sufficient, conditions for linkage. Different results would have strongly suggested there was no connection. But even with these findings, Confederate sympathizers could have signed promissory notes and joined the guerrillas for some other reason, namely strong political commitment.
To control for political commitment, a new study group was selected. This group consisted of volunteers to three rebel military units that organized in May and June, 1861, in two adjoining counties, Lafayette and Saline. Pro-Confederate citizens signed about 400 promissory notes there, with the highest incidence occurring during the months when these units formed. Volunteers to Bledsoe's Battery, Gordon's Cavalry Company, and the Saline Mounted Rifles were young men of prime military age, of strong Confederate sympathies and eager to fight-the same population pool, presumably, as the guerrillas. In the three units, 74 recruits were eligible for study as prewar residents of the two counties, and having identified families. Of the 74, 10 signed promissory notes that were later litigated; another 26 had close family members (fathers, brothers, brothers-in-law, uncles) who were sued. The remaining 38 recruits had no connection to the promissory notes. In the first group of 36 recruits who signed notes or whose close family members did, 4 became guerrillas. In the group of 38 recruits with no connection to the debts, one became a guerrilla. It would be a mistake to try to quantify likelihood in so small a sample. Still, this test suggests that recruits connected with the indebtedness became guerrillas more often than did recruits with no connection. With regard to timing, once again no records show a turn to guerrilla fighting before the start of litigation.
A third test for linkage is to compare demographic characteristics of guerrillas from indebted and nonindebted families. This article's core argument is that indebtedness and attendant loss of land drove larger numbers of young men into the guerrilla bands than would otherwise have been the case. If this is true, these "extra" guerrillas might differ somehow from "ordinary" guerrillas. This proves to be so, in looking at the household property of the 53 guerrillas in the five-county sample. As stated, 44 of the 53 known guerrillas in the five-county sample either had signed promissory notes, or had close family members who did. The 44 indebted families had on average significantly more real and personal property than did the remaining 9 families with no connection to the debts, $12,544 versus $3,953. This is unsurprising, since the debt scheme disproportionately involved the counties' wealthier citizens. More significantly, sorting the families according to the value of their household property shows that none of the nonindebted guerrilla families were wealthy. This is noteworthy, because the five counties sampled were home to many rich men who were flaming secessionists, going on to become Confederate generals, members of congress, and diplomats. Yet in this entire elite group, not a single known individual unconnected to the debts became a guerrilla. Table 1 summarizes the results of this comparison.
There is one final way to test for difference between guerrillas from indebted and nonindebted families. The socioeconomic profile of guerrillas from the indebted group in the five central-west counties can be compared to a new, separate sample of guerrillas from counties where there were no such debt cases. Support for the Confederate cause was strong in southwest Missouri, but there were no banks there, and no promissory notes or resulting property sales. Examining a sample of forty-five guerrillas from Jasper and Barton Counties in Missouri's far southwest, we find that their socioeconomic profile matches that of the central-west guerrillas who came from nonindebted families. As shown in Table I, the southwesterners, like the nonindebted central-west guerrillas, came from families with at best modest property. Many were poor.
Combining all the guerrillas from both geographic samples into a single group underlines the wealth distinction between the indebted and nonindebted groups. Of ninety-eight guerrillas total, the only elite men who became guerrillas were either defendants in the debt cases, or near relatives of defendants. The other, nonindebted guerrilla families in both areas were much farther down the socioeconomic ladder. Southwest Missouri was poorer overall than the central-west counties, but the region had, by its own standards, a local elite of better-off farmers and a few merchants. There are no young men even from these families in the southwestern group. Unless their families were caught up in the debt business, sons of upper-class families steered clear of guerrilla warfare.
To recap, using different analytical approaches, all the available tests point to linkage between the indebtedness and the guerrilla violence. Twice as many recorded guerrilla incidents occurred within indebted counties as elsewhere. Four-fifths of the now identifiable guerrillas from the five sampled counties either were defendants in the debt cases, or had close family members who were. A sample of military volunteers from two indebted counties shows that volunteers from indebted families were more likely to become guerrillas than were members of nonindebted families. Finally, none of the young men of upper-class families became guerrillas, unless their families were indebted. It seems likely that without the indebtedness, the incidence of guerrilla violence in Missouri would have been closer to that experienced in other border states.
Historians of this period have missed the indebtedness because the civilian court records are a largely underutilized primary source. Brownlee, for instance, in Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy, devotes an entire chapter to martial law in Missouri, but refers only cursorily to civil law. In fact, Union commanders in Missouri tried hard to protect the courts and civilian administration. Writing from Jefferson City in January 1863, General Benjamin F. Loan briefed his superior General Samuel R. Curtis in St. Louis on the state of civilian justice in Missouri's Central District. Loan stated that "in several counties in the district no court of record of any kind had held a session for several terms past, say, more than 18 months. The records have been stolen, perhaps destroyed, and the civil officers driven from the country. . . . [In Lafayette County, which had 132 debt cases] it was impossible for the sheriff to serve a writ without a guard stronger than 50 men." But the point is, the sheriff was serving writs, and Loan was providing troops to protect him. General Loan was not exaggerating about the assault on the justice system, and federal forces kept Missouri's county courthouses under constant guard. Even so, thirty Missouri courthouses burned during the war. There are, however, plenty of surviving records.
Without placing undue weight on anecdotes, scattered evidence here and there also suggests a connection between the debts and the violence. In the April, 1864, session of the Chariton County circuit court, the docket contained a two-year backlog of some forty-five promissory-note debt cases. Impatient with what he considered pettifoggery, the presiding judge demanded the defendants' attorneys present all their witnesses and their entire defense instanter-meaning immediately. When the attorneys could not comply, the judge found in favor of the banks. In September, acting under orders of the court, 55-year-old Sheriff Robert Carmon was auctioning the farms of the defendants when guerrillas under Thrailkill and Todd rode into Keytesville, the county seat. The guerrillas burned down the courthouse and murdered Carmon, who left behind a widow and nine children.
At times, some of the surviving wartime accounts of central Missouri look like Unionist and rebel versions of the same story. Neither the postwar guerrilla memoirs nor the writings of their publicist ally, John Newman Edwards, name loyalty to the South, commitment to slavery, secession, or states' rights among the reasons for "going to the brush." They do, however, often speak of defending their homes and their honor, and seeking to avenge northern "outrages." Modern readers usually assume that such statements refer to war atrocities, as they doubtless often do. But then as now, "outrage" can also refer to gross or malicious wrongs or injury done to feelings, principles, justice, or morals. For this type of outrage, a Southern man in Missouri's Boonslick needed to look no further than the circuit judge or the county sheriff for a reason to pick up a gun.
The history of James Waller of Lafayette County shows how one family constructed its memory of a particular outrage. In 1861 Waller was a prosperous, thirty-one-year-old farmer, married with six children, and owning six slaves and a thousand acres of land. When the war broke out, Waller and two other men cosigned two promissory notes. By early 1863 the suits were in court; by mid-1864 the Lafayette County sheriff auctioned the defendants' property. In mid-1863 Waller, described in a newspaper article after his death as previously having been a well-respected citizen, joined Andy Blunt's guerrillas. In March 1864, a detachment of the (Union) First Missouri State Militia Cavalry shot Waller while chasing Blunt and his men. In his report, Captain James B. Moore noted much sympathy for Waller among the local citizens, but described Waller as a "notorious" bushwhacker, who took part in the murder of two unarmed Union men and the storming of a jail. Waller had also been in the infamous raid on Lawrence, and bragged of having killed fourteen men there. By 1870, Waller's widow and surviving children had left the area.
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 Union troops murdered him when he refused to reveal where he had hidden his "fortune." The soldiers then burned Waller's house and set his slaves free, over their objections. The family version thus preserves the outline of the true events: Union authorities took Waller's property and killed him. Lawsuits are not the stuff of legend, however, and as the family tells it, it was not the courts but the soldiers who took Waller's property. The family account omits any mention of Waller's bushwhacking, or any reason for his death other than the Unionists' cold-blooded robbery.
The history of the Warren family of Lafayette County is also suggestive. The Warrens originally came from Virginia via Kentucky, and by the outbreak of the Civil War had been in Missouri for decades. In 1860 they were a thriving clan in Lafayette County, with fifty-one family members in eight households, and ties of blood and marriage to a dozen other families. Together, the Warren households owned seventy-eight slaves and over twenty-five hundred acres of land. After the outbreak of fighting in Missouri in May and June, 1861, most of the young Warren men joined the Confederate forces. At the same time, eight Warrens-fathers, sons, brothers, uncles and cousins-from four different households cosigned eleven different promissory notes, which defaulted in late 1861 and early 1862.
In September, 1862 in Lafayette County, General Loan arrested the officers of the Farmers Bank of Missouri headquarters branch in Lexington. The general then installed new bank officers more to his liking. By early 1863 the replacement officers of the Farmers Bank filed lawsuits in the Lafayette County Circuit Court against the Warrens and over four hundred other defendants who had signed promissory notes between late 1861 and early 1862. Each of the eight Warrens was sued on average twice and each household four times. In 1863, while these suits were in court, the newspapers and military records name three young Warren men from the indebted households as members of a guerrilla band led by Dave Poole, one of William C. Quantrill's lieutenants. In July of that year the Warrens shot their way through a German community in their old neighborhood, indiscriminately killing four people and wounding six or seven more. A month later Poole and the Warrens joined in the Lawrence massacre. The legal outcome, of course, remained unchanged. Judgments in the eleven cases totaled more than thirty-six hundred dollars, forcing the sale of the four households' entire property in 1864. By 1870, of the eight Warrens who were defendants, two had left the state, two had disappeared, one was dead, and three remained in Lafayette County, owning only modest property. Three of the four households were gone.
And so are they all. The last traces of these people are in the records of these thousands of cases, tied up in yellowing bundles and stored in attics and cellars of rural county courthouses. The legal jargon and the old-fashioned, formulaic language record a calamity that fell on these communities and produced a vicious reaction. It is, in the end, difficult to grasp the full measure of rage experienced by the people who found themselves trapped in this way. The failed financial conspiracy of 1861 economically destroyed a part of Missouri's pro-Confederate population, a population already in crisis. No one who has been party to a lawsuit will wish to repeat the experience, and each of these families was in several suits at once. All around them, they would have seen their friends and relatives caught up in similar litigation, inevitably ending in the forced sale of all their property. In the mainly insular, small towns and rural neighborhoods of this region, it must have seemed that an implacable, punitive justice system was taking apart the whole social order, at the point of federal bayonets.
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