Civil War Murder of Alexander Officer

    As a slaveholding border state that remained in the Union during the Civil War, Missouri experienced an intense political strife that often erupted into violence far beyond the battlefield. Loyalties were so divided that civilians were shot down with some regularity merely for sympathizing with the wrong side. Alexander Officer of Andrew County was one such victim.
    On July 7, 1863, Confederate guerrilla leader Joe Hart raided through his old home territory of Andrew County, killing one Union man, seriously wounding two others, and robbing one or two more. What happened to Alexander Officer the next day was in direct retaliation for Hart's raid, because, although Officer had no direct connection to Hart, he was a known Southern sympathizer. Recently, he'd even been ordered to leave the state, but it's not known whether the order came from legitimate Union authority.

    About nine o'clock on the morning of the 8th, five armed men called at Officer's home, and when his wife, Lucinda, answered the door, they demanded to see him. She told them her husband was in the field working, and they went out and got him and marched him back to the house. The men waited on him in the yard while Officer went inside and cleaned up. When he came back, he mounted up and said, "I'm ready." One of the men told him he'd better be preparing, and he said he was about as prepared as he'd ever be. As they started off, one of the other men suggested that they were talking about preparing for the hereafter. They hadn't gone far before Officer, accompanied by one of the men, came back to retrieve the notice he'd received ordering him to leave the state within ten days. The two men then rode off to rejoin the other four men as they headed toward Ogle's Mill (present-day Rosendale). 

    Lucinda didn't see her husband again until about noon the same day when some other men, coming from the direction of Ogle's Mill, brought his body home. Lucinda asked one of the unofficial pallbearers who had killed her husband, and he answered "Some soldiers from Savannah" (the Andrew County seat), but he didn't know their names.

    The next day, July 9, Lucinda swore out an affidavit stating that three of the men who came to her house and took her husband away were Jesse Clemmons, Thomas Ashley, and David Bane, but she didn't know the other two. Several other witnesses were also deposed, and one or more of them testified that they'd either heard the shots that presumably killed Officer, had heard certain members of the Union militia make threats against Officer, or had seen Officer with certain men shortly before the shots were fired. None of them, however, were able to state definitely who had killed Officer.

    Five men, including Clemmons, Ashley, and Bane, were arrested by military authorities as suspects in Officer's murder. The other two were David Wilson and Brad Dowell. The matter was eventually turned over to civilian authority, and only one of the five was ever indicted and had to face prosecution. He, however, was released on bond after some sort of trial or hearing, and according to the History of Platte and Andrew Counties, the matter was quietly dismissed after that. 

    Sources: Union Provost Marshals' Papers, Two or More file; county history; chapter on Joe Hart in my book Other Noted Guerrillas.