Lizzie Powell: A Beautiful and Intelligent Young Lady Rebel

   Unlike most of the women arrested in Missouri by Federal authorities during the Civil War, whose stories we know almost exclusively from Union sources, Elizabeth "Lizzie" Powell kept a diary during her confinement, and it survives. The journal clearly shows Lizzie's feisty personality and her tenacious devotion to the Southern cause.
   Born and reared in northeast Missouri, Lizzie was about 24 years old when she first ran afoul of Union authorities in the fall of 1862. She and a friend, 29-year-old Maggie Creath, borrowed a carriage in Monroe County and drove to Hannibal in neighboring Marion County, where, "under the protection of the Petticoat Flag," they brought out a quantity of gun caps and other items important to the guerrillas. Both young women, being quite attractive and articulate, were accused of influencing young men to support the Confederacy.
   Lizzie was arrested on September 29 at her sister's home in Monroe County and taken to a nearby Federal camp. The officer in charge of the arresting party offered to introduce Lizzie to some other Union officers, but Lizzie demurred, telling her diary she had no desire "to be introduced to those whose acquaintance [she] had not sought and did not expect to cultivate."
   A Union order had recently been handed down requiring all able bodied young men to either enroll in Federal service or declare their disloyalty, and Lizzie was told she had been arrested for "discouraging enlistment." Taken at first to Macon, she was moved after one or two days to Palmyra and held under guard at a hotel. Later she was moved to the Palmyra home of Jacob Creath, her friend Maggie's father. There she and Maggie passed the time by talking, playing chess, and other diversions. Toward the end of the first week of October, Lizzie was officially charged with violating the laws of war, and it was recommended that she be banished from Missouri. Meanwhile, Lizzie continued to vent her anger in her diary against the "vile tyrants" infesting the state.
   By early December, Lizzie's health was failing, and she was granted a leave to return on parole to her Hannibal home. In late December, Lizzie was on the verge of being banished from Missouri when, instead, she was suddenly released from her parole altogether. Within a matter of two weeks, however, she was again in trouble for discouraging enlistments and telling her friends to join the Rebel army. She was re-arrested on January 12, 1863, but she refused the order of banishment that was drawn up against her. Since there was not good place to keep female prisoners, Union authorities paroled her to her sister's home in Hannibal until they could figure out what to do with her. A couple of days later, she was confined under guard in a Hannibal hotel. After another month and a half of debating what to do with Lizzie, authorities finally released her unconditionally in late February.
   In late April, Lizzie traveled to the West, where she met and married a young lawyer, and they later moved to Colorado. Lizzie died in 1877 after being thrown from a vehicle she was traveling in with the wife of the Colorado governor.
   My latest book, Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri https://amzn.to/3yGocBS, contains a much more detailed account of Lizzie's story.

Jane Haller, Mother of Guerrilla Leader Bill Haller

   My latest book is called Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri https://amzn.to/3yGocBS. It's more or less a follow-up to one of my previous books, Bushwhacker Belles https://amzn.to/4fFGLHf, but with a slight difference. The first book concentrated almost exclusively on women in Missouri who got into trouble with Union authorities for helping guerrillas, mostly by feeding and harboring them. The new book, on the other hand, focuses more on women who got into trouble for other activities, such as spying or delivering Confederate mail, and a lot of those activities occurred in and around St. Louis. There are a few exceptions, however. A few women who got into trouble mainly for helping guerrillas were left out of the first book but included in this one. Jane Haller is one example.
   Jackson County guerrilla leader William Quantrill formed his band in late 1861, and William Haller (sometimes spelled Hallar) was made first lieutenant. Quantrill quickly drew the notice of Federal authorities, as did some of his lieutenants. We know from extant records, for instance, that Union officials were well aware of Bill Haller and his older brother Wash at least as early July 1862, when William Kerr, a Federal spy, reported to Lieutenant Colonel Buel, post commander at Independence, that he'd been held prisoner by Quantrill's guerrillas and that Wash Haller had argued that he (Kerr) should be executed. Quantrill overruled Haller and ordered that George Todd and Bill Haller take Kerr away from the guerrilla camp and turn him loose.
   In late August of 1862, a couple of weeks after the Battle of Independence, a detail of Federal soldiers were fired upon from the bush as they were traveling the road between Independence and Lexington, and one soldier was killed. Colonel William R. Penick, Buel's successor, thought "Captain Bill Haller," as he was called in Union records, was responsible for the killing. An incident that happened a month and a half later seemed to suggest that Penick might have been correct. In mid-October, near the exact same spot where the August ambush had occurred, Haller's mother, Jane, and two other women were arrested because the carriage they were traveling in "showed signs" that they had been taking food to the guerrillas, and one of the women had shouted to somebody in the bush to warn them of the Federals' approach.
   All three women were arrested and taken back to Independence, where they were held as prisoners. In late November, Jane, who was under investigation for subversion, was banished to Pennsylvania, where she stayed with her deceased husband's relatives. Sometime in the summer of 1863, she was allowed to come back to Missouri after taking an oath of allegiance to the Union. By this time, her son Bill had been killed in a skirmish with Federals the previous spring, but whether she got back before a second son, Abe, was killed in the late summer of 1863 is not clear.
   Jane died in 1868 and is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Independence.
   My new book contains a more detailed account of Jane Haller's clash with Union authorities.

 

St. Joseph Prostitution, Part Three: Wayward Young Women

   My past two blog posts have been about prostitution in St. Joseph, Missouri, during the late 1800s, focusing respectively on madam Mollie Williams and on how the system worked. This time I thought I'd take a look at how young women in the late 1880s came to turn to prostitution, focusing still on St. Joseph and Mollie Williams's "palace of sin."
   On the evening of November 21, 1884, a merchant from King City, Missouri, showed up in St. Joseph looking for Leona Mann, a 17-year-old girl who had been enticed away from the home of her relatives near King City two weeks earlier by a 27-year-old paramour named Cay Craynor. The next day Craynor was located on the streets of St. Joseph and taken to police headquarters for questioning. He denied any knowledge of Leona's whereabouts at first, but when the police chief threatened to have him taken to jail and "chained to the floor," according to the St. Joseph Gazette-Herald, he instantly weakened and told the chief that the girl was "holding forth at Mollie Williams's bagnio."
   The chief went to Mollie's place and asked that all the girls in the place be brought to the parlor. "The request was complied with," said the newspaper, "and among those who put in an appearance was Miss Mann." Leona was taken to the marshal's office, where she was allowed to talk to Craynor before being interrogated by the police chief.
   Leona told the chief she had left King City two weeks earlier in company with Craynor, who had promised to marry her. They came to St. Joseph, where they stayed at the St. Charles Hotel, and "as a matter of course her ruin was accomplished." After a few days, they went to Kansas City, where Leona thought they would be married, but Craynor refused to keep his word. On November 20, they returned to St. Joe, where Craynor deposited her at Mollie Williams's place. Leona told the chief she was anxious to leave Mollie's but that she owed the landlady ten dollars. The King City merchant stepped in at this point and said he'd pay the ten dollars. Leona "declined to prosecute her seducer," but the chief ordered him out of town under threat of being arrested for vagrancy. Described as "an innocent country girl" with "considerable beauty..., large blue eyes and auburn hair," and a form that was "almost perfection," Miss Mann was taken to a secure house in St. Joseph to spend the night, but the Gazette-Herald reporter thought she would probably return to her relatives in King City the next day.
   On Wednesday morning, September 11, 1889, Frances Hammond, "a comely looking 16-year-old girl with black hair and eyes, five feet high and weighing 114 pounds," ran away from her St. Joseph home "with the avowed intention of entering on a life of shame," according to the St. Joseph Herald. She had confided her plans to a friend of hers and had complained of mistreatment at home. Her father and the police located her Thursday night, according to the St. Joseph News, "in the ranch of the notorious Molly Williams." They took her away, and the father took her back home. The girl was "glad enough to get away," said the News, and "apparently regretted the step she had taken." However, the father planned to have Frances placed in a reformatory "to make sure of her leading a virtuous life."
   On Friday morning, June 27, 1890, a man from Champaign, Illinois, named William Ross arrived in St. Joseph looking for his daughter, whom he had heard was living in "a sporting house" in St. Joe. That afternoon Ross set out to search all the prominent bawdy houses in town. At the second one he visited, Mollie Williams's place, all the girls in the house were ushered into the parlor, according to the Herald, and Mr. Ross found himself "face to face with his own daughter," who immediately began weeping.
   Few words passed between father and daughter, but she immediately promised to accompany her dad home. "The reprimands came afterwards," said the Herald. The father could not or would not say for sure why his daughter had left home, but he intimated that she had been "coaxed away by a traveling man" from Chicago. The girl, who had gone by the name Lillian Brown while at Mollie's place, was described as about 20 years old, "not beautiful but good looking." She had supposedly "repented of her past action." Friday evening, she left with her father for Kansas City, from where they planned to take a train for home.
   Illustrating that there might be at least some validity to the stereotype of the fallen woman "with the heart of gold," Mollie Williams came to the rescue in early January 1891 to take in a homeless baby when no one else seemed to care. On Sunday, January 4, a young woman, giving her name as Mila Myers, appeared at police headquarters with an infant that she said had been left in her care by a couple named Cornwall, who had adopted it out of a house of prostitution, where it had been born to one of the inmates. The police advised Mila to take the baby to the Home of the Friendless, but the supposed charitable organization refused admittance to the child when the young woman took it there. Turning sadly away, Mila started down the street with the infant in her arms and paused in front of Mollie Williams's bagnio to contemplate her sorrowful situation. The woman finally turned in at Mollie's place, and, according to the St. Joseph Gazette-Herald, the madam "agreed to keep the little waif and find a home for it."
   Later investigation revealed that the infant, in fact, was Mila's child and that Mila was a fictitious name. According the St. Joseph Weekly News, the young woman had come to St. Joseph from Marshall County, Kansas, in "an unfortunate condition, the victim of a prominent farmer in that district." As "a last resort," "Mila" had taken up residence at Maud Norris's house of ill fame, and when the baby was born, she determined to "give up her evil companionships." She induced the Cornwalls to take the baby, but they returned it to her shortly afterwards when they were getting ready to leave town. When she told her story to Mollie Williams, Mollie "took pity on her," according to the Daily Gazette, and was able to promptly find a home for the infant.
   Although I've continued to focus on St. Joseph in this post, I'm pretty sure some the examples I've cited about how young women ended up in houses of prostitution could just as well have been drawn from almost any other town where prostitution flourished during the late 1800s or from almost any other era, for that matter. In the 1880s, women who turned to prostitution often did so because of desperate circumstances. Often they were girls running away from abusive home environments, young women who had been "ruined" and cast adrift by fickle lovers, or divorced women with few other ways of supporting themselves. I suspect the same is still true today. And this is not even to mention women forced into prostitution through threats, intimidation, and physical assault.

St. Joseph Prostitution, Part Two: How It Worked

   Last time, in discussing Mollie Williams and St. Joseph prostitution, I mentioned, or at least implied, that, even though prostitution was nominally illegal, a sort of de facto licensing system existed whereby prostitutes and keepers of bawdy houses were periodically fined but then allowed to go right back to doing business as usual. I thought I might go into a little more detail this time about the extent of prostitution in St. Joseph in the late 1800s and how the ladies of the night were treated by law enforcement.
   A St. Joseph Herald newspaper article from February 1889 sheds quite a bit of light on this question. The reporter suggested that while St. Joe was rightfully proud of its educational institutions, churches, and charitable organizations, the town was also "cursed with a population that numbers into the hundreds, that are entirely without the pale of society--the courtesan." The reporter's estimate of the number of scarlet women is probably not an exaggeration, because nine years earlier the 1880 census listed at least 27 women with the occupation "prostitute." Not only had the number probably increased since 1880, but those listed in the census with the title "prostitute" obviously represented only those that openly practiced their profession and did not include those women who were still trying to maintain a veneer of respectability.
   The Herald reporter was not particularly alarmed by the fact that prostitution existed in the city. In fact, he thought the extent of prostitution in St. Joe was no greater than it was in almost any other city of comparable size. However, the fact that prostitution had spread throughout the entire city and was not confined to a certain area was an evil that called for a remedy.
   Only four established houses of prostitution existed in St. Joseph at the time of the article. The "landladies" of these places were Minnie Dixon at 777 Jule Street, Mollie Williams on Main Street between Francis and Jule, Ellen Hardy on Jule between Main and Second, and "Dutch Ella" at 317 Main Street. Minnie's place had eight or ten inmates, Mollie's had six or seven, Ellen's had between ten and twelve, and Ella's place housed ten girls.
   These women were arrested every three months. The keepers were fined $50 each, while the prostitutes were usually fined $8 each. This brought in a total of about $2,000 per year for the city coffers. The police chief told the reporter that these four places were "properly kept" with disturbances rarely occurring at them. In addition, these four houses were all located within a radius of one or two blocks of each other in an old, downtown part of the city where very few families resided and where not much business was transacted.
   The problem, as the reporter saw things, was that it was very difficult to confine prostitution just to this relatively small area. Although the four places mentioned above were the only ones openly doing business as places of prostitution, numerous boarding houses throughout the city had become assignation spots for freelance prostitutes who roomed in those houses. In fact, when the reporter asked a police official whether the prostitutes at the four downtown houses represented the bulk of St. Joe's scarlet women, the official replied, "No, not one-tenth of them. They are scattered from one end of the city to the other. They may be found next door to the millionaire, the minister and the merchant."
   The police official complained that it was difficult to control these freelance prostitutes disguised as "roomers" unless they engaged in boisterous conduct or broke the law in some other manner that drew police attention. The reporter thought the best way to deal with prostitution was by instituting a licensing system that legalized the "social evil" but confined it to a certain area of the city and cracked down on those who tried to expand it to other parts of the city.
   In 1890, there apparently was an attempt to crack down on prostitution in St. Joseph. First the amount of the fine that madams had to pay quarterly was increased to $200 instead of $50. Then, a local judge ruled that the "landladies" would no longer be allowed to simply plead guilty, pay their fines, and go back to the sporting life. Instead, they would have to face trial. The new law, however, had little practical effect in reducing prostitution or punishing offenders, because when the madams were tried for the first time after the judge issued his ruling, at the summer 1890 term of court, the jury assessed the same fine ($200) that the women had previously been accustomed to paying.
   In the fall of 1890, five madams, including the four mentioned above, were arrested and charged with keeping bawdy houses. Four of the five, including Mollie Williams, were allowed to plead guilty and pay fines of $262.50, while Ellen Hardy escaped having to pay a fine by dying. So much for the judge's new rule requiring that the madams face trial by jury.