Regulators

Vigilantism was prevalent in America for many years after the Civil War, and the vigilante actions often had political overtones left over from the war. Nowhere was this truer than in Missouri. A slave-holding border state that remained in the Union, Missouri was very divided during the war, and the bitterness engendered by the conflict lingered and gave rise to violence long after the war officially ended. Although not an act of what we would normally think of as vigilantism, the killing of Rev. Samuel S. Headlee, which I discussed last time, is an example of an act of violence that occurred shortly after the war and had political overtones. Rev. Headlee was killed by Union men in large part because he was an unrepentant and outspoken Confederate sympathizer.
About the same time that Headlee was killed in the western edge of Webster County in late July of 1866, another drama that definitely did involve vigilantism was winding down in neighboring Greene County. In fact, the Regulators, formed earlier in the year to combat an outbreak of thievery that centered around the Walnut Grove area of northwest Greene County, held a mass meeting on the very day that Headlee was killed, although there was no apparent connection between the two events.
The Regulators, who disbanded shortly after the mass meeting, were something of an exception to the idea that vigilante groups tended to be politically motivated. Although the Regulators were made up mostly of Union men and many of the lawbreakers that they opposed had been Confederate guerrillas or at least Southern sympathizers, the first victim of the Regulators was Green B. Phillips, a former captain in the Enrolled Missouri Militia who had aided in the defense of Springfield during John S. Marmaduke's attack on the town in January of 1863. There is also little evidence to suggest that Phillips had seriously violated any laws. However, he had apparently fallen in with the thieves and was therefore lynched for befriending the wrong people.
You can read more about the Regulators in my book about Ozarks gunfights and other notorious incidents.

Samuel S. Headlee

Another chapter in my new book is about the murder of the Rev. Samuel S. Headlee at the Pleasant View Church in northwest Webster County near Elkland shortly after the Civil War. I mentioned Headlee in a previous post about a year ago and discussed the Headlee family fairly extensively, but I went into very little detail about the murder itself. Without giving away the whole story (which you'll have to read my book to get), I will briefly outline the circumstances surrounding the killing.
Before and during the early part of the war, Headlee was a circuit-riding minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church who often preached at Pleasant View. The Civil War tore the church apart, and it split into two factions, the ME Church North and the ME Church South. Although the Northern faction came to dominate the church by the time the war ended, the Southern faction still claimed title to the building.
The Drake Constitution, adopted in Missouri shortly after the war, forbade anyone who had sympathized with the Confederacy from holding a responsible job like teaching, preaching, or practicing law without first taking an oath of allegiance to the Union. Headlee, as an unrepentant Confederate sympathizer, refused to take the oath but decided nonetheless to try to reclaim the Pleasant View Church for the Southern faction. When he announced that he was going to hold a revival meeting there near the end of July 1866, the Northern faction organized to oppose him and warned him not to try to carry through on his plans.
The headstrong Headlee showed up anyway on the appointed day insisting on his right to preach, but a mob that had gathered to challenge him forced him off the church grounds. As he was removing to some land he owned in the vicinity with plans to preach on his own property, he was shot and killed about a quarter of a mile from the church.

Wild Bill Hickok & Dave Tutt

My book entitled Ozarks Gunfights and Other Notorious Incidents has been released (or at least it's available for order from online bookstores); so for the next several posts, I thought I'd touch briefly on some of the subjects covered in the book. A few of them I have already mentioned in previous posts, but most of them I have not previously mentioned.
Chapter One of the book is an account of Wild Bill Hickok's shootout with Davis Tutt on the Springfield square shortly after the close of the Civil War. I won't try to recount the event here, but I'll mention two or three things that struck me as remarkable as I was doing my research, because they were things I was not already aware of. The first thing is that the circumstances surrounding the event and the guilt or innocence of either party were not black and white. In the popular myth, of course, Wild Bill is the good guy, but in reality, he had something of a notorious reputation himself, at least around Springfield. Many Southern-leaning citizens felt that the jury, composed almost exclusively of Northern sympathizers, brought in its not guilty verdict more because of the fact that Hickok had been a Union soldier and Tutt had served in the Confederate army than because of the circumstances of the duel.
We usually hear that the Hickok-Tutt gunfight grew out of dispute over a card game, but I was a little surprised to learn that Tutt, according to at least one report, was not actually involved in the game. Tension between the two men (partly over a romantic rivalry) had supposedly already reached such a point that Hickok refused to play cards with Tutt, and the dispute that led directly to the gunfight involved a prior debt that Hickok owed Tutt, not a debt arising out of the game that occurred on the fateful day.
Finally, my research has led me to believe that the gunfight occurred later on the same day that the poker game took place, not the next day as many accounts suggest. It should be remembered that back in those days card games were often played during daylight hours, mainly because of the unavailabilty of electric lights. Since the gunfight took place around 6 p.m., it seems logical to conclude, and the evidence seems to suggest, that the card game had taken place earlier the same day, not the previous day.

Bloody Bill Anderson

My wife and I just returned from a weekend trip to north Missouri, and we passed through Huntsville, which was the boyhood home of notorious Confederate guerrilla William "Bloody Bill" Anderson. The Anderson family moved to Kansas in 1857, but Bill paid a return visit to his old hometown after he had become notorious. During the summer of 1864, he and his band rode in, fired a few shots, and placed the whole town under arrest. While still holding the town captive, Bill visited pleasantly with a couple of men he remembered from his youth. Then he and his gang loaded up all the valuables they could haul and galloped out of town.
Anderson, of course, operated mainly in north Missouri, but he did make at least a couple of forays into the Ozarks--one as a member of Quantrill's band in the fall of 1863 when the guerrillas attacked Baxter Springs and the other the following spring when he returned to Missouri leading his own small band after wintering in Texas. During the latter incursion, the Anderson gang captured a Union man in the northwest edge of Greene County and took him into Polk County, where they killed him and supposedly mutilated his body.

A Patriotic Flogging

Civil war, by its very nature, tends to give rise to atrocity. America's Civil War was, of course, no exception; and the state of Missouri, where a ferocious brand of guerrilla warfare arose, probably witnessed more than its share of barbaric acts. In addition, the state also saw a number of lesser cruelties that, while perhaps not rising to the level of atrocity, were nonetheless notorious deeds. One such incident occurred at Clinton, Missouri, very early in the war.
On July 4, 1861, a combined force of about two or three thousand Kansas volunteers and army regulars marched into Clinton, the Henry County seat, on their way to link up with General Nathaniel Lyon, who was marching toward Springfield from the Missouri River region around Boonville. Although most of the Southern-leaning young men of Henry County had already gone south with General Sterling Price and Governor Claiborne Jackson a few days earlier, Sturgis found Clinton "pretty much given over to rebellion," according to the Leavenworth Weekly Conservative. It was Independence Day, but the Clintonites had "abolished the great anniversary, Yankee Doodle, the Stars and Stripes, the American Eagle, and all other National institutions."
Some of the volunteers celebrated the Fourth by imbibing a little too freely when a local man "rolled out a large keg of mean whiskey," and a few of the inebriated Kansans started stealing chickens and vegetables from local citizens and committing other minor depredations.
Eight offending soldiers and one teamster were promptly brought before Major Sturgis, who ordered them flogged by some of his regulars. The next day (the same day that Governor Jackson met Colonel Franz Sigel at the Battle of Carthage) they were tied in turn to a cannon and given fifty lashes each on the bare back with a teamster's blacksnake whip.
The severe punishment almost caused a mutiny among the Kansas volunteers, with some of them threating to kill Sturgis, and the Conservative questioned why loyal U. S. solders were dealt with so sternly for relatively minor indiscretions, while men who were in open rebellion against the United States could escape punishment by merely taking an oath.

Newtonia

I am currently in Columbia, where for the past day or two I've been doing some research at the State Historical Society of Missouri and at the Western Historical Manuscript Collection on the MU campus for a book I am writing about the two battles of Newtonia. When I first undertook this project, I worried that there wouldn't be enough material for a book-length manuscript (minimum length approximately 40,000 words). How much can a person write about two relatively minor Civil War battles? I asked myself. However, I'm beginning to think that lack of material may not as much of a problem as I first anticipated. There's a lot more than one might think about the Newtonia battles. Some of the sources I was completely unaware of until I started research for the book--for instance, M. Jeff Thompson's memoir here in Columbia at the Western Historical Manuscript Collection. Thompson commanded Shelby's brigade of Shelby's division during Price's invasion of Missouri in the fall of 1864, and he wrote fairly extensively about the campaign in his memoirs, including a petty good account of the Second Battle of Newtonia.

Thompson, by the way, was quite a colorful character. The mayor of St. Joseph before the Civil War, he was named a brigadier general in the Missouri State Guard when the war broke out and earned a reputation in southeast Missouri as the "swamp fox of the Confederacy." Thompson fancied himself a poet of sorts, and some of his writings are interesting to read.

Saratoga Springs

As I think I mentioned in one of my previous posts about mineral water towns, some of them, like Eureka Springs and Siloam Springs, continued to flourish even after the mineral water craze passed, but a lot of them faded into obscurity almost as rapidly as they sprang up. One of the latter was Saratoga Springs in McDonald County, Missouri.
Located at the edge of Cowskin Prairie in Prairie Township in the southwest part of the county, Saratoga Springs was laid out in 1880, and three additions were laid out the following year. For a year or two, according to Sturges's History of McDonald County, the town "promised to be a place of some importance" and "had the prettiest location and most abundant water supply of all the medical towns." Many houses were erected, several business buildings went up, and even a newspaper "flourished in its palmiest days." By the time Sturges's history was published in 1897, though, "the pride of her glory" had already "long since departed" and "the bloom of her beauty faded slowly away." Only a few residences, a post office, and a couple of small stores remained at the "once promising little city."
Today Saratoga Springs still exists but only as a wide place in the road on Highway 90 about halfway between Noel and Southwest City, and it is known nowadays as Saratoga, without the "Springs."