Going South During the Civil War

It was not unusual for Missouri civilians, particularly women, to be banished to the South during the Civil War by Federal authorities for having fed, sheltered, or otherwise aided guerrillas. Occasionally they were banished from the state and sent somewhere other than the South (e.g. northern Illinois), but most of those exiled from Missouri were sent south.
I did not realize it until recently, but it also was not particularly unusual for women to request to be allowed to go south to join their husbands, who were in the Southern army, or to otherwise reunite with their families. In September of 1863 and early October of 1863, for instance, a large number of women from the Springfield, Missouri, area asked to be permitted to go south. Those who had children, of course, also asked passage for their children.
Women who wanted to go south could not just strike out on their own, for at least a couple of reasons. For one thing, it would have been physically dangerous, but also the Federal authorities might have arrested them on suspicion of carrying information to the Southern army. So, they had to apply to Federal officials for permits to go south. The applications were usually granted rather routinely. In fact, if Federal officials in Missouri could have had their way, they would have sent all Southern citizens, including the women, out of the state.
Among the many citizens from the Springfield area asking to go south during the fall of 1863 was one party of seven women and twenty kids. They wanted to go to Fannin County, Texas by way of Forsyth, Missouri. Two of the women were named Snapp (Mary Snapp and Margaret Snapp). The fact that they asked to go by way of Forsyth makes me suspect that were probably related to the Snapps of Bald Knobber fame. (The bald knob where the vigilante group initially met and which gave the group its name was originally called Snapps' Bald. Also Sam Snapp was one of the victims of the Bald Knobbers.) However, I have not tried to do any genealogical research to determine how the two women tied in with the Snapp family of the Forsyth area, if, in fact, they did.

Lynching of Daniel Reed

As most of us know, lynching was pretty common in America during the 1800s and early 1900s. In fact, I think it was probably even more common than most of us realize. Only the most sensational lynchings were widely reported. Many others occurred that received only passing mention in newspapers of the time. One of the latter was the lynching of Daniel Reed in Joplin, Missouri, on Thursday, October 8, 1874. In fact, this event was so obscure that I failed to run across any mention of it during my fairly extensive research for my Wicked Joplin book, and I only recently became aware of it.
Reed was arrested in early October in Vernon County and brought to Joplin for trial on a charge of allegedly having stolen two mules from John Depriest of Joplin. Reed claimed he was innocent because he had won the mules from Depriest in a game of cards, and he said he'd be able to prove his case at his examination, which was scheduled for Monday October 12. However, he never got a change to present his evidence. In the wee hours of the morning of October 8, Reed was taken from his guards by a party of about thirty "disguised men" and hauled to the "most thickly settled part of the city," where he was strung up to a tree.
A local newspaper, the Joplin Bulletin, regretted the fact that "our city has received another blot on her name." At this time (1874), Joplin had recently incorporated and was trying (rather unsuccessfully, I might add) to emerge from the "reign of terror" that had characterized the place during the early 70s when it was still just an unincorporated mining camp. The Bulletin further admitted that the mob was guilty of murder and that lynching Reed was a greater crime than the crime of theft with which he had been charged. At the same time, however, the local paper tried to justify the lynching to a certain degree by pointing out that Reed was considered "a desperate character" who had no friends in Jasper County, despite the fact that he had lived there for some time. The paper also reported that Reed supposedly confessed to stealing the mules before he was hanged.
The Fort Scott Monitor, on the other hand, opined that the whole affair "looked suspicious, to say the least." The Monitor implied that there were already whisperings of vigilante justice when Reed was handed over to Jasper County officials in Vernon County, that the Jasper County officials knew of these rumors but failed to take any action to prevent the lynching, and that some of the deputies were even in on the lynching. The Monitor said there was at least a fair chance that Reed was innocent as he claimed, and the paper also reported that the hanging was badly handled and that Reed's body ended up being badly bruised and butchered because of the botched execution.
The Granby Miner reported that three or four of the men suspected of being among the mob that lynched Reed were overhauled and arrested as they passed through Granby on the night after the hanging and that they were taken back to Joplin for examination. Nothing is known, however, about the outcome of their cases. More than likely, they were probably never punished. Lynch mobs rarely were.
Sources: October 15, 1874 Mount Vernon Fountain and Journal and Leavenworth Weekly Times.

Fort Sumter

The firing on Fort Sumter that began the Civil War obviously didn't happen in the Ozarks, but, just as obviously, the event did affect the course of Ozarks history, just as it affected the history of the entire nation. Besides, my wife and I just got back from a trip to Charleston and other points in the Southeast; so I'm going to write briefly about Fort Sumter.
Prior to our trip, I had just the merest familiarity with the firing on Ft. Sumter. I knew that Confederate troops fired on Union troops stationed at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, thus igniting the war, but that was about the sum of my knowledge. After my trip, I'm still certainly no expert on the battle, but I do have a little better understanding of it.
Among the foremost things my trip helped me understand about Fort Sumter was its physical location. Prior to my trip, I knew that Fort Sumter was located in Charleston Harbor, but somehow I always imagined it as being very close to shore. Instead, it's a good distance away from Charleston, out in the middle of the harbor. I also did not previously realize that Fort Sumter was just one of several forts that had been built in the harbor years before to defend Charleston from possible foreign attack. (Actually Fort Sumter was not complete at the time it was attacked in April 1861, but it had been started years before.) These other forts were, in fact, the points from which the Confederates launched their bombardment on Ft. Sumter. Major Robert Anderson, who commanded the Union company at Fort Sumter, comprising about 85 men, had previously occupied nearby Ft. Moultrie, but he had abandoned it on Dec. 26, 1860, six days after South Carolina's secession, because of the rising tensions between the North and the South, and moved his men to Ft. Sumter, which he thought could be better defended. Confederate troops under Brigadier General P.G.T. Beauregard had moved in and taken over Fort Moultrie and other forts located along the shores of the harbor, virtually surrounding Anderson. Prior to the firing on Ft. Sumter, Anderson had refused Beauregard's demands that he surrender peacefully.
One of the tidbits of info I learned during my visit to Ft. Sumter was that Captain Abner Doubleday, who would go on to become a general in the Union Army and who would later be credited with having invented baseball, was Anderson's second-in-command at Ft. Sumter. In fact, the troops stationed at Ft. Sumter supposedly played a form of baseball on the small island.
As I say, even though Fort Sumter is about a thousand miles away from the Ozarks, the events there in mid-April of 1861 affected the entire nation, including our neck of the woods. The History of Greene County, Missouri, for instance, recounted how the news of the firing on Ft. Sumter was received in Springfield. The news was received by telegraph, and the local newspaper published an extra edition announcing it. The news reportedly threw the whole town into a state of intense excitement, and people stood on every street corner discussing the event with anxiety and anticipation.
I am attaching a picture I took of the welcome sign at the entrance to Ft. Sumter, and you can see part of the fort in the left background.

Florence Raid Revisited

About two years ago, I posted an entry on this blog about the guerrilla raid on Florence in Morgan County, Missouri, that occurred during the Civil War in July of 1863. Most of the information for that post came from two separate reports that were published in a Jefferson City newspaper shortly after the incident. I recently ran across another account in the St. Louis Daily Union, which was also published in the immediate wake of the incident. The St. Louis paper's account contradicts at least a couple of important details that were published in the Jefferson City paper. The St. Louis paper said that the raid occurred on Wednesday, July 8, whereas the Jefferson City paper said it occurred on Thursday morning, July 9. The Jeff City paper said the leader of the gang was a man named Smith and that a man named Thomas Jobe was also recognized by residents of Florence as being among the guerrillas. The St. Louis paper, on the other hand, said that Thomas Joab (i.e. Jobe) was, in fact, the leader of the gang.
The St. Louis paper also added a couple of details that did not appear in the Jeff City paper. For instance, the St. Louis paper identified one of the men who was killed by the guerrilla gang as a brother to state legislator William Baughman. (This was almost certainly a reference to John Baughman, who like William Baughman, lived at Florence at the time of the 1860 census and was just a few years older than William.) The St. Louis paper said that there were ten men in the guerrilla band, whereas the Jeff City reports did not cite a specific number. The St. Louis paper said that Federal soldiers under Captain Plumb of the 6th Regiment Missouri State Militia pursued the rebels the next day and succeeded in killing six or eight guerrillas. It doesn't specifically say, however, that the men killed were some of the same ones who raided Florence. In fact, I don't see how the Federals could have known whether they were or not, unless residents identified the dead bodies, and the report does not say that such an identification occurred.
The St. Louis paper concluded, "There are but few guerrillas in that region, but those few, by secreting themselves in the woods for weeks, and then sallying upon unprotected neighborhoods, are able to inflict serious damage, and keep neighborhoods in constant alarm. They generally return from their raids, however, with thinned numbers, and seldom fail to leave a portion of their band slain by the wayside, by the unerring bullets of Union soldiers."

Fremont's Brief Command in Springfield

In the 1840s, John C. Fremont led three or four expeditions to the American West, gained a reputation as something of a romantic adventurer, and was dubbed "the Pathfinder" in the press. He got wealthy during the California gold rush of 1849 and was later elected California's first governor. In 1856, he ran for president as the first candidate of the new Republican party and carried much of the North but lost the election because the Know Nothing Party took a lot of the anti-Democrat vote from the Republicans.
Near the outset of the Civil War, Fremont was appointed a Union general commanding the Department of the West headquartered at St. Louis. Frank P. Blair, Jr., a U.S. congressman from the St. Louis area, had supported his appointment, but it didn't take long for the two men to be at odds. Blair and others criticized Fremont for not reinforcing General Nathaniel Lyon prior to the Battle of Wilson's Creek fought on August 10, 1861, and Blair and Fremont also had some personal disagreements. Then in late August, Fremont angered President Lincoln when he issued his infamous decree emancipating Missouri's slaves and declaring martial law in the state. Lincoln ordered the edict rescinded, but the relation between the two men was already strained. Next, Fremont had Blair arrested for insubordination. (Blair was a military officer under Fremont's command as well a congressman.) This, of course, further strained the relations between Fremont and Blair, who had already been working for Fremont's removal. In fact, that's partly why Fremont had him arrested. Perhaps the last straw, though, was Fremont's failure to reinforce Colonel Mulligan prior to or during the Siege of Lexington, the same way he had failed to reinforce Lyon. After Mulligan was forced to surrender to General Sterling Price and the Missouri State Guard on September 20, Lincoln ordered Fremont to "repair the disaster at Lexington without loss of time," but as far as Fremont's future as commanding general of the Department of the West was concerned, the damage had already been done.
Fremont did set out to try to atone for the Lexington defeat by personally taking to the field, amassing a large army, and forcing Price to evacuate Lexington. Fremont pursued Price into southern Missouri during October of 1861. On October 25, Fremont's body guard, led by Major Charles Zagonyi, chased a few hundred Missouri State Guard troops out of Springfield, and a few days later Fremont and his entire army occupied Springfield. Price and the large portion of his State Guard troops, were camped around Neosho, where Governor Claiborne F. Jackson's government-in-exile voted to secede from the Union. Near the end of October, Fremont and Price entered into negotiations concerning the treatment of prisoners and other matters. They signed an agreement on November 1 that said, among other things, that citizens would not be arrested or mistreated merely because of their political sentiments, as long as they were peaceable citizens who were minding their own business.
The very next day, however, Fremont received word that he had been relieved of duty by President Lincoln. At Springfield, Fremont issued a farewell address to his troops, many of whom were very loyal to him and very upset by his removal. In fact, some of the troops (Zagonyi's body guard, for example) were shortly afterwards mustered out of service because they were considered too personally loyal to Fremont instead of to the Union cause.
General David Hunter was appointed to take Fremont's place, and Hunter declared that he would not recognize the Fremont-Price agreement. That, too, hardly mattered, however, since Hunter and all the Federal troops were soon ordered to evacuate Springfield and fall back to Rolla and Sedalia (places that had rail service).

Thirsty Teamsters at Cuba

On Friday, July 10, 1863, a Union wagon train, escorted by a detachment of the 2nd Wisconsin Cavalry, was traveling along the Springfield Road between St. Louis and Rolla. It stopped at David Curtis's store in Cuba, Missouri, and the teamsters asked for whiskey. The clerk, Joseph Martin, told the men that he couldn't sell them any because the proprietor was not there. (Curtis had a special permit to sell liquor, but apparently only he could sell it.) The teamsters grew angry and told Martin they would have the whiskey one way or another.
After dark on the same day, someone cut a window sash out of the store, broke in, and took one or more kegs of whiskey, some tobacco, and a few other items. The entire haul was valued at about $30. The same evening some men also called at the home of a local man named Cundiff and took a gray mare.
On July 13, James R. Coleman of Cuba wrote to the Union's district headquarters at Rolla outlining what had happened and saying that he was sure the teamsters were the ones who had broken into the store and stole the horse. Several other men attested to the facts as outlined in Coleman's letter and seconded his opinion that the teamsters were the guilty parties.
Brigadier General Thomas A. Davies, commanding the Rolla district, forwarded the complaint to the Department of the Missouri's headquarters at St. Louis. He included a statement vouching for David Curtis as an upright citizen and loyal Union man and suggesting that the matter warranted investigation.
Upon receipt of Davies's communication, Major General John M. Schofield, commanding the Department of the Missouri, ordered an investigation in late July. About a month later, Union authorities at Rolla reported back to Schofield that, after an inquiry into the matter, "nothing could be discovered" to substantiate the charges against the teamsters. The chief wagon master at Rolla had testified that none of his teamsters were engaged in the robbery of Mr. Curtis's store and that Mr. Cundiff's horse had been taken by the 2nd Wisconsin escort, not by the teamsters. He added, too, that the horse was found to have a "U.S." brand on it, suggesting that it was government property to begin with that had been unlawfully acquired by Cundiff. The chief quartermaster said the horse had later been "disposed of" by the escort "on the road." Thus the investigation into the theft of whiskey at Cuba was discontinued.

Melee at Quincy, Missouri

In the 1840s, the Quincy (Mo.) community, then called Judy's Gap, was the center of the so-called Slicker Wars, which started out mainly as a vigilante movement but soon disintegrated into what was basically a family feud between the families of the Slickers and the families of the anti-Slickers. Apparently the tendency toward both violence and vigilantism in the area carried over until at least sometime after the Civil War. Quincy, located in what became Hickory County in 1845, was the scene in the spring of 1869 of what the Bolivar (Mo.) Free Press called a "serious affray," during which the local citizens took the law into their own hands.
On Saturday night, May 2, two young men named Wilson and Hyatt, described by the newspaper as "desperate characters," came into town armed with revolvers and bowie knives and started raising hell. The men had been in the habit of coming into town armed, threatening local citizens, and "otherwise behaving in an outrageous manner." During their latest visit, they got drunk, became quarrelsome, and started threatening the lives of certain citizens. They then got into a heated argument with a young man and fired a couple of shots at him but failed to hit him.
"This so exasperated some of the citizens," according to the Free Press, "that they armed themselves and returned the fire." Hyatt was struck in the head by a bullet as he threatened one of the citizens with his bowie knife, and Wilson was hit on the head with a big rock, crushing his skull. Hyatt died on Monday, two days later, while Wilson was still clinging to life but was not expected to live.
It was reported that Hyatt and Wilson had emptied their revolvers except for one bullet before they fell and that 25 to 30 shots were fired altogether during the melee. According to the newspaper, "It seemed to be a matter of general congratulation among the people of Quincy that the desperadoes had been disposed of, and that the entire community would be safer in the future." Nothing was said about whether any of the local citizens who took the law into their own hands were held to account, but presumably not. Apparently, vigilantism still reigned in Quincy.