Published: October 08, 2009 11:34 pm         

An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth

This week I’m really going to challenge your perspective.

I’m not passionate about a lot of things, but I am about history, and I’m distressed about its inexact portrayal over many years by Hollywood. Boy, did anyone out there ever study history in school, or did they just rely on Classic Comics?

Having been a Civil War living history reenactor since the 1970s, that was one of the passions about that period of U.S. history which still motivates tens of thousands of us who re-don the blue and the gray (how about blue and butternut brown, as really was the case) — to portray it accurately, as it happened, not how it happened in some romantic notion of a Hollywood script writer or director.

So, while castigating Hollywood for its inexactitude and disregard for facts, I’ll throw them bouquets for movies in which they did get it right — “Glory” and “Ride With the Devil.”

“Glory” was very well done and director Ang Lee and the writers got it right in “Ride With the Devil,” starring Tobey Maguire, Jewel, Skeet Ulrich, Jeffrey Wright and Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

Anyway, its view of the American Civil War is more from a civilian perspective, as seen from the cauldron of violence on the Kansas-Missouri border.

It’s not of large armies in the field or high principles. It’s the ugly side of the war which continues to come to light the farther we get from the conflict, as is the case in much of historical research.

It’s said the winners write the history and the losers be damned. The border war which spilled over into Oklahoma was just such a case, since it started long before Fort Sumter was shelled in April 1861.

Some of the bloodiest, most cruel and despicable acts were perpetrated by both sides during the Kansas-Missouri border war, which began years before the outbreak of hostilities in the East.

Abolitionist forces, led by U.S. Sen. James H. Lane — commonly known as Jayhawkers — raided up and down the border, killing, burning and looting, most times indiscriminately against pro-slavery southerners in Missouri.

While the history books tell of the horrible massacre, burning and looting that took place in 1863 when William Clarke Quantrill and his Confederate irregulars swept down from Mount Oread and sacked Lawrence, Kan., the attack must be viewed in the light of the times.

While armies in the East fought toe to toe, the border war was hit and run, bushwhack and kill or be killed. While the Civil War was far from civilized in many aspects, it took on total barbarity in the West. It was old-time biblical — an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

Missouri, while a border state and not part of the Confederacy, was a vast area of pro-southern sympathy. In fact, only Virginia and Tennessee saw more battles take place on their soil than did Missourians.

While Sen. Lane and his Jayhawkers were stirring the pot with their raids, the pro-southern factions, made up of hordes of guerrillas and irregulars, retaliated on the frontier.

Two actions most cited in precipitating the attack on Lawrence can be traced to pro-Unionist acts. The first was in September 1861, when Lane’s Jayhawkers shot down at least nine civilians in Osceola, Mo., pillaged and looted the town of 3,000 people, and for all intents and purposes, burned it to the ground.

The second occurred Aug. 13, 1863, after a number of female relatives of Missouri irregulars had been rounded up and placed in a makeshift jail in Kansas City, Mo., for harboring and aiding Quantrill’s men. The three-story structure collapsed, killing four of the women, including a sister of Bloody Bill Anderson, a Quantrill lieutenant and notorious bushwhacker.

Just over a week later, on Aug. 21, 1863, Quantrill and his irregulars decided they’d had enough, and were determined to swoop down on Lawrence, which had been seen as the staging area for years of attacks on Missourians, and, most importantly, was the town Sen. Lane called home.

When Quantrill rode into infamy, leading from 400 to 500 men into the Kansas border town, he was seeking an-eye-for-an-eye vengeance against Lane, Jayhawkers, Redlegs and vigilante groups known for years of attacking and burning farms in Missouri’s western counties.

So, hypothetically, what if a United States senator from Texas brought a large band of armed men into Oklahoma this weekend, went to a town the size of Fairview, murdered nine men, stole everything in sight, burned the town to the ground and made refugees of the entire citizenry? How would Oklahomans feel? Would they be justly outraged and want to seek some type of revenge?

Thus is history. Unless you delve into its dark recesses and see it from all perspectives, you may never have known the 1863 massacre of 183 men in the east Kansas town of Lawrence simply was border-war payback, historically speaking.



Christy is news editor at the News & Eagle. He may be reached at davidc@enidnews.com