January 22, 1864---The Outlaw State

JANUARY 22, 1864:            

Reconstructed Arkansas appoints Isaac Murphy as the State’s Provisional Governor pending Statewide elections.

General William Rosecrans U.S.A. replaces General John Schofield U.S.A. as Military Commander of Missouri. At this point in the war, Missouri has become the elephant’s cemetery for unwanted Union generals too influential to push into total obscurity. Though the State is firmly in Union hands, the Civil War (which arguably began here in the 1850s) has degenerated into a fratricidal gang war in which Confederates and Unionists fight each other even while differing bands of Confederates and Unionists each fight each other. Though they all still call themselves “soldiers,” more and more of them are just outlaws still wearing uniforms.  Not for no reason was Missouri known after the war as "The Outlaw State."

Many of the well-known and infamous outlaws of the Old West were Missouri men: The James brothers, the Younger brothers, the Dalton Gang, Jim Reed, the Hoodoo Gang, Belle Starr, Ike Clanton, Johnny Ringo, and Calamity Jane, were all natives of the Show Me State. Bloody Bill Anderson and Bill Quantrill were Missourian Confederate raiders who died before the war’s end. Wyatt Earp lived in Missouri for many years. 

January 21, 1864---Hoochless Ohio

JANUARY 21, 1864:            

Although the South suffered increasingly dire wartime shortages as the war went on, the North was not immune. On this day, an order was issued in the Department of The Ohio forbidding the distilling of spirits---not because of any temperance movement pressures but because the military authorities feared a shortage of grain for foodstuffs in the unforgiving winter of 1864. 

January 20, 1864---A Union Constitution for Arkansas

JANUARY 20, 1864:  

Even as Arkansas Confederates were tearing down Confederate flags in protest at the expanded draft, Arkansas Unionists were adopting a new State Constitution which banned slavery. With the adoption of the new Constitution, Abraham Lincoln issued an Order to the Military Governor of Arkansas, General Frederick Steele, to permit elections for State offices.

  

On this same day, Lincoln commuted eleven more death sentences given to Union deserters. Lincoln admitted that he “did not want to add to the butchery.” As the war went on, Lincoln became more and more liberal in extending clemencies to most who asked for them---he, however, had no mercy for rapists, slave-traders, or men who brutalized others. 

January 19, 1864---Coal Torpedoes

JANUARY 19, 1864:            

An Anti-Conscription rally is held in Little Rock, Arkansas. Confederate flags are torn down.

On this day, a Confederate inventor creates the “coal torpedo.” A rough-hewn piece of hollowed-out iron painted black, a coal torpedo was loaded with gunpowder and dropped into the coal bin of a building or a ship where it was indistinguishable from real coal. When shoveled into a boiler, the coal torpedo would turn red-hot, igniting the gunpowder and causing a damaging---sometimes devastating---explosion. Coal torpedoes were not much used in the war, but the few that were were extremely destructive.

January 18, 1864---Southern draft resistance

JANUARY 18, 1864:           

The Confederacy, desperate for (white) manpower, having revoked Substitution, now broadens the draft age from 18-45 to 17-60. Mass protests erupt throughout the South, particularly in Union-friendly western North Carolina on this day.