October 16, 1864---Show Me . . . or die . . .

OCTOBER 16, 1864:                    

Benjamin Whitehead Lewis (1812-1866) was one of the rare Missouri Unionists living in the Confederate stronghold of Glasgow.

 

Early in the Civil War, Lewis funded a school for Glasgow’s children. He was a greatly respected citizen of the town, despite his Unionism. In his Last Will and Testament Lewis made a bequest of funds to the community to rebuild the town’s library, destroyed in the October 15th Battle of Glasgow.

 

As both a Unionist and a philanthropist, Lewis attracted the undesirable personal attentions of “Bloody Bill” Anderson. The bloodthirsty Anderson had been visiting Lewis’s home on a near daily basis in the fall of '64.

“I’ll hound him and make an example of him,” Bloody Bill declared. “We'll show them it ain’t just niggers we whip --- it's the niggers' white friends.” It is unknown why Anderson believed that Lewis, who was a slaveowner, was a “friend” of African-Americans.  

One particular day, after being told by Lewis’s wife that her husband wasn’t home, a frustrated Anderson randomly fired his rifle into the ceiling of the house, grazing Lewis, who was hiding in the attic.

On this day in 1864, Anderson finally caught up with the unfortunate Lewis. He tortured Lewis by forcing him to walk a half-mile on his knees from the Lewis home to the bank, where Anderson demanded $10,000 from Lewis at the price of his life. Being a Sunday, the bank was not open. Lewis’s slave, Zeb, ran to find the bank president, who fearfully refused to get involved or to give Lewis even his own money.

Finally, after much begging and pleading, Lewis’s family was able to raise $7,000. Anderson at first refused to take less than the $10,000 he’d demanded, but at last relented. However, as a punishment to Lewis for not paying the full amount, he lifted Lewis off the ground by his feet and dropped him on his head a number of times. Lewis sustained severe neck and skull injuries which eventually killed him.    

 

Bloody Bill Anderson’s brutality toward the Unionist Lewis was far more representative of the Civil War in Missouri than Sterling Price’s parole of Union soldiers on the previous day. 

Price’s “Campaign” (or “Raid”) into Missouri did nothing to seize the major cities of St. Louis and Jefferson City, but it did much to destroy what little civil authority remained intact in the State. 

  

As of October 1864, Missouri was a failed State. It had been at war not since 1861 but since 1854 (“The Border War”), combating itself (and Kansas) over Popular Sovereignty. Kansas had become a Free State upon its admission to the Union in 1861, but raiding and fratricidal violence persisted in Missouri even after the end of the Civil War. Peace did not come to the "Show Me" State until the mid-1870s. 

In the Civil War years, Missouri lay essentially at the center of the continent. As an entity, it looked North and South and East and West all at once, a hodgepodge of frontier settlers, slaveowners, free-soilers, and entrepeneurs, Native Americans and immigrants. The centrifugal force of all these competing pressures turned the State into a free-fire zone during the Civil War.  

A Union State with a rump Confederate government, it was a State that never seceded; yet, and nevertheless, the Secessionist Governor, Claiborne Fox Jackson, had declared war on the United States in 1861 without formally allying himself to the Confederacy.  

Jackson was long gone now, and the Missouri Unionists held the larger cities, but in the countryside, all was a nightmare. Unlike every other State, Union or Confederate, Missouri was a battleground State with no real front lines. 

Confederates and Unionists shared towns, shared kitchen tables, and even shared beds. “The enemy” wore no uniform, or both, or either. “The enemy” was anyone who was armed and wanting anything.

  

Not knowing who was friendly and who was unfriendly (and indeed loyalties changed by the day and sometimes by the hour), the men of both armies were brutal toward everyone they met. Civilians habitually shot at strangers regardless of their garb. Southerners disguised themselves in blue and Northerners disguised themselves in gray. Bushwhackers in butternut fought Jayhawkers in red leggings. Lifelong friends hanged one another upon suspicion of being with the “wrong” side, but who was “wrong” was as changeable as the weather.

  

Guerrillas like “Bloody Bill” Anderson (mostly nominally pro-Southern in outlook) burned, hacked, pillaged, robbed, and raped their way across the ruined State at random and at will, like ancient barbarians. The Confederacy feared them, seeing in their tactics “unchristian” and “dishonorable” acts that besmirched the Southern cause; but ironically the government in Richmond and the generals in the field actively supported their efforts.  

The United States vowed to destroy them, but they moved freely through the lines, hidden in plain sight. Running them to ground was a near impossibility --- they were protected by regular Confederate troops and by locals too, either out of loyalty or out of fear. In their wake they left the living maimed, and the mutilated dead.  Benjamin Whitehead Lewis was just one of thousands of innocent people whose lives were destroyed in the cyclone that was Missouri. 

Missourians themselves often refused to submit to the bushwackers. The little town of Avila was a Union stronghold. The Confederate flag never flew in Avila, and Avila’s hard-bitten Unionist residents slew any guerrillas that came near, gruesomely hanging their heads from a “death tree” on the approach to town. “Bloody Bill” once tried to take Avila; his force was beaten back with heavy losses. Avila was one of the few towns in Missouri to have come through the Civil War structurally intact, and no residents of Avila died in the war.

By 1864, more Missourians lived outside the State than within it, refugees from an incomprehensible war within a war.