September 27, 1864---The Sacking of Centralia; Marianna Burning

SEPTEMBER 27, 1864:    

General Sterling Price C.S.A. continues his scorched earth raids in Missouri. Price’s avowed goal is to seize St. Louis and disrupt the Union Presidential election. In reality, Price has no chance of taking heavily pro-Union St. Louis, and has to limit himself to snatch-grab-and-burn raids in the countryside.

Price is leading the Missouri State Guard. Although the Guard has had as many as 28,000 men at one time, it is shrunken to less than 8,000, and many of these are irregulars --- desperadoes, bushwhackers, and outlaws --- although Price prefers to call them “guerrillas.”  Nominally Confederate, most of these men attack any target of opportunity.

Missouri, which has been suffering an internal civil war since 1854, has gotten no more peaceful. For every depredation of the Confederates, Union men hang Southern sympathizers and troops. For every Union action, pro-Confederate Missourians kill Unionists. The North-South split in Missouri is long-standing, personal, and full of rage.

Once a member of Quantrill’s Raiders, “Bloody Bill” Anderson has set up his own “command” of about 100 men. His subordinates include the Younger brothers, Cole, Jim, John and Bob, and Jesse and Frank James. Anderson’s men usually limit their destructiveness to Unionists, but they routinely scalp and sexually mutilate their victims.

On this day they enter Centralia, Missouri. After sacking the saloons, raping the women, and looting the town, they loot an arriving stagecoach and an arriving train. The train is carrying 23 Union soldiers on furlough, none of whom are armed. Anderson’s men line them up and shoot 22 of them, taking one, a sergeant, Thomas Goodman, as a hostage. They burn the train, the stagecoach, and the depot. This is the first successful train raid by Confederates in the war.  

Leaving the looted town behind, they return to their base. The shocked citizens of Centralia summon Union garrison forces (Missouri Volunteer Infantry) stationed nearby, and the Federals try to raid Anderson’s camp. Anderson, who has been alerted to the Union presence by local informers, has managed to assemble 150 men, who ambush a Union force of 125, kill most of them, and mutilate the bodies. A few men are left alive to be tortured, mutilated, and released as a warning to other Unionists.

Anderson delivers his unharmed captive, Union sergeant Goodman, to General Price. Although Price is personally horrified by the fact that Anderson and his men have decorated their mounts with scalps and other body parts, he commends Anderson for the raid, and tasks him to cut rail lines through the State.  

The Battle of Marianna, Florida:    Asboth’s Raid through the “Secession Belt” of Florida reaches the “buckle.” The small planation market town of Marianna is the home of Florida’s fanatically fire-eating Governor, John Milton. The local militia decides to make a stand against the Union forces despite being outnumbered at two-to-one, 800 to 400. The Confederate line gets off one solid volley, which kills most of the Union men lost in the battle. General Szandor Asboth is shot in the face.  Instead of scattering, the Federals charge, and a brutal, short, bloody fight ensues. After the town is taken, Asboth orders it burned in retribution. Losses are ten men killed to a side.

Although the battle of Marianna is just another one of the 10,000 all-but-forgotten “little” battles of the Civil War, it has an impact far more significant than its size alone would indicate. The destruction of the sedate market town breaks the back of secessionism in Florida. It also creates a legacy of bitterness among the locals. For most of the war, Florida (excepting the larger port cities) has been comfortably nestled close to the Confederate bosom, and has remained untouched. Considered too underpopulated and too geographically isolated by Union commanders to be worth a major land campaign, Florida has avoided most of the destruction seen elsewhere in the South. The putting of Marianna to the torch caps Asboth’s “scorched earth” raid and breaks the fighting will of all but a few on the Floridian home front. The Florida Panhandle is driven into an economic and social decline from which it never completely emerges.

And Marianna never quite outlives its past. The Union dead are initially buried in shallow graves soon dug up by animals, who feed on the corpses. The townspeople then rebury the Yankees in waste ground, far away from the town’s graveyards and churches. Confederate sentiment remains strong well into the 20^th Century.

A meeting of the United Confederate War Veterans (1927) and a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan (1934) are stark reminders that the past is never entirely past.

September 26, 1864---It's all Choctaw to us

SEPTEMBER 26, 1864:    

Cyrus Nye Byington, the son of Cyrus Byington the well-known Christian missionary and Choctaw linguist, is serving as a Federal Quartermaster near Washington D.C.. He writes home to his family in the Indian Territory. His letter reads in part:

I attend church regularly at the Charles Street Church,  Dr Sewell pastor.  A very able man and besides a strong union man.  I hope Pres Lincoln will be reelected for I believe his election will do more for us here at home than any thing else we can do.  It will show Jeff Davis and his crew what the north are determined to do.  Gen Grant was here the other day but I did not see him.  We have good news from the valley.

Cyrus Nye is, not long after this letter, reassigned to frontier duty among the Choctaw Indians, who sided with the Confederacy and now need to be “pacified”. Since he is familiar with the Choctaw language, having learned it from his father, his services are a great help to the Union Army commanders in the Indian Territory. 

September 25, 1864---Jeff Davis does it again!

SEPTEMBER 25, 1864:    

While in Georgia, Jefferson Davis visits with General John Bell Hood. Hood is in the midst of a bitter feud with his subordinate, General William J. Hardee. Hood blames Hardee for the Federal breakthrough at Jonesboro, and for the subsequent loss of Atlanta. Although Hardee is an able commander known as “Old Reliable”, and although Hood has done nothing since assuming command that would inspire confidence in him, Davis (characteristically) takes sides in the argument and backs Hood. An angry Hardee is reassigned to South Carolina, a sinecure command. Hood and Davis then decide jointly that Hood’s next move should be to cut Sherman’s supply line to Atlanta; they have no idea that Atlanta is to be burned. In a subsequent published speech, Davis foolishly lets slip these plans, allowing Sherman to make his own plans accordingly. 

September 24, 1864---"The Burning"

SEPTEMBER 24, 1864:    

 “The Burning”:

Philip Sheridan decides that if Jubal Early’s men will not come out, his men will go in. Sheridan orders the burning of every crossroads, town, farmstead, homestead, millhouse, barn, rick, cottage, tree and crop in the Shenandoah Valley, hoping in this way, to cut the legs from under Early’s forces.

The residents’ horses are impressed into the Union army, as are their chickens, pigs and cows. The harvest is seized. “The Burning” is methodical; Sheridan’s men advance slowly up the Valley, spreading ruin as they go. The Burning lasts two weeks, long weeks for the denizens of the Shenandoah Valley.

Sheridan encounters some resistance: Mosby’s Rangers and groups of Early’s men skirmish with Sheridan’s forces at New Market and Woodstock and along the Valley Pike. The Southerners establish a redoubt in the Luray Valley (a part of the Shenandoah Valley surrounded by uplands), and forbid Sheridan’s forces entry.    

The Burning has largely been excised from published accounts of the Civil War and is remembered mostly in the folk histories of the old families that live in the Valley today.

Warfare in the Valley reduced everything to its lowest common denominator, that of  sheer brutality. General Grant's orders to Sheridan to "make all the Valley a desert" and a "barren waste" and to follow the enemy "to the death," echo the sentiments of Mosby's men, who rode into battle yelling, "Wipe them from the face of the earth!" and "Take no prisoners!"  Even a Union chaplain spoke of the need to "peel this land" like a piece of fruit.  Dead soldiers, tortured, hanged, and mutilated, of both sides were found with one-word notes pinned to their clothes, staked through their bodies, or worst, carved in their flesh:  “Retaliation!”

While the Valley burns, General Sterling Price C.S.A. raids Union-held Missouri, likewise scorching the earth.

Angered at the loss of Athens, Alabama and the defeat of Confederate men by United States Colored Troops, General Nathan Bedford Forrest C.S.A. takes the city of Athens, Georgia by convincing the Union garrison commander that he is leading at least 15,000 men. In truth, Forrest has only 4,500. It is a trick The Wizard has used before, more than once, and it works again. The Union men are marched off to P.O.W. camps, all but the U.S.C.T., who are enslaved on Forrest’s orders.