Read Truman for Free Online

day describe for a New York Times writer how she and her mother, their faces blackened with the soot and ash that rained down from the burning barns, stood in the yard watching the hated blue soldiers ride away.
    Though possibly no silver ever was taken, certainly it might have been, and if no buildings were actually destroyed on the Young farm, the little girl may well have been witness to other farms going up in flames in “the burnt country.” The resulting hatred was the same in any event. The stories were what mattered as they were passed along, not the formal claim. From such times and memories, as was said, a family “got solid” in its feelings.
    But nothing that happened in western Missouri during the course of the war left such a legacy of bitterness as the infamous Union measure known as General Order No. 11. Estimating that two thirds of the outlying Missouri populace were either “kin to the guerrillas” (like the Youngs) or “actively and heartily engaged in feeding, clothing, and sustaining them” (like the Slaughter family, near neighbors of the Youngs on Blue Ridge), the Union commander at Kansas City, Brigadier General Thomas Ewing, decided to deny the guerrillas their base of supply by depopulating the entire area.
    The order was issued August 25, 1863. All civilians in Jackson, Cass, and Bates counties, except those living within a mile of Union posts at Kansas City, Independence, Hickman’s Mills, Pleasant Hill, and Harrisonville, were to “remove from their present places of residence” within fifteen days. If they could prove their loyalty to the Union to the satisfaction of the post commander, they could remain in those towns or cross over into Kansas. If not, they must leave Missouri. All grain and hay found in the district after the deadline was to be destroyed.
    Twenty thousand people were driven from their homes. The country was depopulated in a matter of weeks, as Union cavalry helped themselves to whatever of value was left behind, then put a torch to buildings and crops. “It is heartsickening to see what I have seen,” wrote a Union officer to his wife. “…A desolated country and men and women and children, some of them almost naked. Some on foot and some in old wagons. Oh God.” Another Union officer appalled by the suffering he witnessed firsthand was the artist George Caleb Bingham, whose outrage would take form after the war, when, settling in Independence, he painted Order No. 11, in which General Ewing himself would be seen driving a family from their home.
    At the Young farm, the policy appears to have been carried out to the letter, despite the fact that Solomon had signed a loyalty oath more than a year before. The family was permitted to take away one wagonload of possessions. Little Martha Ellen would remember trudging northward on a hot, dusty road behind the swaying wagon, headed for “bitter exile” in Kansas City.
    Anderson Truman, meantime, had fared far better. He too had signed a loyalty oath. He wanted only “the Union as it was,” like the rest of the Trumans back in Kentucky. (“I hope you have not turned against this glorious Union,” wrote his brother John Truman from Shelby County, where, as in Missouri, families and neighbors were sharply divided.) But earlier Anderson and his family had moved across the Missouri to Platte County, which, close as it was, the war hardly touched. An increasingly religious man, he wished no part in violence. He hated Catholics, but little else apparently, and he kept to his land and labors, living simply and almost without incident. Once, after dark, the slave Hannah heard screams and a commotion of horses at the adjoining farm. Everyone assumed the Red Legs had arrived and Grandmother Holmes, then in her eighties, fled with the youngest Truman children to hide in a cornfield. The Red Legs proved to be a detachment of Confederate cavalry who had come to press a neighbor’s sons into service. This was as close as the