Examining the public and private lives of the women who fill the position of first lady and their influence on the president he. For Martha Washington to michelle obama, sundays at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on American History on cspan3. As a compliment, cspans new book. First ladies president ial historians on the lives of iconic women. It is available as a hardcover or an ebook. During the civil war in 1863 the union Army Believed confederate guerrillas in kansas in the region were drying from missouri. In an attempt they imposed general order 11. The Kansas City Library hosted the talk. My name is eli paul and the land and people of western missouri had suffered as much as any during the civil war. The 1865 edict known as order number 11 had depopulated several missouri counties, devastated homes and farms and left the physical and mental scars that took decades to heal. A local independent historian has authored two books on the subject of this burnt district. Caught between three flyers and the second and more recent senders and silence. Both will be available for sale. Its resilient people and the metamorphosis that occurred with both and what one came back to after the civil war on the western border had and it. Some of you may have heard me speak before and you know i have a tendency to wander around. Standing behind a podium where i have notes is foreign to me so bear with me if i get lost. Several months ago, when eli and i scheduled the presentation because the civil war ended 150 years ago, the presentation was designed to pull together and end to the Library Celebration and revisit of the civil war history. What i tried to do this afternoon is provide some comments and some insights into what happened in western missouri at the end of the civil war. As eli mentioned, my focus is on families and communities that existed within the burnt district when the civil war again. So my expertise is not the military it is not battles necessarily, it is families and communities in western missouri that were prosperous and thriving when the civil war began in 1861. I got started on this search because i wanted to find out what happened to all of the families that lived in the county when the civil war began. That scope is now out of control. Im now trying to figure out what happened to all the families in the burnt district and find their historys and their stories. Today, what i am going to do is try to bring some focus to what our area was light in the summer of 1865 as the civil war drew to a close. I passed out a handout and a flyer earlier. On the upper side of the handout is a photograph of the burnt district monument in harrisonville, missouri. I had been asked to write a brochure about the history of the burnt district that vacationers could pick up at the monument when they visited. As i started to do research, i realized that i could not find a concise history of what had happened and Jackson County, cat county, and bates county during the civil war. Hopefully it is a start for future historians to dig even deeper into what happens, the tragedy of western missouri during the civil war. Of great importance to me when i began my research was what happened, and when did it happen. That is where the senders in my presentation come from. What happened in the burnt district during those years that were covered by the civil war . Equally as important, why is it that for those of us that grew up and were educated in western missouri, when we attended school, high school, and in some cases college and studied missouri history, order number 11 in the burnt district were not discussed. How is it that history disappeared . Why is it that 150 years after the civil war, current researchers like myself and academic historians are trying to reclaim that passed and documented. That is what the silence is about. The metamorphosis, other places in the United States reconstructed because of the devastation and damage in western missouri. The term reconstruction did not really work for me. When i looked at the city in 1870, the transformation that took place was more of a complete metamorphosis. I will talk about that also this afternoon. I want to take you back to 1865, may 1865. If you lived in kansas city and you took the local newspaper yesterday, on may the 16th, when you read your newspaper, you would have found out that the first trip from kansas city to lawrence on the Union PacificEastern Division railroad took place. The train went 46 miles to lawrence. You also would have read on may 16, 1865 that in missouri the union army was executing bushwhackers. The week before, you would have read in the kansas city newspaper and article with the title bring home our missouri soldiers. Our borders are being ravaged by the bushwhackers. Another article in the same newspaper talked about the fact that there were rumors that bushwhackers were gathering in Lafayette County for future attacks. On may 17, 1865, 1 hundred 50 years ago today, you would have read in the paper that Jefferson Davis was under strong guard. You would have read how they were constructing the trial of the assassins of abraham lincoln. You would have been reading about bushwhackers gathering in missouri and confederate troops returning home. You would have been reading about the voters. A new constitution was going to be enacted in the state of missouri. On may the 17th, 1865, there was not a firm and deep feeling and western missouri that the war was over. Fighting elsewhere was fading, but here in river city, things were not as cut and dried. Western missouri, the summer of 1865, you see the burnt district monument, if you go back to firstperson accounts of what it looked like i want to bar your imagination for a few minutes. Borrow your imagination for a few minutes to read a reverend wrote, minutes. A reverend wrote, for miles and miles we saw nothing but loan chimneys to mark the spots where a happy home stood only five years before. For many such consecrated spots, from one to three had gone forth to fall in deadly stride. On july the seventh, 1865, on the missouri side of the line, were once the country through its inherent wealth was dotted over with nice cottages and fine farmhouses, where everything was happy and all was prosperous scarcely anything marked the ancient habitations of ancient man except the lone and blackened chimneys of former buildings. Standing boldly out. Nothing marks the former cultivation of the land except that here and there, the remains of old fences, dismal fields of weed, and frightful reptiles. So you ask, and we look back and we try to picture what western missouri looked like in the summer of 1865. Consider the following, 2200 square miles of western missouri , more square miles and then are included in the state of delaware, were completely laid to waste. Over 12 individual towns and villages had been obliterated and did not return. Around 35 thousand civilian residents had been driven out of the burnt district. The majority of those by general order number 11. 2800 family farms, including barnes and outbuildings, had been destroyed. 3000 miles of fencing had disappeared. All of that destruction began in 1861, and on the handout i have given you, some of the things that impacted the families and communities in that period. In 1861 and 1862, the kansas brigade and the kansas seventh cavalry camped in western missouri. Much of the damage that was sustained to towns and villages happened in 1861 and 1862. The families that lived in the burnt district, in addition, the jane to lane brigade and the kansas seventh cavalry also had to deal with local bushwhackers and j hawkers who crossed their farms, who took their food. For each team out of kansas city, independence, westport Pleasant Hill, and harrisonville visited western missouri farms for three and a half years. When they left those farms, they took everything with them. Food, forage, livestock. It was such an event for the life of samuel partins, my great great great grandfather, the lead me to become somewhat passionate about researching the families in missouris burnt district. In november 1862, the parsons farm was visited by a forage team. The team left with all their forage, their livestock, their food. So as winter fell, the family had to fight through the winter of 62, 63 on their own will and their own gumption. The families that lived in western missouri lived in a war zone. Many families during the civil war in other states and other communities did not live actually in a war zone, but the families that lived here experienced skirmishes on the road on a regular basis. Battles on a regular basis were fought in the burnt district. Assassinations and individual murders began in 1861 and continued all the way through 1865. And early into 1866, which makes it extremely difficult sometimes to put a date on the specific day when the civil war ended in western missouri. It took quite a while to bring the violence to a halt. With order number 11, the depopulation of the burnt district began in earnest. Within 15 days, approximately 30,000 civilians, union and confederate, were driven out of western missouri to parts unknown. As they left, homes, villages, farms were burned to the ground. On the lefthand side of the flyer there is a picture of martin rice. One of the things i try to do in this presentation was avoiding some of the more wellknown personalities and wellknown names because its more interesting to read firsthand accounts are at you may never have heard of martin rice before. He was the poet laureate of Jackson County, cap county, and western missouri from probably 1862 1890. He wrote a book called world rhymes. Martin rice wrote a firsthand account of what he witnessed during order number 11 as thousands of civilians, mostly men, women, and children, exited western missouri. On the back of the flyer is a reduced copy of this mural. And my copy is also reduced. The original is 14 feet long and 40 inches high. Everybody in this mural was a living, breathing resident of the burnt district when order number 11 was implemented during their stories were collected as i conducted research. Its important for you to think about what it was like in august and Early September of 1863 as these people exited western missouri. Let me bar your imagination for a moment. You live in western missouri. You know what it is like when it has not rained for six weeks. All the ponds and all the streams have dried out. The lakes and ponds are more like sludge than water. The average temperature, the average daytime temperature during that exodus every day was between 90 and 100 degrees. When you look at that mural, you see smoke rising in the air. Those are firms burning. Families left their homes and in many cases, their neighborhoods were set on fire as they walked out of their yards. There was no water. Everybody impacted by order number 11 was considered a rebel. As they left western missouri, many communities would not provide them with food. In many cases, they could not buy food until they got to the other side of the state. You dont see people with water or food along the side of the road in that mural, passing out water and food. That did not happen. As these people left, in cass county, only a third of the prewar residence returned after the war. As they left missouri and they settled in other states or they settled in central missouri, they took the history of what had happened here out in their heads and their hearts. Because they never came back the history walked out with them the civil war ended, and what began was a period of intense activity in western missouri as people try to claim their lives and rebuild the area. In addition to that, a cloak of silence, heavy silence, fell over what it happen during the civil war. If you look at the reasons why that happened, it becomes easy to understand under the circumstances why silence continued through decades after the civil war. Its very interesting to look at the population of the burnt district because it helped explain much of what happened. In 1860 i am an oldschool schoolteacher. I cant just talk about it, i have to show it. If i throw numbers out quite often, the size of the numbers overpowers the story involved. Look at a chart, right . In 1860, the burnt district had a population. Free whites and salves together slaves together and 40,000. On september the 30th, 1863, a month after general order number 11 was issued, i estimate there were 6000 civilians left in the burnt district. Seven years later, in 1870, the population of the burnt district was 90,000. When you consider a third of the 40,000 never return, only 1 3 did not return, returned, 2 3 didnt, most of these 90,000 were people new to missouri. They had no Prior Experience personal experience, of the border war. War, of the civil war. As they moved into western missouri to begin anew, and someone were to ask them on the street what happened here in 1863, they had no knowledge. Only one in six of the residence in the burnt district in 1870 had any personal experience with what had happened here before the end of the civil war. What does that look like . It looks like this. There are 17,200 beans in this jar. That is a significant number because it is a represents half of the citizens that left western missouri during the civil war. When you look at this jar and you see this dark colored bean those are the people that lived here that had personal experience with western missouris civil war history. The white beans, the light beans represent new residents to western missouri that had no knowledge. Its pretty easy to understand just the change in population had an impact. Not so fast. Something else happened the summer of 1865. It had a tremendous impact on silencing the history of western missouri. On july 4, 1865, the great constitution was enacted in the state of missouri. The drake constitution has been described by historians as draconian. It was meant to punish. Any resident in the state of missouri that had ever aided or abetted rebels against the United States government once again, i would like to turn to someone who actually lived during the period. What this meant was you had to take an oath. And the operative words in the oath were, have ever. You go to vote, you take the oath. It disenfranchised many citizens in the state of missouri. It meant that unless you took the oath, you could not be a minister in a congregation, you could not hold Public Office you could not vote. Here is how it was received by the later senator from the state of missouri. Under the leadership of hamilton r gabel had disappeared, the jacobins under the leadership of Charles D Drake were in possession. The drake constitution had been enacted or it the most rheumatic, the most cruel, the most outrageous enactment ever known in a civilized country. No man could practice law, teach school, preach the gospel, act as a trustee, hold any office of honor, trust, or profit, or vote in any election unless he swore he had ever sympathized with the cause of the confederacy or any person fighting for it. The father who had given a trig of water or a crust of bread to his son who belonged to the Confederate Forces was ostracized and put under the ban of law. Blair came back and went to the polls dressed in his major generals uniform and demanded the right to vote without taking the oath. It was denied. He immediately commenced suit against the election officials. So, if you were a dark colored bean and you had any prior knowledge or experience with western missouri civil war, the drake constitution helped to create silence. You did not know if something you could have said could have been held against you because you might have aided and abetted the southern cause. For a least five years after the civil war and burnt district when people voted, they were sensitive to being disenfranchised. They kept they kept a list of people. It helped them post silence. The pictures on the handout are of great interest. On the left is andrew j nugent. Things during that period were never as simple as we thought they were. Andrew jean nugent was a slave owner. He was a constitutional unionist. He lived in the burnt district. During the civil war, he fought for the union, he lived in kansas city, and he represented Jackson County when the drake constitution was drawn up early in 1865. Andrew nugent signed the missouri ordinance that freed all the slaves in the state of missouri. On july 4, 1865, Andrew Nugent addressed here in kansas city all of the new friedman who were celebrating their first Independence Day as free citizens of the United States. While Andrew Nugent was living in western missouri, he was a friend of the gentleman in the right picture, the reverend major abner dean in jail. You are very familiar with a painting about order number 11 by george caleb and him george caleb bingham. Caleb also painted this picture of major dean in jail, because abner dean refused to take the oath. He was put in jail in Jackson County. Abner dean and men like him with the courage to stand up for healing stood up for healing after the civil war. Abner dean had been a captain in the union army. I think his story after the civil war, abner dean became a rallying point for people in western missouri because he wanted to heal. He wanted our communities to move on and move into the future. The other thing that drove silence during this period in 1865 and beyond was what i call on the exhibit the commercial engine. Before the civil war began kansas city, independence, saint joe, leavenworth, west point harrisonville, all of these towns were vying to drive growth , commercial growth, economic growth, west. When the civil war ended, this emphasis on growth and the future reenergized those 90,000 new people that we had. It also caused peoples focus to move forward and let go of the past. It was a natural consequence. The metamorphosis of western missouri was really driven by what happened in kansas city. One of the reasons why the burnt district fell by the wayside is because missouri had such a terrible reputation during the civil war that when you were trying to build a new city and build a new economy, who would want to come and live in the burnt district . If you use that term burnt district, not many people are going to come. This became a land of opportunity. What happened after the civil war as those 90,000 people w