C. L. McClellan

LETTER TO THE READER 
Everything, it is said, is a matter of opinion. If so, this work
represents the opinion of the author. It is not a rehash of the entire
theater of the Civil War - nor is it a conspiracy theory. It is the
story of Missouri and her people, overwhelmed and overshadowed by events
above and beyond their control. This work began knowing nothing of
General J.O. Shelby, and under the impression that Charles William
Quantrell was, at the very least, a man who succumbed to the excesses of
war. As the work progressed, it was at first impossible, then painful,
to face the fact that the history of the Missouri-Kansas Border Wars and
Civil War is a record of treason - and and betrayal of the nation and
the whole American people. 

Most Americans are not aware that the shot that opened the Civil War
was fired on the virgin soil of Kansas Territory in 1854, long before
the first rocket flared over Fort Sumter - and there is a reason for
it. One of the best kept secrets in American history is that the
Missouri-Kansas Border Wars were a political shooting war - waged by the
Republicans against the Democrats. The issue being contended was the
establishment of a one-party dictatorial regime that would control the
Congress, the Presidency, and ultimately, every political office in the
nation. This war was planned and financed by New England politicians,
industrialists, wealthy ministers and misanthropes, whose stated purpose
was to overthrow the duly elected government of the United States. 

The Republicans chose Kansas Territory as the battleground to
inaugurate their war. The first casualties of war were the innocent
Missouri settlers of Kansas Territory. The first wagon train of
Northern “settlers” to arrive in Kansas Territory were not settlers at
all - they were Republican adherents and hired agents of the North -
armed with the best firearms money could buy and schooled in how to
takeover Kansas Territory. On arrival their first act was to level
their guns and run off the Missourians already settled there. The
second was to set up a Land Association that would prevent anyone but
“right-thinking” men from homesteading in Kansas. These agents spread
out into every existing settlement on the Kansas side of the border,
awaiting arrival of a horde of New England settlers being recruited to
become voters and make Kansas a Republican State, and the Lawrence
example was repeated many times over.

Those who financed mayhem and murder in Kansas soon carried that war
into Missouri. In December 1855, Kansas Jayhawkers crossed the Missouri
border to plunder and burn the isolated farms and businesses of those
Missourians courageous enough to oppose them. In May 1856, when many
bona fide settlers of Kansas objected to coercion, five settlers from
Missouri were taken from their homes at the stroke of midnight, horribly
mutilated and murdered in a terrorist act so brutal that it demonstrated
vividly what would happen to anyone supporting the Democrats in Kansas. 
By 1859, Kansas Jayhawkers, one band led by a politician, another by a
doctor, and a third by a preacher, rode into Missouri, burning,
plundering and murdering - stating that theirs was a noble cause to free
the slaves and punish the godless - and they fell to it with glee. They
were protected from extradition and punishment by the Republican regime
of Kansas. Missouri was viewed as a vast warehouse by Jayhawkers. The
town of Lawrence, Kansas, known as “The Queen City Of The West,” was
built twice-over on the blood-stained plunder hauled out of Missouri. 
In late 1860, when Lincoln was elected and it was apparent that civil
war was inevitable, the Jayhawkers enlisted in the United States army,
and as U.S. troops, wearing Union blue and riding under the American
flag - they rode and murdered, hauling a steady stream of plunder out
of Missouri, much of which went to the northern war effort throughout
the war.

In studying the Missouri-Kansas Border Wars and Civil War west of the
Mississippi, one is dumbstruck, time and time again, by the catalogue of
atrocities committed against Missouri and her people. The descendants of
those Missourians are owed a profound and sincere apology by the United
States government and the Republican Party, and if justice is to be
served, reparation should be made to those descendants for the
constitutional and human rights violations inflicted on their ancestors
- atrocities ordered and condoned by United States military authorities
and inflicted by United States troops - with the full knowledge of their
commander-in-chief. Missouri gave of her blood and treasure at point of
gun-barrel and bayonet, even as she voted for the Union, sued for peace,
and begged for neutral status. Missouri holds the distinction of being
the only state in the Union to be occupied by enemy troops during
peacetime and warred against at a time when no war had been declared
anywhere in the nation. If the people of Missouri were not denied their
constitutional and human rights - no people on the face of the earth
have been. 

Nor did holocaust in the West end at the close of the Civil War. 
Missouri soil was held by force, but Missourians had not been conquered.
Returning ex-Confederates who held public office before the war, or
protected the populace during the war, were certain to be voted into
office. In a move to retain power and avoid being charged with war
crimes, the Republican puppet regime of Missouri passed a piece of
midnight legislation called the Drake Amendment - the most
unconstitutional and repressive legislation ever imposed on American
citizens. Under this amendment, no Southerner or ex-Confederate, nor
any member of their families, could hold public office or work at any
profession or trade except farming - and that nearly impossible, every
farm implement having long since been hauled into Kansas. Worse yet,
mobs of ex-Federals calling themselves Regulators and accompanied by
“lawmen,” rode the countryside by night, murdering ex-Confederates who
could expose them for the vicious war criminals and thieves they were.
There was no authority to which Southerners could apply for relief or
redress - even the US Supreme Court being under Republican control. 

When a war ends, there is only the victor and the vanquished. In his
mind, the victor is always right and enforces his version of history on
future generations. In Missouri, this could only be accomplished by the
destruction and suppression of evidence. This was necessary to protect
the lives and assets of those who had perpetrated or condoned war crimes
in Kansas and Missouri. Parties in such crimes must necessarily look to
future generations for it is the war generation that will remember and
live to tell the story. To that end, it was not enough for the gallant
victor to grind the adult population under his heel. In what was
perhaps the cruelest of his transgressions, Northern “teachers” were
brought to Missouri to “teach” Southern children and forcibly impose the
North's version of the war on them. The Puritan Ethic states that
sparing the rod spoils the child - there were no spoiled children in
Missouri. Southern children - and only Southern children - were made to
stand and recite a Loyalty Oath every day at school, replete with
cutting remarks by their “teacher.” One need only envision a teary-eyed,
sobbing six year old, or a tight-jawed, clinch-fisted orphan whose
father was murdered before his eyes, to know why this practice became
such an embarrassment to the Republican administration that the Oath was
revised, renamed The Pledge of Allegiance, and administered to all
school age children. 

We may never know the full story of the Border Wars or Civil War in the
West. In time, the participants of conflict die out, victor and
vanquished alike. Propaganda takes its toll and the issues that once
resounded to a cannon’s roar fade into the dim past, no longer a threat
to those who feared exposure and now lay moldering in their graves. It
is only then that trickles of evidence come to the surface. Missouri
and Kansas, two states situated as they are in the very heart of the
nation, were relegated to a post-war backwash to lie fallow and
forgotten for nearly a century. Within these two states lay the proof
to indict the Republican Party, many U.S. congressmen, governors, state
legislators, wealthy businessmen and a plethora of their adherents on
charges of treason and complicity in the most heinous crimes ever
perpetrated on American soil.

What is known is that there was only Fightin’ Joe Shelby and a
mysterious entity known as Charles William Quantrell to defend
Missouri’s helpless non-combatants - the women, the children and the
aged. Shelby and Quantrell, with a handful of teenage farm boys,
endured four long years of unimaginable hardship. They were members of
the Missouri State Guard, a legally organized State army sanctioned by
the President and United States Congress. When Federal troops could not
whip them, the Missouri State Guardsmen were arbitrarily and unlawfully
branded as guerrillas in a move to deprive them of the status of
soldiers. This meant if captured - they were not entitled to be treated
as prisoners of war. Union officers issued orders that all “guerrillas”
were to be shot or hanged wherever found. General Shelby took his men
to Arkansas where the Confederate army was headquartered, his gaze ever
set northward to the Missouri River Valley. But in all of Missouri,
there was not a single continuing Confederate presence - not a fort, not
a blockhouse, not a brigade of Confederate soldiers. Someone had to
remain in Missouri, behind enemy lines, to protect non-combatants,
gather intelligence for the Confederacy and recruit for the army. 
Quantrell and his men, all of whom were Missouri State Guardsmen,
volunteered for the job. 

Quantrell and his men were hunted constantly and living in the brush,
exposed to the elements year round, without supplies or medical
treatment for the sick and wounded. Working in small squads of ten to
twenty men, they often skirmished with Union troops many times their
number and sent them back to the barracks reeling in their saddles or
slung over them. As a result of Quantrell’s activities and the
Confederate Army's military incursions into Missouri, Federal commanders
were forced to keep sixty thousand troops posted in Missouri at time
when they were desperately needed in the deep South. Under the most
trying circumstances, and in an almost superhuman dedication to honor
and duty, Quantrell and his men fought throughout the Civil War - but
even so - their finest hour was yet to come. In all the years after the
war, under extreme duress and threat of loss of life and property - not
a single man betrayed their secret - that there was no Quantrell, that
several men rode under that name, albeit one more noted than the rest -
and took that secret to their graves. What greater tribute can be
bestowed on a leader - or the men who followed him? 

It is said that fame is being remembered twenty-five years by
twenty-five people. What is it to be remembered one hundred thirty-five
years by thousands? Missouri has not forgotten - these men are honored
and revered to this day. They would have been celebrated as national
icons had the South not been defeated - leaving an embarrassed and
vindictive foe to broadcast lies to discredit their gallantry and their
struggle. In the history of the world there are few to match the
Missouri Guerrilla’s dedication to duty, country and comrades. The
world bestows the title of Immortals on men such as these. They did not
belong to an ancient age of antiquity - they were Americans - and they
belong to us.

Over the years and after many conversations with people from the North
and South, it is evident that a serious misconception still exists
between these two sections of the nation. The descendants of the North
take the position that the Civil War has been over for a hundred years
and is forgotten. For the descendants of South; the war is not over,
and will never be over, until the truth is told - that a cartel of Wall
Street bankers, investors, industrialists and Northern politicians
betrayed their country and by force of arms overthrew the United States
government. At the close of the Civil War, the Constitution was, in the
unflinching words of John Erlichman, “significantly eroded” - and
neither the South - or the nation - has been made whole. C .L. McClellan