When Harry Truman turned 21, in 1905, he joined the Missouri National Guard - and went to his grandmother's house to show off his uniform. "Harry," his grandmother said, "this is the first time since 1863 that a blue uniform has been in this house. Don't bring it here again." When Mr. Truman's mother visited her son in the White House many years later, during his term as 33rd president, she said she wouldn't sleep in the Lincoln bedroom: "I would rather sleep on the floor."
Why the abiding hatred of Abraham Lincoln? And what indelible survived specifically from 1863? The U.S. Civil War began in 1861, after all, and lasted until 1865. The fact is that Mr. Truman's grandmother (and mother) were among the 20,000 people forcibly expelled from their Missouri homes in August of 1863. Within two weeks, Union forces depopulated four counties of their inhabitants, slaughtered or stole their livestock and burned their houses, barns and crops. When General Thomas Ewing Jr. issued his infamous Order No. 11, he commanded the scorched-earth destruction of thousands of square miles of hearth and home.
When General Ulysses S. Grant ordered the removal of Jews from parts of the South in 1862, Lincoln personally revoked it. When Ewing ordered his massive evacuation in Missouri, Lincoln did nothing.
Civil War historian Edward Leslie describes the Missouri exodus: "They [Union forces]swooped down on farm houses, stealing money and livestock, and then ignited the buildings. If the place had been already abandoned, they raced to the next house, hoping to catch the inhabitants before they could flee." They didn't discriminate. "The torch was applied to the one-room cabin, the clapboard house, the porticoed mansion and the barn, smokehouse and all outbuildings. The fire spread across open fields and through dry woods, blackening vast stretches of landscape."
George Caleb Bingham, an artist, described the spectacle of thousands of people - mostly women and children, since so many men were at war - fleeing for their lives down scorching-hot dirt roads: "Bare-footed and bare-headed women and children, stripped of every article of clothing except a scant covering of their bodies, were exposed to the heat of the August sun and compelled to struggle along on foot. All means of transportation had been seized by their despoilers, except for an occasional dilapidated cart or an old, superannuated horse."
By general consensus, Order No. 11 was cruel and futile: It recruited hundreds more men - such as the outlaw Younger brothers and James brothers - to the irregular Missouri forces, the notorious bushwhackers. The Missouri Historical Review called Order No. 11 "the most drastic and repressive military measure directed against civilians during the Civil War. In fact, aside from the herding of Japanese into concentration camps during World War II, it stands as the harshest treatment ever imposed on United States citizens under the plea of military necessity in our nation's history."
It's little wonder that Mr. Truman's mother - Martha Ellen Young Truman (1852-1947) - cherished the notorious raider William Quantrill as a hero as long as she lived. In a sense, with his appalling massacre of 150 men and boys in Lawrence, Kan., on Aug. 21, 1863, Quantrill himself caused Order No. 11. But the Lawrence atrocity came eight days after a Union atrocity had enraged Missouri: the deaths of five Missouri women and girls and the wounding of others, political prisoners all, in a Union jail. Quantrill's raiders stormed Lawrence shouting the names of the dead. One week later, Ewing ordered the evacuation of Missouri. In the war between Missouri and Kansas, it's impossible to know who perpetrated the first atrocity.
For Mr. Truman, though, the scales were balanced: "Quantrill and his men were no more bandits than the men on the other side. All they were trying to do was to protect their property." His southern legacy notwithstanding, Mr. Truman - as president - undertook the country's most radical extension of federal authority over civil rights since Lincoln.
In the midst of the self-perpetuating slaughter in Missouri and Kansas, slavery was indeed an issue: Missouri was a slave state. But states' rights were an authentic issue, too. The Civil War definitively answered the first question. It did not definitively answer the second. Now many Americans are beginning to ask it again. It took exceptional intrusion by federal forces to make this happen.
Fox News commentator Glenn Beck, in his revivalist rhetoric, invokes a historic resistance to the simple phrase "federal forces." In his big rally the other day at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, he implicitly asks the very question that motivated the Confederate raiders: Where does the authority of the federal government end? Or does it?