A photo of a lone Civil War soldier appeared on a screen at the beginning of a “Ghosts of the Civil War” presentation for Jefferson Elementary School fourth-grade students.
“We don’t know who this soldier is. He is one of hundreds of thousands who fought in the Civil War. He was like the soldiers of today — he had a family and hopes and dreams for a brighter future,” Jeff Kluever, director of the Allen County Historical Society, told the students.
Kluever told the students not to worry there weren’t any real ghosts floating around the room. They would see artifacts, letters and photos from the museum’s archives that would help them understand the reason why people fought 147 years ago during the Civil War — and that reason was to end slavery.
“Can you imagine buying and selling another human being?” Kluever asked the students.
To illustrate his point he showed the students a bill of sale for a slave. The cost of the human life on the bill was $150.
Kansas wasn’t exempt from the terror of the Civil War. Kansans were internally at odds with each other — those who were among the free-staters and the pro-slavery forces.
Humboldt residents were free staters while those living in Cofachique, the oldest town in Allen County just 10 miles north of Humboldt, were pro-slavery.
In September 1861 Confederate troops burned and pillaged businesses and homes in Humboldt. Within another couple of weeks the soldiers returned and burned the remains of Humboldt leaving only four churches and a few homes which housed sick residents.
Kluever talked about pro-Confederate guerrilla leader William T. Anderson, better know Bloody Bill, who led a group that targeted Union loyalists and Federal soldiers in Missouri and Kansas. He become notorious for the number of soldiers he killed and the brutality he showed. Anderson was raised by a family of Southern sympathizers in Kansas.
In 1862, Anderson became a horse thief after his father was killed by a Union-loyalist judge. In early 1863, Anderson joined Quantrill’s Raiders, a pro-Confederate group of guerrillas, and participated in their actions at the Lawrence Massacre. Anderson was killed in a battle against Union militia in 1864.
The Lawrence Massacre, also known as Quantrill’s Raid, was a rebel guerrilla attack during the U.S. Civil War by Quantrill’s Raiders, led by William Clarke Quantrill, on the pro-Union town of Lawrence. Kluever told the youths, “You all know Lawrence, where the University of Kansas is today.”
The attack on Aug. 21, 1863, targeted Lawrence due to the town’s long support of abolition and its reputation as a center for Jayhawkers and Redlegs, which were free-state militia and vigilante groups known for attacking and destroying farms and plantations in Missouri’s pro-slavery western counties.
THE ONLY way people learned of the death of a family member during the war was through lists of names published in newspapers. There were also thousands of soldiers buried in unmarked graves leaving grieving families to wonder what happened to their loved ones, Kluever said.
As troops moved across the countryside they took whatever they needed from towns and farms leaving paths of devastation.
