General Order No. 11

General Order No. 11 was a Union military measure that depopulated much of western Missouri in an effort to cut guerrillas off from supplies and support. Issued on August 25, 1863, it drove roughly 20,000 people from their homes within weeks. Its broad removal requirements, destruction of property, and application even to families that had declared loyalty made it one of the war’s most bitterly remembered policies in the region.

Purpose and Provisions

The Union commander at Kansas City, Brigadier General Thomas Ewing, judged that much of the outlying population either had family ties to guerrillas or actively supplied them. The order sought to deny those fighters a base of support by removing civilians from the affected countryside.

Civilians in Jackson, Cass, and Bates counties were given fifteen days to leave their residences. The main exception applied to people living within one mile of Union posts at Kansas City, Independence, Hickman's Mills, Pleasant Hill, and Harrisonville. Residents who could satisfy a post commander that they were loyal to the Union could remain in those towns or cross into Kansas; those who could not were required to leave Missouri. Grain and hay remaining in the district after the deadline were to be destroyed.

Enforcement and Displacement

The order was carried out on a large scale and at speed. Union cavalry took what of value had been left behind, then burned buildings and crops. The resulting displacement was not limited to families considered disloyal: the measure swept up a broad civilian population, leaving people on foot or in wagons with few possessions and, in some cases, little clothing.

The experience also entered the historical record through the response of artist George Caleb Bingham. Appalled by the suffering he witnessed, he later painted Order No. 11, depicting Ewing driving a family from its home. The painting gave a visible form to the policy’s central act: civilians being forced from the place where they had lived.

The Young Family and the Order’s Legacy

At the Young farm, the order was enforced despite Solomon Young having signed a Union loyalty oath more than a year earlier. The family was allowed to take only one wagonload of possessions. His granddaughter, Martha Ellen Truman, later remembered walking north behind the wagon toward Kansas City. For the family, the oath offered no protection against removal.

The contrast with Anderson Shipp Truman’s family illustrates how location shaped exposure to the war. He too had signed a loyalty oath, but his family had moved across the Missouri River to Platte County, which the war barely touched; the conflict came close to them only when Confederate cavalry arrived at a neighboring farm to press its sons into service. The Youngs’ expulsion, by contrast, became part of a lasting regional bitterness. General Order No. 11 was remembered not merely as a military directive but as a policy that uprooted families and left its consequences embedded in local memory.