General Order No. 11 and its expulsion campaign

General Order No. 11 and its expulsion campaign was a Union effort to deprive guerrillas in western Missouri of supplies by removing the civilian population from a wide area. Issued during the American Civil War, it drove thousands of people from their homes and reached the Young family even though Solomon Young had previously pledged loyalty to the Union.

Background and Scope

Union commander Brigadier General Thomas Ewing judged that much of the population outside the Union-held posts was related to guerrillas or supported them with food and clothing. He sought to cut off that support by depopulating the area. The order, issued on August 25, 1863, applied to civilians in Jackson, Cass, and Bates counties, except those living within a mile of Union posts at Kansas City, Independence, Hickman's Mills, Pleasant Hill, and Harrisonville.

Those outside the exempted zones had fifteen days to leave their homes. Civilians who could satisfy a post commander that they were loyal to the Union could remain in the designated towns or cross into Kansas; those unable to establish their loyalty had to leave Missouri. The order also required all grain and hay remaining in the district after the deadline to be destroyed, extending the measure beyond removal of residents to the loss of supplies and property.

Expulsion and Destruction

The campaign displaced about twenty thousand people, depopulating the countryside within weeks. Union cavalry took what they could from abandoned homes and then set fire to buildings and crops. The removal was therefore not simply a change of residence: families left under military pressure while the material basis of their return was being destroyed.

At the Young farm, the order was enforced despite Solomon Young’s loyalty oath, signed more than a year earlier. The family was allowed to take only one wagonload of possessions. Martha Ellen Young Truman later remembered traveling north behind the wagon as the family was driven into exile in Kansas City. Her experience illustrates the gap between the order’s provision for people able to prove loyalty and the treatment of a family whose loyalty had already been formally recorded.

Legacy and Memory

The expulsion became a lasting source of bitterness in western Missouri. The book distinguishes the formal record from the stories handed down afterward: family accounts included an alleged theft of silver and remembered fires, although the records cited do not establish that silver was taken or that buildings on the Young farm itself were destroyed. The stories and the experience of displacement nevertheless helped shape enduring family feeling about the war.

The suffering also prompted criticism from within the Union. Artist George Caleb Bingham, who witnessed the devastation, later settled in Independence and painted Order No. 11. In the painting, Ewing is shown driving a family from its home, giving a human figure to a policy whose effects had been experienced across a broad, emptied district.