Union Army

The Union Army is presented not as a distant abstraction but through the actions of troops operating in western Missouri during the Civil War: cavalry raids, military occupation, battlefield fighting, and the enforcement of General Order No. 11. The account distinguishes Union loyalty from the conduct of individual Union forces, and it shows how a campaign against guerrilla supply networks imposed sweeping costs on civilians. Its later reference to Lincoln and the Union Army’s principal commander also gives the wartime example a constitutional afterlife: presidential authority over military command remains a consequential question long after the conflict itself.

The Union in a Divided Borderland

Missouri’s position in the war complicates any simple division between Union and Confederate populations. The account emphasizes that most Missourians remained loyal to the Union, including slaveholders such as Solomon Young and Anderson Truman; it also cautions that western Missourians were not uniformly guerrillas, just as Kansans were not all abolitionists. Violence crossed the state line in both directions, and civilians, rather than the armed factions alone, bore much of its cost. In this setting, Union service and Union allegiance did not guarantee safety from military operations conducted in their name.

The Union Army’s presence is depicted through forces in the field, not through a full description of its organization or command structure. Union cavalry operated in the countryside, and troops associated with different officers visited the Young farm repeatedly. The account’s emphasis is on what those forces did locally and how residents remembered it. Union and Confederate forces both appear in a landscape of reprisal, destruction, and contested loyalty, but the text keeps their actions distinct rather than treating the Union Army as responsible for every atrocity committed in the border conflict.

Raids and Civilian Losses

A formal claim Harriet Louisa Young filed in 1902 recorded that Union forces under five officers came to the farm on five occasions, beginning with General James Henry Lane in May 1861. The filing itemized losses, assigning Lane fifteen mules and thirteen horses, valued at $4,525. It attributed other seizures to Colonel Burris, General Sturgis, and Captain Axaline. The listed property included bacon, hay, corn, livestock, beds and bedding, wagons, fence rails, and rations; the claim valued all confiscated goods at $21,442, described in the account as equivalent to a quarter of a million dollars in contemporary money.

The official inventory does not settle what happened. Harriet Louisa’s later recollections and family stories described Lane’s men taking additional goods and destroying property, while the claim itself named Burris—not Lane—as responsible for a substantial seizure of bacon in October 1862. It listed no family silver and made no reference to destroyed buildings, although those details recurred in later family accounts. The account preserves this tension between the documentary record and remembered experience instead of presenting every remembered detail as independently established. The stories endured because they carried the family’s sense of what the raids had meant, whether or not each disputed item appeared in the formal claim.

Other episodes show that Union military action could strike people whose allegiance was not known or whose family connections drew suspicion. A physician named Lee was killed because his sons had joined the Confederate Army. Farmer John Hagan was stopped by Union cavalry while travelling with his family and killed after being taken aside; the account gives no reason for the killing. These cases sit alongside the destruction and plunder inflicted by Confederate guerrillas, making the border war a history of civilian exposure to armed power on both sides, not a story in which Union affiliation reliably protected a household.

General Order No. 11

The account identifies General Order No. 11 as the Union measure that left the deepest bitterness in western Missouri. Brigadier General Thomas Ewing, the Union commander at Kansas City, sought to deny guerrillas their sources of support by depopulating a broad area. The order, issued on August 25, 1863, required civilians in Jackson, Cass, and Bates counties to leave their homes within fifteen days unless they lived within a mile of specified Union posts or could satisfy a post commander of their loyalty. Those permitted to remain could stay in the designated towns or cross into Kansas; others had to leave Missouri. Grain and hay remaining in the district after the deadline were to be destroyed.

The operation displaced twenty thousand people within weeks. Union cavalry took what they found of value, and buildings and crops were burned. A Union officer’s letter, as recounted in the book, conveys the spectacle of families driven from a devastated countryside, some travelling on foot and others in old wagons. The artist George Caleb Bingham witnessed suffering associated with the policy and later gave his outrage form in the painting Order No. 11, depicting Ewing driving a family from its home. The painting made the human consequence visible through the figure of the commander and the household forced away.

The Young family’s removal shows how the order operated even against people who had taken steps to establish their loyalty. Solomon Young had signed a Union loyalty oath more than a year earlier, yet the family was allowed only one wagonload of possessions. His daughter Martha Ellen later remembered walking behind the wagon on the hot, dusty road toward Kansas City, an exile the account describes as bitter. The detail does not make the family’s experience an exception to the order; it demonstrates how the policy’s broad terms could override an individual household’s declared allegiance.

Command, Accountability, and Memory

The account places the Union Army within a wider question of civilian authority over military action. In its discussion of the Civil War, Lincoln’s eventual decision to relieve the Union Army’s principal commander becomes a precedent for the responsibilities of a president confronting a senior commander. Much later, Harry S. Truman invoked Lincoln while considering whether to relieve Douglas MacArthur, arguing that a president could not tolerate a commander’s defiance of presidential orders. This later episode is not an action by the Union Army, but it shows how the book uses the Army’s history to frame the constitutional relationship between elected leadership and military command.

For western Missouri’s civilians, however, the Union Army’s legacy in the account is also local and intimate: repeated requisitions, deaths, displacement, and memories passed between generations. General Order No. 11 transformed a military strategy into the expulsion of whole communities, including a family that had sworn loyalty to the Union. The gap between a written claim and remembered loss, and between the stated aim of denying aid to guerrillas and the suffering imposed on civilians, is central to the portrayal. The Union Army appears both as the force defending the Union and as an armed authority whose policies and operations could devastate the very population whose allegiance they purported to secure.