Part 3 of a four-part series on the Border War:
Baron DeKalb (“B.D.”) Shore was my great grandfather. The below is quoted from the very excellent family history “The Frederick Shore Family 1570–1980 From Switzerland to North Carolina” by my cousin Leo Jane Shore:
“Shore Stories of the Civil War
“Jonathan William Shore’s family was deeply involved in the Civil War conflicts of Missouri; raids by the Kansas Redlegs even though they were about 5 miles east of the border counties, in Lafayette Co. Consequently, and because their sympathies were with the South, they placed hay and grain in a persimmon grove for Quantrell.
“Both Federal and Confederate armies were conscripting men and boys who were ‘man-size.’ Those not in the right uniform, or no uniform, were usually killed, especially in border areas of Missouri by the Federals.
“Samuel Richard, the oldest son, was forced to hide in the branches of an oak tree during one Kansas Redleg raid (so called because of the red leggings they wore). From this vantage point he watched his home burned; his daughters rescue their most prized possessions, feather beds and personal saddles, only to have the Redlegs hurl them back into the fire; watched them shoot the family dog ‘Tige,’ as they rode away. He recognized Jim Meador, a man of the area who was married into the family. Shore vowed to kill Meador, knowing it was he who led the raid there. Meador ‘left the country,’ not returning after the war. The family lived in Samuel’s wood-working shop until the home was rebuilt. (Among other wood-work, he was the coffin-maker of the area).
“Theophilus ‘Ophie,’ another son, was caught on an open road by a Redleg party, with no means of escape. Thinking quickly, he stooped for a stick and began digging. When the officer asked what he was doing he replied, without a pause and not looking up, ‘huntin’ winter snakes.’ The officer commented, ‘The damn fool’s crazy. Let him alone.’
“B. Decalb, the youngest son, aged 17, was sent by his parents to a family friend, Mr. Campbell, in Ray County. The Federal Army was as vengefully recruiting there as at home, so Mr. Campbell suggested it would be best for Decalb to ride with Quantrell until they could reach Gen. Shelby’s Confederate camp, which Decalb did.”
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Before B.D. rode off to join Quantrill, the Redlegs torched and looted his parents’ farmhouse, and tried to kill them and B.D.. The land where the farmhouse stood is still in the family. When I visited there in (I believe) 2002, the farmhouse was still there, and still habitable. I saw for myself the scorched floor joists.
During Quantrill’s Raid on Lawrence, B.D. rode with some people you have heard of, like Frank and Jesse James, and Coleman Younger. The roster lists “DeKalb Shore” and “Coal Younger.” He also rode with some folks you probably don’t know.
From “The Devil Knows How To Ride—The True Story of William Clarke Quantrill and His Confederate Raiders” (henceforth “the Devil Knows”) by Edward E. Lesser, in a longish footnote:
“While slavery was an issue for the small number of radicals on either side who were engaged in the struggle over Kansas Territory during the prewar period, the preservation of the peculiar institution does not appear to have motivated most Missouri Southerners to fight in the Civil War. These Southerners, like their cousins in the South, had a variety of reasons for fighting against the Union—and it is obvious that an individual might have more than one, including such personal motives as parental expectation, what we would call peer pressure, friendship, a desire for adventure, notions of masculinity, and concepts of duty and honor.
“The relatively small number of Missourians who were slaveowners or the sons of slave-owning families, of course, desired to protect a profitable institution and a way of life. But most Missouri Southerners who fought did not own slaves and had no hope of owning slaves, and many would have opposed the institution of slavery. Many Missourians, viewing the federal government, in far-off Washington, DC, as ominously tyrannous, fought for what one lieutenant, wounded in the Battle of Pea Ridge, called ‘the undying principles of Constitutional liberty and self-government.’ They believed they were acting in the tradition and protecting the legacy of their great grandfathers, who fought in the American Revolution of 1776. The Federal troops —so many of them German or other foreigners or from faraway northern states— seemed a hired army of occupation that threatened hearth, home, and family and so must be driven out. Further, some Missouri Southerners embraced the Confederacy as their new country and, patriotically, sought to prevent its subjugation.
“Southerners from the western border counties—particularly those who joined partisan ranger bands like Quantrill’s—had an additional and overriding motivation: a powerful desire to take revenge for the plunder and murder raids committed by the likes of Lane, Jennison, and Montgomery, and by the various jayhawking bands both before and during the war. ‘From the first six to sixty men who went to Quantrill [after he formed the band],’ ex-bushwhacker Morgan T. Mattox said in 1909, ‘all were of the best families in Jackson, Cass and Lafayette counties. The Federals had committed depredation[s] on all their families, and the men went to Quantrill with vengeance in their hearts. No other motive than revenge prompted them. Of course all were Southern sympathizers.’ Indeed, Mattox claimed that Quantrill would accept no one into the band who was not ‘moved by injury to selves or family, imbued with malice and bent on revenge.’ Mattox added that as the war dragged on ‘men of bad principle, thieves and robbers got into the band to rob, murder, and plunder.’
“Some men who rode with Quantrill came from slave-owning families—notably the Jameses and Cole Younger—but others did not. I can document the fact that two abject racists were members of the band and undoubtedly there were more, but at least three free black men belonged. Little is known about one of these men, John Lobb, but the other two, John Noland and Henry Wilson, were in later years extremely proud of having served with Quantrill and made a point of attending the band reunions. Noland was especially well liked by his white fellow veterans and was described by them as ‘a man among men.’”
Noland is said to have been a freed man when the War started. Still living around where he had been enslaved. Had a close, familial relationship with his white half-brothers. When his brothers enlisted, he wanted to go with them. And he did. Wilson, however, was a slave when he went in. He had personally observed Redleg brigandage, and when his master went in, he volunteered to go, too, to help stop it. Quantrill is said to have been terrified of the likes of Bloody Bill Anderson and George Todd, his lieutenants; and I have read that Quantrill always made sure his personal bodyguards were black. Wilson was one of them. In We Rode With Quantrill (henceforth “Hale”), Wilson told author Donald R. Hale that “Quantrill trusted me because I didn’t drink whiskey and I could shoot.”
Noland, Lobb, and Wilson were with B.D. on the raid on Lawrence.
The late, quite significant Border War historian and musician Cathy Barton recorded this with Dave Para in “A Call of Quantrill:”
“We´ll come as a thunderbolt comes from the cloud; we´ll smite the oppressor and humble the proud.
“Few shall escape us and few shall be spared, for keen is our saber, in vengeance ´tis bared.”
Quantrill’s Raid.
From The Devil Knows:
“On August 10, 1863, Quantrill called his officers and the chieftains of allied bands together at his camp near Blue Springs to tell them of his plan to attack Lawrence. Not all his men were as confident of success as he was. The war council dragged on for twenty-four hours. Lawrence was too deep in enemy territory, some argued, and there were too many Yankee troops prowling around; even if they could reach the town with impunity, they would have to fight all the way back to Missouri.
“…
“Quantrill knew what was in their hearts. ‘Lawrence is the great hotbed of abolitionism in Kansas,’ he told them. ‘All the plunder —or the bulk of it— stolen from Missouri will be found stored away in Lawrence, and we can get more revenge and more money there than anywhere else in the state.’”
Quantrill had spies in Lawrence. Noland and Fletch Taylor slipped into town. But they apparently fell short in their information-gathering. So Wilson was sent in. Hale wrote that Wilson explained that: “I was really only a boy and small for my age when I went into Lawrence as a scout. I was barefoot and had my pants rolled half way to my knees. I begged cornbread for a poor nigger boy and got a good lay of things.” I have read that Lobb, too, scouted Lawrence. But the heavy lifting was done by certain townspeople — women with Southern sympathies, who were not strangers in town. They prepared a map with the names and addresses of Redlegs and abolitionist rabble-rousers marked. Those were men to be killed and houses to be burned. Other houses were marked as sympathizers only, so only to have their houses burned. And some men were just to be killed. Perhaps bad men living in quarters owned by an innocent in the opinion of Lawrence women with Southern sympathies.
At dawn on August 21, 1863, Quantrill and his 450 men rode into Lawrence. Quantrill quickly sent detachments to dispatch 22 white recruits of the Kansas 14th Regiment and to neutralize the nearby camp of the 2nd Colored Regiment.
The Devil Knows:
“Quantrill now led most of the men in a wild charge down Massachusetts Street; the rest went down parallel streets. Despite their ferocity, at least one victim could not help admiring their skill and daring.
“‘The horsemanship of the guerillas was perfect. They rode with that ease and abandon which are acquired only by a life spent in the saddle amid desperate scenes. Their horses scarcely seemed to touch the ground, and the riders sat upon them with bodies erect and arms perfectly free with revolvers on full cock, shooting at every house and man they passed, and yelling like demons at every bound. On each side of the stream of fire … were men falling dead and wounded, and women and children, half dressed, running and screaming — some trying to escape from danger and some rushing to the side of their murdered friends.
“‘They dashed along Massachusetts Street, shooting at every straggler on the sidewalk, and into almost every window. They halted in front of the Eldridge House. The firing [now] ceased and all was silence for a few minutes. They evidently expected resistance here, and sat gazing at the rows of windows above them, apparently in fearful suspense.’”
The Kansas State Historical Society website contains this entry:
“The Leavenworth Daily Conservative of August 23, 1863, headlined the account of the raid as follows: ‘Total Loss $2,000,000, Cash Lost $250,000.’ The story that followed described the scene along Massachusetts street, the business artery of Lawrence, as ‘... one mass of smouldering ruins and crumbling walls.... Only two business houses were left upon the street -- one known as the Armory, and the other the old Miller block.... About one hundred and twenty-five houses in all were burned, and only one or two escaped being ransacked, and everything of value carried away or destroyed.’ The article went on to point out that the offices of the three Lawrence newspapers, the Journal, Tribune, and Republican, were destroyed, and that every safe in the town but two had been robbed. There was also an account of the burning of the Eldridge House.”
The accepted body count—150 Lawrence men. No woman was killed, raped, or assaulted. I attribute that (i) to Quantrill’s men knowing that their best spies were women who were indistinguishable from other women living in Lawrence. Also (ii) to the recent death of a number of Southern sympathizing women in Federal custody in Kansas City shortly before the raid. Cole Younger, for one, lost a cousin. He and Bloody Bill Anderson each had two or three sisters killed or injured there. Maybe prior to this point Anderson should not have been referred to as “‘Bloody’ Bill,” for a sister’s death and broken legs to a 13-year-old sister held shackled to ball and chains are said to have been what triggered his madness.
I must disclose that the above language was from an early draft. As I ready myself to hit “publish,” I have only just re-examined Cole Younger’s autobiography. He believed that one woman was killed. He wrote that a black woman suddenly appeared leaning out a second floor window and was shot dead before her gender was recognized.
Willfully killing or physically harming or injuring women was a line none of them crossed. But every house marked on the map was torched.
B.D. was on Quantrill’s Lawrence Raid roster, which the Federals captured and seized. See also, Rose Mary Lankford’s 1999 “Encyclopedia of Quantrill’s Guerillas.” But he served with Quantrill only very briefly. Soon after the raid on Lawrence, B.D. was serving in the Confederate Cavalry in Shelby's Company J.