History

Williams’s men gathered up their dead and piled them inside the Rader home. While this work was going on, a local civilian was brought in as a prisoner because he had been found wearing a new pair of US government-issued shoes, presumably taken from one of the dead Union soldiers, and because his shirt was bloody as though he had been in a fight. He was identified as forty-eight-year-old John Bishop, a Confederate sympathizer recently paroled from a Union prison at Fort Lincoln. On Colonel Williams’s order, Bishop was marched into the house and shot for violating the terms of his parole. After his body was added to the pile of corpses, the house was set on fire, turning it into a funeral pyre for the dead men.

Williams burned the bodies rather than take time to bury them. Chasing Livingston’s gang was a more pressing matter, but the guerrillas had already scattered by the time Williams arrived. Unable to locate the men responsible for the deadly attack on his troops, Williams took out his frustration by burning eleven farmhouses in the vicinity and the entire town of Sherwood. Considered a rebel stronghold, the town, which was Jasper County’s third largest at the time, was never rebuilt.

The number of Federals killed during the Rader’s farm skirmish totaled sixteen men, including thirteen black soldiers and three white men of the Second Kansas Battery. Approximately the same number suffered wounds of various severity. In addition, two men of the First Kansas Colored Infantry and three white men were taken prisoner. The three whites were Haley Pipkins and David Whitstine of the Second Kansas Battery and David Akers of the Sixth Kansas Cavalry; the names of the black soldiers are not known. The guerrillas also confiscated the Union wagons and mules, six horses, fourteen hundred rounds of ammunition, and what Livingston called “a good many” guns and pistols. Livingston said he sustained “no losses” except that he and one of his captains were slightly wounded in the skirmish. A Fort Scott correspondent to the Chicago Tribune made the dubious claim, however, that five or six guerrillas were killed,

During the Civil War, opposing sides on the battlefield often communicated directly with each other under flags of truce, but military leaders, especially guerrilla chieftains on the frontier, sometimes enlisted noncombatants to carry messages as well

On May 20, Livingston sent a civilian messenger into the Union camp at Baxter Springs bearing a letter to Colonel Williams. The guerrilla chief announced that he had captured five of the colonel’s men, three white and two black. He offered to exchange the three white soldiers for any Confederate soldiers that Williams might be holding, but he declared that he could not recognize the black men as soldiers. Livingston claimed that he would have to keep them as “contrabands of war.” He also denounced the killing and incineration of John Bishop. Usurping the moral high ground, Livingston said he did not believe the report because he was satisfied that Williams was “to [sic] high-toned a gentelman to stoope or condecend to such brutal deeds of barbarity.”  

In refusing to recognize the troops of the First Kansas Colored Infantry as soldiers, Livingston was adhering to the policy Jefferson Davis had announced five months earlier. Indeed, the Confederate Congress had formalized Davis’s position just two and a half weeks before the skirmish at Rader’s farm with passage of the Retaliatory Act. Although the Retaliatory Act authorized executing or re-enslaving captured black soldiers, Livingston’s use of the term “contrabands of war” in reference to the two black soldiers captured at Rader’s farm leaves in doubt the question of whether he was implying such a threat. As early as the spring of 1861, when Major General Benjamin Butler refused to return three Virginia slaves who sought refuge in his camp, Union officials had labeled confiscated slaves contraband, essentially treating them as property that might aid the enemy war effort if not seized. Perhaps Livingston’s calling his black captives “contrabands of war” was meant in mockery. It seems unlikely Livingston intended to hold the black captives indefinitely. Did he plan to deal with them according to the Missouri slave codes, as the Davis administration had authorized? Was he, in fact, threatening to kill them? Whether intentionally or not, his use of the term “contrabands of war” left the legal status of his black captives in limbo.

Although it is unclear what Livingston intended for his black captives, we know that he was a former slaveholder, strongly opposed abolition, and referred disdainfully to Williams’s men as “a lot of eatheuoppians.” Guerrilla leaders in south- west Missouri had let it be known they would not treat captured black soldiers as prisoners of war. Livingston and his men might also have held personal resentments against his black captives, because some of Williams’s troops at Baxter Springs had formerly been slaves in neighboring southwest Missouri.

Certainly, Williams detected a threat in Livingston’s May 20 letter, because the very next day he answered with a warning of his own: 

In regard to the colored men, prisoners, belonging to my regiment, I have this to say, that it rests with you to treat them as prisoners of war or not but be assured that I shall keep a like number of your men as prisoners until these colored men are accounted for, and you can safely trust that I shall visit a retributive justice upon them for any injury done them at the hands of the confederate forces. . . . If you take exceptions to this course of procedure, you are at liberty to “play to my hand” and as best suits your pleasure or convenience. But I will promise to “follow suit or trump.”

Williams said he was confident he had the full backing of the US government in his proposed course. He also upbraided Livingston for his audacity in speaking of “barbarity” in reference to John Bishop’s execu- tion and incineration after Livingston’s own men had so callously treated the corpses of Williams’s black soldiers. 

In closing, he agreed to Livingston’s proposal for an exchange of white prisoners. Livingston had already paroled one of the captured white men, Akers, and Williams said he would send two Confederate prisoners being held at Baxter Springs in exchange for the other two, Pipkins and Whitstine.

On May 23, Livingston fired off an angry reply in reference to Williams’s statement that his government fully supported his proposed course. The guerrilla leader said he had a higher opinion of Northern government in regard to the treatment of prisoners than Williams himself apparently did. Livingston said that the Confederate government had the power to retaliate by killing three POWs for every one the Union killed, but that it did not allow such conduct.

The question of retaliation for the killing of prisoners was a controversial subject throughout the Civil War, and it became especially contentious in Missouri after the Union army carried out one of the most notorious acts of retribution of the entire war within the state in the fall of 1862. In September, Confederate forces under Colonel Joseph Porter captured an alleged Union sympathizer named Andrew Allsman at Palmyra. In early October, Colonel John McNeil, commanding Union forces in the area, issued an ultimatum threatening to execute ten Confederate prisoners if Allsman was not returned by a certain date. When the deadline passed, Allsman was presumed dead, and McNeil carried out his threat. The threat of retaliation contained in Williams and Livingston’s exchange of letters was by no means unprecedented, but it was the first time the issue of race factored into the negotiations.

Before Colonel Williams received Livingston’s second letter, he made a hurried trip to Fort Scott. Returning to Baxter Springs on the evening of May 25, he learned that one of the black men captured by Livingston had been killed. The next day, he wrote to Livingston demanding that the man who committed “the dastardly act” be turned over to him. If Livingston did not comply within forty-eight hours, Williams threatened that he would hang one of the Confederate prisoners he had in camp. Williams added in a post- script that Livingston need not try to excuse the murder of the black prisoner by claiming it was beyond his power to prevent. If he was fit to command, Williams told the guerrilla leader, he should be able to control his men.

Despite Williams’s postscript, Livingston did, in fact, deny that he had any power to prevent the murder of the black prisoner. He said the act was committed by a member of a company over which he did not have command. The man just happened to be in the guerrilla camp, got into an argument with the black prisoner, and killed him. (This person was perhaps a member of Colonel John T. Coffee’s irregular regiment, which had rendezvoused with Livingston’s guerrillas about this time.) Livingston said he very much regretted the incident but that he did not know the current whereabouts of the offender. Therefore, he could not comply with Williams’s demand to turn over the killer. Livingston added that, as far as he knew, none of the prisoners Williams was currently holding belonged to his command. “Consequently, the innocent will have to suffer for the guilty,” Livingston concluded, “and I much regret that you compel me to adopt your own rule.” He added that unless Williams retracted the threat to kill a prisoner, he planned to turn the letter over to the Confederate government. Livingston added that he expected to meet Williams on the battlefield soon. Picking up on Williams’s earlier metaphor, Livingston told the Union commander he would show him “how to shuffle the cards.

Negotiations between Livingston and Williams broke down after this exchange, and both men started carrying out their threats. Williams killed a Confederate prisoner in revenge for the murder of the black prisoner in Livingston’s camp, and Livingston retaliated by killing the other black soldier he had captured at Rader’s farm. To even the score, Williams then killed another Confederate prisoner.

During the next couple of weeks, Livingston’s guerrillas and Williams’s troops at Baxter Springs engaged in a series of minor skirmishes. In one of the more important clashes, on June 7, Livingston’s men killed one member of the Second Kansas Battery and captured two others as they were guarding a herd of horses near the Baxter Springs camp, while Williams and the bulk of his command were away from the post. Williams and Livingston tried briefly to revive negotiations to get the prisoners exchanged. However, the killing of the previous POWs had soured whatever good faith might have existed between the two sides, and Livingston ended up executing the two white prisoners. Whether Williams responded in kind is unknown, but the lack of evidence suggests he did not. He had apparently run out of Confederate prisoners to kill. 

In early June, Williams was ordered to move his regiment to Fort Gibson in Indian Territory, and he left Baxter Springs on June 15. Later that month the First Kansas Colored Infantry helped defeat a Rebel force at Cabin Creek, and in July, Williams’s regiment fought for the victorious Union at Honey Springs. In April of 1864 the First Kansas Colored suffered defeat at the Battle of Poison Springs in Arkansas, an engage- ment made infamous by the Confederate forces’ slaughter of black troops after they had been wounded and incapacitated. Meanwhile, Livingston was killed leading a charge on the Cedar County courthouse at Stockton, Missouri, on July 11, 1863, less than two months after the skirmish at Rader’s farm and less than a month after Williams left Baxter Springs.

Contemporaneous accounts differ markedly on exactly what happened at Rader’s farm on May 18, 1863. Livingston, in his report of the incident to Confederate General Sterling Price, said that he completely “routed” the Union detachment, that he and his men killed twenty-three black soldiers and seven white men, that he pursued the mounted white soldiers for eight miles, and that his own command sustained no losses except for minor wounds to himself and one of his captains. Although Livingston exaggerated the number of Federal soldiers killed, several Union accounts published in newspapers in the immediate wake of the action generally agree with his version of events and seem to confirm the ignoble behavior of the mounted white troops in deserting the black soldiers. The Chicago Tribune’s Fort Scott correspondent called the incident “an inexcusable blunder, or rather a criminal neglect.” An officer who had remained at Baxter Springs and who apparently got his information from another soldier described the skirmish in a letter to the Leavenworth Bulletin as “the most perfect and unnecessary surprise and rout on record in the history of the war.” He placed the blame squarely on the officers and mounted soldiers who, if they had “made a bold stand,” could have “beat the rebels back until the colored men could have got to their guns, and then they could have whipped them easy.” John R. Graton, a Union captain who, like the Bulletin correspondent, was not at the Rader’s farm skirmish but was among the soldiers who returned to Sherwood the next day with Colonel Williams, wrote to his wife on May 22 describing the Rader’s farm action that had occurred four days earlier. He admitted that the Union detachment “got badly whipped,” and he blamed the disaster on “want of foresight.” Without directly impugning the courage of the white artillerymen and officers, he said that they, “being mounted, were able to get out of [the] way.

At least three contemporaneous Union accounts, however, told a different story. Having left Baxter Springs on May 19, 1863, Captain Chester Thomas reached Leavenworth on May 22, bringing the first news of the Rader’s farm skirmish. He reported that the outnumbered and outgunned Union soldiers “stood their ground until all their cartridges were gone, and were then obliged to fall back.” A correspondent to the Lawrence State Journal, writing from Baxter Springs on May 20, praised their effort in even more glowing terms. He said that in response to the surprise attack, the Federals fought valiantly for half an hour before they were forced to retreat. He added that after reaching a narrow lane, “six of our men made a stand and with their Sharp’s [sic] rifles poured volley after volley, completely checking them.” The Leavenworth Times, one of the harshest critics of the Union performance at Rader’s farm, denounced Major Ward in particular, interpreting his having driven the ammunition wagon away from the other wagons and the men guarding them as an act of desertion. In response to such negative reports, the rival Leavenworth Daily Conservative sought to set the record straight, citing intelligence gleaned from officers at Baxter Springs and Fort Scott. The Conservative said that Major Ward personally led the Union resistance and “was severely wounded in the hand, but never left his post of danger till the survivors reached camp.”

In the late 1800s, Hugh Thompson, who had accompanied the Union expedition to Rader’s farm as a scout, described Livingston’s attack in a pamphlet he published about the history of Baxter Springs as a military post. Although he offered little detail, his terse statement that he and his comrades had to “fight our way out” added credence to the idea that the Union retreat from the house was not a pell-mell flight. He also confirmed that at least some of the black troops carried arms during the retreat.

Although reports of the Rader’s farm skirmish, including those published in the immediate wake of the action as well as Thompson’s reminiscent account, vary widely in the particulars of what happened, Livingston’s version became the generally accepted account, since his report to General Price was the only one that made it into the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. For over 150 years, most students of the Civil War accepted the idea that the Federal troops at Rader’s farm scattered precipitously at first fire and raced for their lives, with the mounted white soldiers completely deserting their black comrades. 

This conception changed in 2015, thanks to an archaeological study by Christopher Dukes, a graduate student at Missouri State University. Dukes found numerous rounds of ammunition and other military artifacts west of the Rader’s farm site in a relatively small area of what is now the Sherwood/Rader’s Farm Civil War Park. His discovery suggests that the park area, now called the Rally Field, was the place where the half dozen or so armed infantrymen and a like number of mounted white soldiers, after falling back from the Rader house, made the stand that was mentioned by at least a couple of the contemporaneous Union newspaper reports. The newspapers suggest, and Dukes’s study confirms, that several of the Union men were black soldiers. Most of the rounds Dukes found were .58 and .69 caliber musket rounds indicative of Springfield muskets that were carried by the black troops at Rader’s farm. Dukes also found a number of carbine and revolver rounds, suggesting that at least a few of the men were white, since only the white troops were issued revolvers and carbines. Although Dukes found fired as well as unfired rounds of ammunition, the large majority were unfired, suggesting that the men dropped a number of rounds in their haste to reload as they made their stand.

Dukes’s findings seemed to change the narrative of what happened at Rader’s farm, because they showed that not all of the black troops were unarmed, and that those who did have arms stood and fought. The archaeological evidence also suggested that not all their white comrades deserted them. A close examination of written sources pertaining to the Rader’s farm skirmish shows, however, that Dukes’s study did not so much promote a new narrative of what took place at Rader’s farm as it confirmed what some of the Union reports had said all along. But prior to the 2015 study, few people credited or even knew about the accounts that cast the Union soldiers in a more favorable light. 

No doubt most, if not all, of the accounts of the Rader’s farm skirmish written in the immediate wake of the action contain a grain of truth. Some- times what appear to be outright contradictions turn out merely to be, upon close examination, different points of view. While a white soldier who was left behind and captured at Rader’s farm might well report his comrades’ retreat as a cowardly flight, a mounted soldier who briefly skirmished with Livingston’s men before retreating might report that he and his fellow soldiers fought valiantly against overwhelming odds. Indeed, some of the mounted artillerymen at Rader’s farm carried only a single revolver, and a few had only the ammunition in their pistols. Under such circumstances, it is only reasonable that they might have galloped away after firing a few shots.

Most of the accounts of the fight at Rader’s farm probably also contain exaggeration, if not outright untruth. For instance, Livingston did not kill twenty-three black troops as he claimed but instead only fifteen (counting the two he executed after taking them prisoner). We can also be relatively sure that the Federals did not kill five or six guerrillas as one or two Union reports claimed. Not only did Livingston say he did not suffer any fatalities, but even some of the Union newspaper accounts suggested that the guerrillas sustained minimal losses, if any. Both sides during the Civil War tended to exaggerate their own successes and downplay their losses. 

The best we can sometimes do is to critically examine all the conflicting accounts of an event, take into consideration any empirical evidence that might be available, and weave together the story of what actually happened to the best of our ability. Therefore, the account given here represents not the absolute truth, but perhaps the most likely scenario of what happened at Rader’s farm on May 18, 1863. Suffice it to say there is now convincing evidence that some of the troops of the First Kansas Colored Infantry who were able to reach their arms offered a strong resistance, and that not all the white soldiers turned tail and ran in cowardly flight. The archaeological work of Chris Dukes and the newly reexamined newspaper reports have redeemed their honor. 

At the Rader’s farm skirmish, the First Kansas Colored Infantry became the first black regiment to see combat during the Civil War as part of the US Army, although the Fifty- Fourth Massachusetts, depicted in the movie Glory, is often given credit for this distinction. The evidence suggests that the Rader’s farm skirmish was also the war’s first action in which African American troops fought side by side with their white comrades, although this distinction is commonly ascribed to the Battle of Cabin Creek, fought several weeks later in Indian Territory. 

The significance of the Rader’s farm action, however, is based not just on what happened on May 18, but also on what happened in the aftermath of the skirmish. Not only was the killing of the black prisoners in Livingston’s camp the first time the Confederacy’s Retaliatory Act was carried out in practice, but Williams’s killing of the two Confederate POWs was also one of the very few times throughout the entire war that a Union officer retaliated tit-for-tat by killing white men in revenge for the murder of black soldiers.

 Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field had been adopted by President Lincoln in April 1863. More commonly called the Lieber Code after its author, Francis Lieber, the code regulated the rules of war and stressed the strict but humane treatment of prisoners, regardless of race. Although the code allowed for reprisals, it was still an extraordinary step for a Union commander to adopt, as Williams did, a policy recognizing, in effect, that a black soldier’s life was just as important as that of a white soldier.

The no-quarter policy toward black soldiers that Livingston carried out at Rader’s farm was not an anomaly in the Confederate army. Southern soldiers continued throughout most of the Civil War to kill African American soldiers rather than allow them to surrender. The most heinous example occurred in April 1864 at the Battle of Fort Pillow, where Confederates killed about three hundred African American soldiers, most of them massacred after the battle was over. Black soldiers who were taken pris- oner rather than extemporaneously slaughtered on the battlefield remained subject to execution or enslavement.

The present-day Sherwood/ Rader Farm Civil War Memorial Park. An archaeological study of the park’s grounds by Christopher Dukes, a graduate student at Missouri State University, in 2015 led to discoveries that challenge parts of the long-held historical narrative on the skirmish. In particular, his study suggests that Union forces offered more resistance than previously believed, and that black troops caught unarmed and on foot were not ignominiously abandoned by their mounted white comrades.

Williams’s execution of white prisoners in retaliation for Livingston’s killing of his black troops, however, stood throughout the war as a singular measure. On July 30, 1863, three months after the Confederate Congress passed the Retaliatory Act and less than two and a half months after the action at Rader’s farm, President Lincoln issued a retaliatory proclamation of his own. Known unofficially as the Order of Retaliation, it declared that it was the government’s duty to protect its citizens “of whatever class, color or condition,” and that there should be “no distinction as to color in the treatment of prisoners of war.” Lincoln continued, The Government of the United States will give the same protection to all its soldiers, and if the enemy shall sell or enslave any one because of his color, the offense shall be punished by retaliation upon the enemy’s prisoners in our possession. It is therefore ordered that for every soldier of the United States killed in violation of the laws of war, a rebel soldier shall be executed; and for every one enslaved by the enemy or sold into slavery, a rebel soldier shall be placed at hard labor on the public works and continued at such labor until the other shall be released and receive the treatment due to a prisoner of war.

In theory, the Order of Retaliation ratified the action Colonel Williams had taken at Baxter Springs, but Lincoln never allowed his order to become Union policy because of his own moral reluctance to engage in a practice he deemed barbaric. The Union did, however, quit exchanging prisoners because of the Confederacy’s refusal to exchange black soldiers, and in one or two instances, Union commanders, upon seeing black POWs forced to work on the front lines, put a like number of Confederate POWs to work in the battle trenches. These steps and the mere threat of retaliation served to restrain the Confederacy in its execution and enslavement of black prisoners. Over the next year and a half, the provisions of the Confederate Retaliatory Act were carried out only on a sporadic basis, depending on circumstances and who the Confederate commander was, but the Confederate government did not officially agree to start exchanging all prisoners until January 1865.

Recent archaeological and historical research has altered our under- standing of what happened at Rader’s farm. We now know that the African American troops of the First Kansas Colored Infantry who were able to reach their arms fought bravely, alongside a few white men, and even the mounted white troops who fled in the face of a superior enemy can now be judged less harshly. Blame for the Union fiasco at Rader’s farm must be attributed almost solely to what Captain John Graton called “want of foresight” on the part of the Union commanders in not fully appreciating the threat posed by Livingston and his guerrillas and not taking adequate precautions. The skirmish on May 18 and the subsequent back-and-forth between Colonel Williams and Major Livingston should also be appreciated as a defining moment in the history of African American soldiers in the Civil War. Livingston foreshadowed how Southern commanders would treat black soldiers and POWS for most of the remainder of the war, and although President Lincoln approved in theory the payback that Colonel James M. Williams dished out, he ultimately could not sanction such an unyielding policy.