A Reassessment by Larry Wood
Camp Jackson, May 20th, 1863 Colonel Williams, Honored Sir,
I hav five of your Solgers prisoners, three Whight and two Black men. The whight men I propose exchanging with you if you hav Eny of my men or other confederate Solgers to exchange for them. As for the negroes, I cannot Reccognise them as Solgers, and in conciquence, I will hav to hold them as contrabands of war. If my proposels sootes you, you will Return ameadately my men or other confederate Solgers, and I will send you your men.
I remain yours truly, T. R. Livingston, Maj comdg confederate force. R. Livingston, Maj comdg confederate forces
Throughout the Civil War, Missouri served in many ways as a bellwether for the rest of the country, presaging the direction of the entire conflict. In the summer and fall of 1861, as the Union army vied with Southern forces for control of Missouri, an anxious nation watched closely, knowing the result of the struggle might tilt the balance of the war. In the fall of 1864, the country closely followed the news of General Sterling Price’s raid through Missouri as he sought to take back the state for the Confederacy and perhaps engineer the defeat of US president Abraham Lincoln at the ballot box in November. Between these early and late events, other actions in Missouri also helped determine the course of the war. The May 18, 1863, skirmish at Rader’s farm in western Jasper County served as one such harbinger for the rest of the country. While top Federal and Confederate officials were still debating the role of African American soldiers in the war and still contending in theory with the question of how black prisoners of war should be treated, answers to these troubling issues were already being decided in practice on the battlefield in south- west Missouri by men such as Southern guerrilla commander Thomas R. Livingston and Union officer James M. Williams.’
Whether African Americans should be allowed to serve in the Union army had been a contentious issue since the war’s beginning. Although black soldiers had served during the Revolutionary War, a subsequent law forbade their service in the US Army, and racist resistance to such service was still strong when the Civil War broke out. President Abraham Lincoln worried that accepting blacks into the Union army would prompt slaveholding border states like Missouri to secede. Indeed, when Major General John C. Frémont, commanding the Department of the West headquartered in St. Louis, issued a proclamation on August 30, 1861, freeing slaves in Missouri and permitting them to enlist, Lincoln promptly rescinded the order.
*Larry Wood is the author of sixteen books and numerous articles on the history of Missouri and its region. A retired English teacher, he lives in Joplin, Missouri.
On July 17, 1862, however, Congress, as a means of striking at the Confederacy, passed the Second Confiscation and Militia Acts. Although these laws were primarily punitive measures aimed at undermining the institution of slavery, they offered the added benefit of helping to alleviate the growing manpower needs of the Union army. The Confiscation Act authorized the confiscation of slaves belonging to anyone who sympathized with the Confederacy, while the Militia Act authorized the army to enroll “all able-bodied male citizens between the ages of eighteen and forty-five.” Although the law did not call for the enlistment of blacks into the US Army, it did authorize the president to employ blacks in any manner he saw fit to crush the rebellion, and it also allowed individual states to accept blacks into militia service. Passage of the act was the cue for some Union states, including Kansas, to begin enlisting African Americans into military service.
Kansas senator James H. Lane, who also served as a Union general and the state’s recruiting commissioner, had long advocated arming black men for the war effort. In August of 1862, despite a lack of support from the federal government, he began enlisting African Americans into a militia regiment designated the First Kansas Colored Infantry. Many of the recruits were former slaves from Missouri who had escaped to Kansas. Williams, the commander of the First Kansas Colored Infantry, was white, as were most of the regiment’s other officers, but all the rank-and-file soldiers were black. The First Kansas Colored Infantry was the first black regiment organized in a Northern state. In the fall of 1862 it also became the first black regiment of the Civil War to see action on the battlefield during the skirmish at Island Mound in Bates County, Missouri.
In late October, Major Benjamin F. Henning, commanding the Union post at Fort Scott in Bourbon County, Kansas, ordered about 230 men of the First Kansas Colored Infantry, under the command of Captains Henry C. Seaman and Richard G. Ward, into Bates County in response to Confederate guerrilla activity on and near Hog Island, a tract of land encircled by two channels of the Marais des Cygnes River. The Federals found a large force of bushwhackers gathered in the area and briefly skirmished with them on October 27 as they established their camp on a farm near the island. The outpost was dubbed Fort Africa by some of the black troops. Two days later, the fighting resumed on a nearby hillside, called Island Mound because of its proximity to Hog Island. After a series of fierce skirmishes, the guerrillas retired from the fray, carrying off as many as twenty-five dead, according to Union estimates. The Federals lost nine men dead and eleven wounded. Captain Ward later reported that the black troops had positively answered “the often-mooted question of ‘Will they fight?”” According to a New York Times correspondent, the guerrillas themselves, who had previously held a “contemptible idea of the Negroes’ courage,” admitted that the black soldiers “fought like tigers.”””
By late 1862, President Lincoln had reversed his previous position and concluded that freeing the slaves and enlisting African Americans into the Union army was now a necessary step in the successful prosecution of the war, and he drafted a preliminary proclamation to that effect. Confederate president Jefferson Davis responded by declaring that black soldiers captured by the Southern army would be either enslaved or subject to execution. White officers in command of black soldiers would also suffer severe punishment for inciting insurrection.”
On January 1, 1863, Lincoln officially issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves in the rebellious states and announcing the acceptance of black men into the Union army. The ultimate freedom of the slaves, of course, depended on a Union victory in the war, but the liberated could now fight for their own liberty. Less than two weeks later, on January 13, the First Kansas Colored Infantry was mustered into US service at Fort Scott. The unit had campaigned and fought throughout the fall of 1862 without legal status, but now the black troops were officially part of the Union army.
The treatment of black soldiers was still a very contentious and unsettled issue when Colonel Williams and his regiment were ordered to Baxter Springs, Kansas, on April 30, 1863, to establish an outpost there. Their mission was to protect Union wagon trains traveling along the Military Road between Fort Scott and Fort Gibson in Indian Territory and also to destroy or drive out the guerrillas inhabiting the region. The guerrillas, under the command of Livingston, were based in western Jasper County, but they often roamed into other parts of southwest Missouri as well as southern Kansas and Indian Territory. Like most Missouri guerrilla leaders, Livingston was loosely affiliated with the Confederate army, but his company operated mainly as a roving, independent band.
The First Kansas Colored Infantry and one section of the Second Kansas Battery started for Baxter Springs from Fort Scott on May 4. During the trip the regiment was overtaken by a scouting party sent from Fort Scott in response to guerrilla activity in the vicinity of Sherwood, Missouri. Colonel Williams detailed two companies of black troops and one artillery piece to reinforce the scouting party. On the morning of May 7, the Union detachment broke up a guerrilla camp on Center Creek near its confluence with Spring River in extreme western Jasper County, with insignificant casualties on either side. After another minor skirmish near Sherwood the same day, the black soldiers who had made the detour into Missouri reunited with the rest of Williams’s troops at Baxter Springs.”
On May 14, Williams sent a derisive letter to Livingston announcing his intention of ridding Jasper and Newton Counties of bushwhackers. He upbraided Livingston for lurking in hiding places, preying on defense- less civilians, and refusing to engage in honorable warfare. Referring to Livingston and his men as a “murderous gang,” Williams challenged the guerrilla leader to meet him on the open field in a fair fight.
Four days later, on May 18, a detachment from Baxter Springs that included twenty-five infantrymen from the First Kansas Colored, twenty- three mounted artillerymen of the Second Kansas Battery, three officers, five teamsters, and scout Hugh Thompson started from camp on a foraging expedition into western Jasper County. The party was joined north of Baxter Springs by four men of the Sixth Kansas Cavalry, making a total of about sixty men under the overall command of Major Richard Ward, the same officer who had fought at Island Mound. While foraging northeast of Sherwood near present-day Carl Junction, the Federals spotted a large party of guerrillas watching them from a distance, but both sides moved off without launching an attack.”
Later the same day, the Union detachment stopped at the Andrew Rader farm about three miles southeast of Sherwood near the present-day intersection of Fountain Road and Peace Church Road to resume their foraging. Six mounted white men in parties of three were sent out in opposite directions to establish lookout posts. Four of the wagons were left on the road, about fifty yards in front of the house, and a few mounted white soldiers were detailed to guard them. Meanwhile, the black soldiers and the rest of the mounted troops approached the house, and the remaining wagon, containing most of the regiment’s ammunition, was driven into the yard and parked outside the house.
Only women and children were present in the large, two- story frame home because Andrew Rader was in the Confederate army and his son, Bill, was a member of Livingston’s guerrillas. The women were ordered out of the house, and about twenty black soldiers, leaving their arms stacked near the wagon, were sent inside to search for foodstuffs and other supplies. On the second floor, some of the men discovered a stash of corn, which they tossed out the window to be loaded into the wagon below. Others ransacked the house in search of “little things to pick up,” as one Federal soldier told a Leavenworth newspaper several days later. Out in the yard, some of the white soldiers laughed and talked with the women, who were “making themselves very agreeable” to throw the Federals off their guard, knowing that Livingston’s men were in the area. Several other soldiers chased after chickens, while a few searched the outbuildings for horses and saddles.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon. The Union soldiers had scarcely settled in when about seventy guerillas under Livingston charged out of the woods from the south with their guns blazing. The attackers were apparently the same men the Federals had seen earlier in the day, and they had trailed the foraging party to the Rader farm. The guerrillas got past the Union pickets and guards and rushed the soldiers at the house, flanking them on the right (the east). The sudden attack cut the sentries off from their comrades and caught the troops at the house by total surprise, throwing them into a panic.
The black soldiers made a dash for their muskets, but only a few, primarily those who had remained outside the house, were able to reach their arms. The unarmed men scattered in various directions, racing for the woods. However, many of them were overtaken and shot down before they could escape. One member of the Second Kansas Battery, Cameron Garrett, was also killed near the house.
The rest of the white men at the house mounted their horses and fled down a short, narrow lane to the west, firing a few shots at the attacking guerrillas as they retreated. The mounted troops were joined by the handful of black infantrymen who bore arms, and the combined force made its way through a gate at the end of the lane. Scout Hugh Thompson recalled years later that he and his comrades had to “fight our way out,” although most contemporaneous accounts suggest that the Union soldiers offered nominal resistance during the initial attack at the house.
Once through the gate, the Union troops headed for some woods about a quarter of a mile west across the prairie, firing an occasional shot to momentarily check the guerrilla pursuit as they retreated. The Leaven- worth Daily Conservative later reported, “Under the inspiration of Major Ward the men seized their arms, sallied together, and fell back fighting, the Major himself bringing up the rear.” At or near the edge of the woods, some of the mounted troops, armed only with pistols and running low on ammunition, broke for Kansas, hoping to outrun the pursuing guerrillas.
Meanwhile, the five or six armed infantrymen of the First Kansas Colored and a similar number of white soldiers who carried carbines as well as pistols reached a lane through the woods on the present-day site of the Sherwood/Rader Farm Civil War Park. Here they made a stand, firing what the Lawrence State Journal called “volley after volley” at the pursuing guerrillas. The Daily Conservative wrote, “Our men fought desperately, both white and black, the latter distinguishing themselves in every instance.”
In their haste, the Federal soldiers dropped a large number of unfired rounds, but their stiff resistance convinced most of the guerrillas to turn their attention to an easier target: the fleeing mounted troops. Livingston’s men pursued them for about eight miles, keeping up a running fight most of the way. Some of the Union horses began to tire, and the guerrillas overtook and killed two more artillerymen before calling off the chase.
News of the disaster at Rader’s farm reached Baxter Springs by about sundown on May 18, when the first of the survivors made it back to camp. Hungry for revenge, Colonel Williams immediately set out for Missouri with about four hundred men. His force consisted of four or five companies of his own regiment and two companies of the Third Wisconsin Cavalry, which had stopped at Baxter Springs with a wagon train they were escorting to Fort Gibson.
Williams reached the area of Rader’s farm at about daylight on May 19. He and his men found the bodies of at least ten dead black troops lying on the field where they had fallen. The corpses had been desecrated. A Union soldier accompanying the Williams expedition described the scene: “The rebels were not content with shooting them in the head. One and all were stabbed to the heart, some of them three or four times. Most of them had their heads beaten to a jelly with clubs.” Most of the bodies were also stripped of clothing except for undergarments.
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.
