| Subject: History from a different perspective ... |
Author:
Relo from StL
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Date Posted: 07:07:09 08/20/01 Mon
With such a wonderful weekend for late August, the wife and I just had to get out and explore again. This time, we hit 24 highway eastbound, and traveled to Lexington, MO.
This was the site of a Civil War battle, the northernmost penetration of the Southerners in Missouri, and you can still see the spot where a cannonball hit the top of one of the columns on the courthouse on Main Street (MO Hwy 13).
What was interesting to see while visiting the battlefield museum was that Lexington was THE town on the Missouri river in that day (Kansas City was just a muddy village), and was very much a Southern town, with the plantations, slaves, the whole thing. Missouri was a slave state before the war, but the slaveowners concentrated along the Missouri river from St. Charles west to Lexington. Lafayette County counted more slaves than any other in the state, and counties not bordering on the Missouri river had very few slaves.
Given all that, Lexington was defiantly pro-Confederacy, and when the Feds set up a garrison there, the Southern sympathizers came after them, and the battle ensued. The Southerners won, but were surprisingly gentlemanly about it, as only a hundred or so of the Federal defenders were killed in the battle, and the rest were allowed to leave with a promise to "never return to Missouri again".
That got me to thinking -- do you think that if TODAY a force of citizens attacked and took over a Federal garrison, that they would allow the defenders to leave after agreeing to such a promise? Do you think the Feds would honor such a promise? (They didn't in 1861 ... shortly after the battle, the Southerners withdrew and a new force of Union soldiers reoccupied the town.) The town hasn't been the same since.
One footnote to that battle: It was decided when the Southern sympathizers had the brilliant idea to create a wall between them and the Federal defenders out of HEMP bales. (Today, hemp is marijuana, in case you did not know) In those days, that part of the state produced hemp in abundance (and perfectly legally), which was used to make rope, among other things. Lexington had a hemp warehouse full of the stuff, and it was taken by the attackers. They advanced on the garrison simply by shoving the hemp bales ahead of them (they were big enough and tough enough to capture and hold any bullets that came). Once they advanced close enough, the defenders realized their fate was sealed and gave up.
Another interesting thing was the clearly pro-Southern slant given to the displays in the battlefield museum. Contrast this to what we saw earlier in the year when we journeyed south in Kansas to Ft. Scott. I guess we can be thankful that today the MO-KS rivalry is confined to a football or basketball game a few times each year, because a century and a half ago, that rivalry was a full scale war!
Some things never change. Some of the folks honored in the display at Lexington (or at Ft. Scott) are nothing short of hooligans, and were probably thought of as such in that day. One wonders what scalawags and hooligans we see today in our world will be honored in museum displays in the 22nd century?
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