General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I just found out that one of my great great grandfathers served on the Confederate side [View all]Xithras
(16,191 posts)I know that we have none on my dads side, and on my maternal grandfathers side we had two (one with a Maine infantry regiment, and another with a Massachusetts artillery regiment).
On my maternal grandmothers side, there's a bit of a mystery. We know that her grandfathers family lived in western Missouri during the runup to war, and and his wifes journal makes it pretty clear that he was an active Border Ruffian prior to the start of the war. Kansas abolitionist guerillas regularly staged raids across the border into Missouri, burning farms, homes, and businesses. Her grandfather apparently supplemented his farming income by taking payments from other farmers to participate in a Ruffian group to defend against the Kansas raiders. There's a paragraph suggesting that he did kill at least one, at least once. There are other paragraphs that hint at the possibility that he may have participated in some cross-border raids back into Kansas. She didn't explicitly say that, but there's a two week stretch where she talks about the difficulty of running the farm on her own, and mentions that she can't wait for her husband and "his men" to return. Two days after he came back, she complained about having to buy him new boots because he lost one when "crossing the river" on his way back home. If that river was the Missouri, he was in Kansas.
Now, here's where it gets interesting. My great-great-great grandmother was a prolific writer, and journaled at least weekly, and often daily, about her life. We know from her journals that he participated in some sort of fighting prior to 1862, but he apparently was not part of any regular units. Then, in June 1863, the entries vanish. There's an entry in June 1863, a spot where you can see that many pages have been removed, and then the next entry is in May of 1864. Those entries primarily talk about the problems they were having since the border had been heavily depopulated by the fighting. There's one line, several weeks after the first, where she mentions that she's finally getting used to having him around the farm again.
That missing span of time fits perfectly with the destruction of Lawrence Kansas by Quantrills Raiders, their march to Texas to join up with the CSA, the collapse of his units, and the return of the Raiders to their homes in Missouri. There is NOTHING to prove it conclusively, but it's our suspicion that he was marching with Quantrill at the time. Because the Lawrence Massacre was such a horrendous crime, we think that she may have later removed those pages from her journal to destroy any evidence that he rode with them.
My grandmother and her sister also remembered her grandfather getting irritated after seeing a movie about Jesse James when she was young. He was complaining about how they got the people "wrong" and how Henry Fonda was the wrong person to play Frank James. He said, "I knew Frank James, and Henry Fonda doesn't look anything like him." Frank James was famously one of Quantrills Raiders, and was in that march to Texas.
It's just a circumstancial suspicion, but everything fits.
(I have no idea why I wrote this all down, but I'm bored and haven't told the story in a while )