Since July, the Union Army has been operating under President Abraham Lincoln‘s order to execute one Confederate soldier for every Federal soldier killed in violation of the laws of war. Lincoln’s order had been issued due to frequency and violence of Confederate guerrilla activity during the second half of the war, corresponding to the dimming prospects of a Confederate victory over the North. Since the order, there have been many executions, perhaps hundreds, of Confederate soldiers in retaliation for Union men murdered by guerrillas.
Today in St. Louis an execution of six Confederate soldiers takes place. Put to death by a firing squad, the six have committed no crimes themselves. Their lives, however, are taken as proxy for the recent murders of six Federal soldiers by Confederate guerrillas.
While more executions are yet to come as the war winds down, the message is already sinking home: guerrilla activity, in part due to beefed up Union military action against guerrillas and in part due to the U.S. policy of taking a life for a life, is gradually declining in much of the border lands.
Meanwhile, further to the West and northward, American (Northern) Baptists are expanding their presence. Rev. G. J. Johnson, future Western Secretary of the American Baptist Publication Society, offers a snapshot of his own story within that of the story of western settlements both helped and hindered by military activity during the Civil War years.
I reached Sioux City, Iowa, October 29, 1864. Brethren who knew more of the west than I did, seemed to shudder at the bravado with which I commenced my stage journey from central Iowa for the frontier at Sioux City, about two hundred miles distant. My inquiries at Sioux City concerning the region towards the setting sun, disclosed the fact that a few Baptists were known to be located at Yankton and Vermillion, and that Rev. Albert Gore was on a claim, at Brule Creek, six or seven miles north of Elk Point. He had preached occasionally at Sioux City. I do not think it was known at Sioux City that Rev. L. P. Judson was in the Territory of Dakota. How soon I became acquainted with Brother Gore I do not now remember. Probably not until Brother Judson left Dakota, which was on January 24, 1865. As he passed through the city he called on me, and reported the situation. I think that he had entered the territory with what was known as the New York Colony. He may have been largely instrumental in starting that movement. He certainly gave much of his time and labor to its interests. Some of the Baptists at Yankton must have known of him, but his own statements, and later inquiries made on the ground, coincide in showing that his evangelistic and missionary efforts are to be placed at a minimum. He left Dakota convinced that his colony was, for the time, a failure. The tension and drain of the civil war made its plans inopportune.
As Mr. Gore’s commission dated from February, 1865, and my endorsement was given to the application, it is possible that he had reported the movements of Mr. Judson, and the possibility of his departure. During the first half of the time that he held his commission, I heard but little concerning him or his work. I was then too busy with our church building enterprise at Sioux City, and with my Iowa explorations, to go spying into a brother’s work, especially as a region in Iowa sixtv miles east and west, and reaching from the Minnesota line south to Council Bluffs, was the “vicinity” named in my commission. In September, 1865, Mr. Gore supplied my pulpit while I attended the Western Iowa association at Jefferson. As this required 320 miles travel with a pony, he came and went during my absence.
On Saturday, November 18, Rev. E. T. Hiscox, D. D., of New York and Rev. C. A. Bateman, then of Missouri, came to Sioux City. On Monday morning I drove to Elk Point and Brule Creek, taking both these brethren with me. The object of Dr. Hiscox’s visit was a personal inspection of the home mission stations along what was then the border of the east side of the Rocky Mountains. Brother Gore’s field was then the ultima thule, as mine had been earlier, and was later. I had already met Brother Gore at various times, and had sufficient knowledge of his work to have saved that long journey of nearly sixty miles, through a very sparsely settled country. I declined the responsibility of such a report, and insisted upon personal inspection by Dr. Hiscox. Of his interview with Brother Gore, and its results, I know nothing. I do know that while his commission made Yankton the center of his operations, he spent most of his time on his claim at Brule Creek, forty miles distant, and that he made few appointments for Sabbath services far or near.
Yet a broader view than this is due to Brother Gore and his work. The same conditions which made Brother Judson’s movements futile, were still operative. In 1864, the only portions of the territory which were settled, were limited by the valley of the Missouri and in the region of Pembina. The Missouri valley settlements were stretched out one hundred miles westward, along the river. The civil war and the mountain gold fever had reduced the population of Sioux City from two thousand in 1859 to about eight hundred in 1864. The grasshopper raid of 1864 had compelled the temporary abandonment of a considerable proportion of homesteads in Dakota. The Indian scare, while it sent some away, saved that region for the time from utter ruin. It was the government expenditures, rather than the bullets of the soldiers, that protected the settlements. The vain marching and countermarching of the troops made them in some respects a laughing stock. But those who knew laughed for another reason. Still it is true that the troops kept the people there, and kept the Indians away. Under such conditions missionary work was possible only through the support of the Home Mission Society. The settlers had no money to help. Money was gathered only by those who speculated in government supplies, and was lavishly expended by them, but they never made good church deacons, and pastors could not depend on them for advice. No one dared to say that he and his family would report at roll call, after another trial at cropping the newly broken prairies. Brother Gore’s latest connection with Baptist work in Dakota was really ended in December, 1865. His family had gone east, I think, the year before. He came to Sioux City and remained at our house until January 14,1866, when he preached the sermon at the dedication of the first house of worship built by the First Baptist church in Sioux City. A day or two later he left us, going southward.
Thus, while lives are destroyed in the South in the great war over slavery, the seeds of new hope are planted on cold prairie soil in a harsh climate far from the killing fields of war.
Sources: Howard Mann, “True Tales of the Tenth Kansas Infantry
Sorrowful Revenge by Firing Squad,” Civil War St. Louis (link); Thomas Miles Snanafeltpp, The Baptist History of South Dakota, South Dakota Baptist Convention, 1899, pp. 88-91 (link)
