MISSOURI HISTORY AS ILLUSTRATED BY
GEORGE C. BINGHAM.
George Caleb Bingham, in painting the picture by which
he is best known throughout the southwest, "General Order
No. 11, or Civil War on the Border," recorded the final outcome of a series of events of almost unparalleled, and certainly
of an unsurpassed violence in the history of the Civil War.
For in the border counties of Missouri the war was
fought with a peculiar bitterness growing out of a long train
of events, with long cherished resentments and a deep sense
of injury on both sides. The strife following upon the Kansas-Nebraska act and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise
was the fruitful source of this bitterness. It is difficult to
determine at whose door lay the greater blame; each side
soon claimed that its fiercest measures were largely retaliatory. Early in the war, Lane and Jennison, of Kansas,
made predatory raids into Missouri during which their
soldiers robbed and looted unrebuked. In September of '61,
Colonel Jennison, 7th Kansas calvary, temporarily stationed
at Kansas City, made a raid upon Independence. His "red-
legs" (so called from the color of their riding ,boots, worn
outside their trousers) plundered and despoiled the citizens,
taking back into Kansas with them much blooded stock and
wagon loads of household furniture. This species of raiding
by Jennison's men was kept up at intervals, loyal men suffering as well as the secessionists.
In addition to the civil strife, there existed what President Lincoln characterized as a "pestilent factional squabble '' which he greatly deplored, and which he more than once
mentions as troubling him out of measure. The two factions of the Union party were almost as venomously opposed
to each other as they were to the Secessionists. Men of the
