Review - "Union Guerrillas of Civil War Kansas: Jayhawkers and Red Legs" by Thomas & Matthews

[Union Guerrillas of Civil War Kansas: Jayhawkers and Red Legs by Paul A. Thomas & Matt M. Matthews (Arcadia Publishing and The History Press, 2025). Softcover, photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography. Pages main/total:131/160. ISBN:978-1-4671-5808-4. $24.99]

Between the implementation of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and the end of the Civil War, the borderland between Missouri and Kansas was transformed into a landscape of violence that all too often crossed accepted boundaries. The irregular warfare that that extended conflict between proslavery and antislavery forces spawned possessed a nature and intensity that few other bitterly contested regions rivaled, and perhaps none equaled.

Literature coverage of the most infamous episodes and crimes of the Civil War period in eastern Kansas and western Missouri still focuses most closely on the actions and individuals involved with the pro-Confederate side of the irregular war, but Union guerrillas operating out of Kansas and cutting their own paths of murder, arson, and plunder could be just as ruthless as their Missouri counterparts. As continues to be the case with those studying the Missouri guerrillas, gaps in the available source material and persistent myths passed down through generations plague those writers who want to find the truth behind Kansas's guerrillas. Freshly wading into this heavily disputatious historiographical ground are Paul A. Thomas and Matt M. Matthews, the authors of Union Guerrillas of Civil War Kansas: Jayhawkers and Red Legs.

With the "Bleeding Kansas" period already the subject of an expansive modern library of scholarly work, Thomas and Matthews's contextualization of the 1850s Border War that created the Kansas Jayhawker is understandably brief. For the uninitiated, they trace the historical origins of the term 'jayhawking,' which was for decades prior a fairly non-specific word used to describe acts of thievery. The terms Kansas "Jayhawker" and "Red Legs" are defined and differentiated, the latter being a subset group of the former and which came into use after the start of the Civil War. Heavily associated with looting and arson that could be indiscriminate in nature and not strongly averse to committing outright murder, Jayhawkers and Red Legs at various times drew censure from all sides, although participants themselves along with many of their home front backers seem to have proudly accepted those labels. It is the distinct purpose of the authors to avoid playing the heroes versus villains game that has plagued the Border War historiography, focusing instead on portraying these men "in a way that fairly highlights the diverse and often complex reasons that they did what they did" (pg. 18).

Thomas and Matthews frame their largely biographical study around a representative sample of six major leaders: James H. Lane, James Montgomery, Charles R. "Doc" Jennison, George H. Hoyt, Marshall L. Cleveland, and William S. Tough. Of the half-dozen, Lane and Montgomery are the two most towering figures. Content found in their chapters, which offer fine summaries of how the authors interpret their backgrounds, character, and Civil War-era activities, will be familiar to those who have read any of the multiple book-length biographies of each that have been published in recent times. Though he still lacks a full biographical treatment of his own (Stephen Starr's 1974 combined unit history and leader study Jennison's Jayhawkers remains the classic source), Jennison's level of notoriety in the areas of deadly violence and marauding was top-tier. While household names in the region at the time, the rest are fairly obscure today. Hoyt, a lawyer who insinuated himself into John Brown's legal defense, was close to Jennison and was the individual most closely associated with the Kansas Red Legs. As revealed in the book, Cleveland was little more than a criminal freebooter (earning the moniker "Phantom Horseman of the Prairie"), using the Civil War as a means for stealing horses and other forms of property. Tough was another Jayhawker who gained enough wartime notoriety to be given a nickname (the "Paladin of the Kansas Prairie") but remains little known among today's Civil War students.

A number of common threads course through the pages of all six biographical chapters. All of the half-dozen jayhawking figures featured in the study were ostensibly antislavery in disposition. Each was situated somewhere on a spectrum between the ideological true believer (ex. Montgomery and Hoyt) and the most cynical brand of 'practical' abolitionist (ex. Cleveland and Tough). Jennison's abolitionist credentials are in dispute, and the authors note that his own wife denied that he marched to the abolitionist tune. Although the chapter devoted to James Montgomery duly recounts those of his actions that would be considered war crimes, it also generously describes him as the only truly "righteous" man in the bunch.

Although freeing Missouri slaves, regardless of slaveholder loyalties, was a major objective of Jayhawker raids, it was also the case that all the men that Thomas and Matthews profile in their book were involved in very serious episodes of arson and property crimes, the latter even to the extent of robbing banks. Personal motivations ranged among inflicting 'righteous' punishment on proslavery persons to making the war pay for itself to mere cynical personal gain, with the last far too often being primary. With Missourians of all political stripes commonly deemed to be inveterate enemies, many Kansans considered cross-border plunder and robbery justified, and many Jayhawkers used Civil War conflict to amass significant wealth for themselves and their closest associates.

To varying degrees, all of these men also played a role in the worst of all war crimes, the killing of prisoners and civilians. None of the six shied away from deadly violence, and, reading the book, one gains the strong sense that psychological and emotional instability was not uncommon. In recounting specific events, the authors do address conflicting reports. One prominent example involves allegations that emerged from the sacking of Osceola in September 1861. Many secondary sources in print and on the web today maintain that nine prisoners were executed, but Thomas and Matthews have determined that the best evidence points toward period sources mistakenly conflating what happened at Osceola with prisoner killings that did occur days earlier at Morristown.

The book also makes clear that Kansas Jayhawkers and Red Legs proved capable of moving back and forth between the irregular and conventional spheres of warfare, with some of the profiled individuals effectively leading both types of units at some time during their Civil War careers. That crossover led to frequent clashes between them and their military superiors who took a dim view of Jayhawker breaches in military discipline and behavior toward enemy civilians. Nevertheless, as the book shows, arrested Jayhawkers and Red Legs who possessed valuable knowledge and experience often escaped punishment by convincing their accusers of their unique usefulness as scouts and gatherers of intelligence.

It is also unsurprisingly the case that politics was keenly involved in Kansas's notoriously factional relations between prominent Jayhawkers and high-level politicians as well as within the Jayhawker leadership. Results from such political maneuvering often proved complicated, even contradictory. For example, the authors make clear that they could find no compelling evidence to support the common view that Lane and Jennison were friends. Instead, they determine the pair to have been "bitter enemies" (pg. 40). Yet the authors also reveal elsewhere in the book that Lane co-sponsored, with Kansas's other U.S. senator, a petition that strongly urged President Lincoln to appoint Jennison a brigadier general at the very moment the war's most infamous Jayhawker was suffering in official disgrace.

Union Guerrillas of Civil War Kansas makes a hefty contribution to our understanding of those Civil War Kansas leaders who were directly involved in the irregular conflict fought on both sides of the Kansas-Missouri border. Sweeping away simplistic portrayals and partisan mythologizing, Paul Thomas and Matt Matthews's collection of Kansas Jayhawker leadership biographies reveals, using the best available evidence and reasoned conjecture, not only who those men were as individuals but how each was situated, relative to each other, within common themes associated with Jayhawker motivations, actions, and justifications of those actions. In that way, readers gain vital insights into an ideological conflict that attracted and produced, as the authors maintain, "both good and bad men who did good and bad things" (pg. 18).