Missouri's War by Silvana R. Siddali

Author:Silvana R. Siddali [Siddali, Silvana R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Americas, United States, Civil War Period (1850-1877)
ISBN: 9780821443354
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2014-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

ELVIRA SCOTT LAMENTS THAT HER HOME IS “NO LONGER A SAFE ASYLUM”

Elvira Ascenith Weir Scott was a pro-Southern lady who lived in Miami, a town in north-central Missouri, during the Civil War. Like so many other proslavery Missourians, Elvira’s parents had originally come from Virginia, though she herself had been born in Indiana. She was educated at the Washington County Seminary in Salem, Indiana, married John P. Scott in 1844, and had two daughters, Eva and Hebe. From time to time during the war, federal soldiers came to the Scott home to ask Elvira and her seventeen-year-old daughter Eva (“Pet”) to play the piano for them. “Jno.” was a common mid-nineteenth-century abbreviation for the name “John.”

Sunday, March 9th, 1862. The past summer & fall have been passed in such a state of excitement, in such feverish anxiety, that I have had no time to record the terrible events. Many of them will live in history. The past year of ’61! What horrors it has witnessed! Sometimes we almost imagine it a frightful dream from which we will awake to the old peace & prosperity, but evidences of its fearful realities are everywhere the most painful of all. Thousands of bloody graves, disease & the sword have made the whole land to mourn. Where it will end, if God in his mercy does not interpose? We seem to be plunging deeper & deeper into the vortex. Men seem to be transformed into fiends….

There is a class of men in every country—the low & shiftless, who live from hand to mouth by fishing, robbing, roaming from place to place, a tax on the communities in which they live; Dutch & Irish laborers, who have nothing at stake. Such men in Missouri are generally Union men, who by becoming “Home Guards” can prey upon their neighbors, or jayhawk. Generally they have a malicious, envious feeling toward their neighbors who by honest industry have surrounded themselves by the comforts of life. They openly boast that they will have possession of their fine farms, & they think that the time has arrived for them to take the time to better their fortunes. Such are nine-tenths of the Union refugees. We know some of them from the east in this county,. They owned nothing, were in debt, & had lived off the community as long as they could. They left of their own free will & became Union refugees. Now they are creating sympathy by their support of the free States. Or they are jayhawking in other counties of the State….

If the maintenance of the Constitution is the object why don’t they begin at home, where it was first violated? The cause lies in the North, the effect is in the South. Let them remove the cause. If they do not intend to interfere with slavery why have Federal soldiers stolen thousands of slaves from their masters? These are now wandering in Kansas as vagabonds, stealing everything they can lay their hands upon….

April 26…. I suppose

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