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Re: Jo Shelby
In Response To: Jo Shelby ()

In reading Daniel O'Flaherty's "General Jo Shelby; undefeated rebel", I keep running across old friends. In the chapter on "Wilson's Creek: the face of war", I find this sentence:

"Private Joseph A Mudd, of Company B of the Jackson Guards, of Clark's Division, says ..."

The National Park Service's Soldiers and Sailors database only has one entry for Joseph Aloysius Mudd. It lists him as an "AA Surg" in General and Staff Officers. That undoubtedly refers to his service in a hospital in Richmond. His nursing staff consisted of slaves and freedmen who formed the nucleus of the Confederate States Colored Troops. Mudd also wrote "With Porter in North Missouri, based in his service with the 1st Northeast Missouri Cavalry (Porter's Partisan Rangers).

Col Joseph C Porter is only mentioned briefly in the book on Jo Shelby during his service with Marmaduke at Hartville. It does not even mention that Porter was mortally wounded in that battle. But what really drew my attention was the end of the last chapter that I read this afternoon:

"... and Jo Shelby, his arm still suppurating, was pondering bitterly the news from Missouri.

"Quantrill, who seems to have detached himself at will from whatever command he was assigned to, now rode a thousand miles to Lawrence, Kansas, where he sacked and burned the town and murdered sixty unoffending civilians. The Federals, under a General Ewing in that district, issued their famous Order No 11, which ordered that rebel sympathizers and their families in the whole Western Missouri River Valley be dispossessed and driven out of the area."

Jo Shelby's family were forced out of Waverly. Shelby wrote to Frank Blair and Benjamin Gratz, his boyhood friends (who were now leaders of Union forces in Missouri). They helped his wife and children return to Shelby, Blair, and Gratz' boyhood home in Lexington, Kentucky.

The ironies of the Kansas/Missouri and Ozark Civil War are so amazing, and so well illustrated by these passages. It seems that Shelby's biographer shares the opinion of Porter's biographer (Mudd) concerning Quantrill. Both writers state that their subjects (Shelby and Porter) had a poor opinion of Quantrill. That is especially remarkable in that Porter was dead long before the raid on Lawrence.

Since O'Flaherty must have known that the death toll at Lawrence was close to 150, he must have concluded that only sixty of the victims were "unoffending", and that the other ninety were either military men, or strong advocates of The War.

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Jo Shelby
Re: Jo Shelby