I consider the book a valuable addition to my collection dealing with Civil War on the western Missouri border. It strikes me as a pretty even-handed treatment of the topic. The book presented research findings that helped me better understand certain aspects of the Border War. For example, I had been assuming that Osceola was a fairly substantial town, of about the same size as Lawrence. Benedict presents census information indicating Osceola was much smaller. This is an example of the facts presented by Benedict which helps one put the events on the border into better perspective. However, my main reaction to the book was confusion over why Benedict chose to present certain matters in the way that he did and disappointment that he did not pursue certain lines of inquiry.
On the inside cover of the book, Benedict presents a quote by Chaplain H. H. Moore indicating the total war waged on Missouri was in response to the previous incursions of Missourians. This is not backed up at all by the facts and analysis presented in the book. It leaves me wondering why that particular quote was highlighted in the manner it was.
Benedict provides a definition of the term “jayhawkers” as soldiers serving with Kansas units and does not provide any background on the term, which is a bit surprising given the rich history of the term and its prominent use in the book’s title. It is my understanding the “jayhawkers” term was relatively obscure until the opening months of the war, when the term came to be more widely known and defined in part by the particular manner of war waged by Lane, Jennison, etc. Benedict declines to describe the role of Lane is giving the term its peculiar meaning. Benedict also missed a chance to describe the alleged role of Lane in coining the term (if the Bondi autobiography is to be believed).
Lane’s pre-war activities are described as being a military leader of the Free-State forces, while arguably a more comprehensive description would cover his role as a militant agitator seeking to further his political career in the turmoil he helped to stir up. At a minimum, some discussion of this angle would help the reader draw his own conclusions on the extent to which such objectives also influenced his war-time activities.
I was hoping the Benedict book would provide some further insights into themes developed in Castel’s article on the jayhawking raids of 1861-1862. Castel opined that the poverty resulting from the great drought in Kansas fueled some of the thievery and plundering associated with the jayhawkers. While Benedict mentions the drought, he provides few clues as to the extent to which poverty was a motivation among the rank and file of Lane’s brigade.
While Benedict at least opens the door for personal profit as a Lane motivator, he tends to dismiss allegations that Lane participated in the plundering of Osceola, citing a lack of evidence. Benedict appears to have missed or ignored the letter presented in Robinson’s The Kansas Conflict that documented the allegation, as well as the statements made in Spring’s Prelude (which was reportedly based on extensive first hand accounts).
Only to a limited extent does the book present the plundering ways of Lane’s brigade in the context of the more widespread jayhawking that characterized the early months of the war, and it does not discuss Lane’s influence (or lack thereof) in the more widespread theft and plundering. A case could be made that Lane was the head of a political movement that championed jayhawking, starting in the territorial days, and that for at least a time portrayed even an outright criminal like Marshall Cleveland as a champion of the Union (specifically, by Anthony in his Leavenworth Conservative). Had Governor Robinson prevailed over Lane and kept him out of a military role, and/or had Lane declined to wage total war on the civilian population of western Missouri as he did, would the horrors of the Border War been reduced or at least delayed, or had the die already cast by the activities of Missourians that were alluded to in the opening quote by Moore? While I believe Benedicts’s book advances the scholarship on the Border War, I find the book falls short of providing much insight into these basic issues in which Lane figured so prominently.