By LEE HILL KAVANAUGH
Source: kansascity.com
LEXINGTON, Mo. | The first cannon boomed at 2:06 p.m. Sunday.
Six thousand spectators huddled under umbrellas and ponchos. There were grandparents and grandkids, veterans in wheelchairs and mothers carrying infants. People showed up in hiking boots, and a few wore sandals.
Everyone here was waiting to see the Johnny Rebs whup the Yankees. This was the 150th remembrance of Lexington’s Battle of the Hemp Bales, where Confederates used the hemp as a shield before they overtook the Federalists.
Rain had soaked Charlie Owen, but that didn’t stop the Higginsville man from speed-dialing his girlfriend in Iowa. Each volley of cannon fire had him nearly jumping up and down like a schoolboy with glee.
“Listen! That’s the cannons … the same one I had. Now do you understand why I like to do it?”
He held the phone up to the sky as Confederate troops lit eight cannons once more. Men gave fist pumps to the Yankees crouched in a 50-foot ditch.
For the commemoration, Lexington was full of Bushwhackers and Federalists in slouch hats and kepis. There were horses, muskets, cannons and lots of wool jackets and muddy boots, most hand-stitched. Women in long dresses clutched parasols and lifted hoops to avoid a mud splatter.
Radka Sherman, 46, who is deaf, gave her husband, Pete Sherman, 51, a thumbs-up as she felt each boom. “It made her laugh because she could ‘hear’ the cannons, too,” he said. “We loved this.”
And when at last the Union troops waved the white rag, leading the troops to surrender was a Leawood woman, although most people probably mistook her for a man.
Sharon Johnson, 54, was playing a high-pitched, tinny fife, her music soaring above the crowd noise and muskets and patter of rain. Part of the 7th and 30th Consolidated Volunteers, The Irish Brigade, she took up the instrument last year. She takes fife lessons from a teacher in Lawrence. Her talent lets her re-enact history with her husband and sleep in the same tent.
“It’s kind of unusual for a husband and wife to come out and be two guys,” she said, and laughed. “We have a lot of women re-enact, but you can’t sleep in the same tent if they’re a soldier. This way I can.”
Women playing the part of men have to respect the 10-foot rule: no makeup, no earrings, and people 10 feet away shouldn’t be able to tell they’re women, she said.
A living historian, Darral Clancy, 52, of Lexington, who — except for his red hair — bears an eerie resemblance to Bloody Bill Anderson — an infamous Missouri pro-Confederate figure — sauntered by with his grandson in tow. His slouch hat was set at a jaunty angle with an ostrich plume rising skyward.
“I’m really not Bloody Bill. I’m just a Missouri bushwhacker,” and he opened his shirt to show the stash of pistols at the ready. “The rifles of 1861 were probably louder than what we heard today. And in the 1961 re-enactments they actually pointed their weapons at the soldiers instead of the air. And they clanged their sabers harder.
“Yeah, this is the safer generation. But this was still thrilling, I thought.”
His grandson, Gage Ralston, 8, launched himself prone and started “shooting” at re-enactors walking by.
“Don’t shoot the civilians, Gage! … My grandson loves history, and this is the way to see it.”
By 5 p.m. most of the civilians and the fighters had left, but the muddy roads stalled out more than a few cars. Tow truck drivers pulled cars out and an army of volunteers from the Wentworth Military Academy pushed dozens out of the muck.
Lafayette County Sheriff Kerrick Alumbaugh, 47, rounded up stragglers, making sure everyone could drive out of the cornfield goo.
“Everybody I met who came was smiling. I never saw one person who wasn’t excited about being here. … But parking was like turning a battleship in a mud puddle,” he said and shrugged. “We had a complete community effort this weekend, though.
“And it was impressive.”
150 YEARS AGO: Federal garrison surrenders after fierce stand
LEXINGTON — Large bales of hemp, one of the top cash crops of Missouri’s slaveholding region, were used to protect the final assault by Missouri State Guard troops on Federal trenches that had been under fire for two days.
After a fierce stand, the federal garrison of 3,500 surrendered to the Guard, the independent, 12,000-or-more strong anti-Union army of the state government elected in 1860. It was the largest capture of an enemy force by either side to that point in the war.
The surrender culminated 10 days of efforts by Maj. Gen. Sterling Price, commander of the Guard, to seize the Missouri River town. Federal efforts to reinforce the garrison had stalled because of weather and ineffective commanders, who were trying to organize relief even as the commander, Col. James Mulligan, was ordering his troops to give up.
Overnight, northeast Missouri men from the First Division under Brig. Gen. Thomas Harris prepared the bales by soaking them in river water. Covering fire and “the continued advance of the hempen breastworks, which were as efficient as the cotton bales at New Orleans, quickly attracted the attention and excited the alarm of the enemy, who made many daring attempts to drive us back,” Price wrote in his battle report to Gov. Claiborne Fox Jackson. “They were, however, repulsed in every instance by the unflinching courage and fixed determination of our men.”
Mulligan, whose men had been without water for three days and who was nearly out of ammunition, then surrendered about 2 p.m. The Federals lost 39 dead and 120 wounded during the 10-day siege, and the Guard losses were listed at 25 killed and 72 wounded by Price.
A “private letter” from one of the Home Guard soldiers, printed in the St. Louis Democrat and reprinted in the Columbia Missouri Statesman, described conditions inside the Federal trenches.
“Late on Wednesday it was announced that the water had given out, and the men were warned not to eat salt provisions for fear of provoking thirst,” the soldier, signed only P., reported. “Add to all this, the fact that there were near 2,000 horses inside the fortifications, and many hundreds of which had been shot in the early part of the fight and could not be removed and were putrefying in the sun, till the stench became insupportable, and you can form some idea of the horrors with which we were surrounded.”
Along with the prisoners, the Guard took seven artillery pieces, arms for 3,000 infantry, 750 horses, and large quantities of food and military stores.
Price also recovered $900,000 that Union forces had seized from the bank at Lexington.
Price paroled the Union garrison but not before Jackson made a speech to the Federals, telling them they had no business being in Missouri “and that we had better go home and mind our own business. All of which we listened to with such patience as to become a man who could not help it,” a paroled soldier wrote in an unsigned letter to the Chicago Post reprinted in the St. Louis Daily Missouri Republican.
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