General Order No. 11 (1863)
11 is the title of a Union Army directive issued during the American Civil War on August 25, 1863, forcing the abandonment of rural areas in four counties in western Missouri.
11 was issued four days after the August 21 Lawrence Massacre, a retaliatory killing of men and boys led by Confederate bushwhacker leader William Quantrill.
Ewing's decree ordered the expulsion of all residents from these counties except for those living within one mile of the town limits of Independence, Hickman Mills, Pleasant Hill, and Harrisonville.
All persons living in Jackson, Cass, and Bates counties, Missouri, and in that part of Vernon included in this district, except those living within one mile of the limits of Independence, Hickman's Mills, Pleasant Hill, and Harrisonville, and except those in that part of Kaw Township, Jackson County, north of Brush Creek and west of Big Blue, are hereby ordered to remove from their present places of residence within fifteen days from the date hereof.
10 from these headquarters will be at once vigorously executed by officers commanding in the parts of the district and at the station not subject to the operations of paragraph 1 of this order, and especially the towns of Independence, Westport and Kansas City.
11 was not only intended to retard pro-Southern depredations, but also limit pro-Union vigilante activity, which threatened to spiral out of control, given the immense anger sweeping Kansas following Quantrill's Raid.
11 was partially intended to punish Missourians with pro-rebel sympathies, however many residents of the four counties named in Ewing's orders were pro-Union or neutralist in sentiment.
Historian Christopher Philips writes, "The resulting population displacement and destruction of property (lest it fall into rebel hands) prompted the nickname "Burnt District," as an apt description of the region.
Although Federal troops ultimately burned most of the outlying farms and houses, they were unable to prevent Confederates from initially acquiring vast amounts of food and other useful material from abandoned dwellings.
Ewing's order had the opposite military effect from what he intended: instead of eliminating the guerrillas, it gave them immediate and practically unlimited access to supplies.
11, but rather to strengthened border defenses and a better organized Home Guard, plus a guerrilla focus on operations in northern and central Missouri in preparation for General Sterling Price's 1864 invasion.
"[1] Bingham, who was in Kansas City at the time, described the events: It is well-known that men were shot down in the very act of obeying the order, and their wagons and effects seized by their murderers.
Large trains of wagons, extending over the prairies for miles in length, and moving Kansasward, were freighted with every description of household furniture and wearing apparel belonging to the exiled inhabitants.
Dense columns of smoke arising in every direction marked the conflagrations of dwellings, many of the evidences of which are yet to be seen in the remains of seared and blackened chimneys, standing as melancholy monuments of a ruthless military despotism which spared neither age, sex, character, nor condition.
They crowded by hundreds upon the banks of the Missouri River, and were indebted to the charity of benevolent steamboat conductors for transportation to places of safety where friendly aid could be extended to them without danger to those who ventured to contribute it.
[11]Bingham insisted that the real culprits behind most of the depredations committed in western Missouri and eastern Kansas were not the pro-Confederate bushwhackers, but rather pro-Union Jayhawkers and "Red Legs," whom he accused of operating under the protection of General Ewing himself.
[1] However, Albert E. Castel refutes Bingham's assertions, demonstrating in his publications that Ewing made conspicuous efforts to rein in the Jayhawkers, and to stop the violence on both sides.
11 at least partly in a desperate attempt to stop a planned Unionist raid on Missouri intended to exact revenge for the Lawrence massacre, to be led by Kansas Senator Jim Lane himself (see above).
[15] This more recent scholarship reviews Ohio newspaper accounts of the 1880 campaign, and indicates Ewing, running as a Democrat, faced significant third-party challenges, and was trying to oust the Republicans during a time of economic prosperity—always a difficult political task, at best.
