Eleanora and her daughters graciously invited me into their home where I was able to show them all of the information I had found and invited me to come speak at their event. Present at the event was Jim Fisher, a correspondent of the Kansas City Star newspaper, who interviewed me about my research. The article he wrote appeared on the front page of the Sunday edition of the Star....
Man
seeks glory for black Civil War soldiers killed in Missouri
By Jim Fisher, Knight Ridder
newspapers
November 26, 1999 12:00 AM
BUTLER, Mo. -- Chris Tabor has a
dream.
Someday -- perhaps in the
not-too-distant future -- what will be akin to an archaeological dig will take
place 8 miles southwest of here, and human remains will turn up. Those bones,
137 years old, will belong to the first black combat soldiers killed in the
Civil War.
As dreams go, Tabor's is huge. The
public perception, cemented by the hit movie "Glory," is that black
troops saw their first combat and suffered their first casualties in mid-July
1863 in the storming of Fort Wagner near Charleston, S.C.
Actually, Tabor said, the official
record shows that the first black troops killed -- Cpl. Joseph Talbot, and
Pvts. Samuel Davis, Thomas Lane, Marion Barber, Allen Rhodes and Henry Gash --
died nine months earlier, on Oct. 29, 1862. They were killed in the fight at
what was called Island Mound or Toothman's farm along the old Fort Scott road
in Missouri's Bates County.
The story is riveting. Enough so
that 150 people piled into the civic auditorium at the Butler City Hall one
recent Sunday to hear it, ignoring a gloriously warm autumn day and not
bothering with the Kansas City Chiefs' whomping of the San Diego Chargers.
There were church services and a big
dinner, and even re-enactors of the ninth and 10th Horse Cavalry Association of
Leavenworth and Kansas City. The Rev. Larry Coleman, pastor of the Brooks
Chapel A.M.E. Church, which along with the Mount Zion Methodist Church
sponsored the event, was adamant
"This is something that has to
be told."
It is a story basically unfamiliar
in western Missouri, said Tabor, probably for several reasons Vestiges of the
Civil War still linger; the engagement was relatively small, being a bloody
skirmish rather than a full-fledged battle; and the fact that the black
contribution to the Union and the 180,000 blacks who wore blue had been largely
forgotten until the mid-1950s, when Dudley Cornish, then a professor of history
at Pittsburg State University, wrote a seminal work called "The Sable
Arm."
"One old black man came up to
me and said, 'Why couldn't this have been in my schoolbooks?' " Tabor
said. "It touches something in people."
Tabor is white and a former combat
Marine who served in Operation Desert Storm and Somalia. He was discharged
after 10 years of service when he injured his knees on his 82nd parachute jump.
He has a degree in geography and is finishing a graduate degree at the University
of Missouri-Kansas City.
Tabor said there was a strange
duality in Missouri about what happened here in the early days of the Civil
War, which were particularly vicious along the Missouri-Kansas border.
"Go over to Jefferson City, and
right there in the state Capitol is a diorama of the Island Mound fight,"
said Tabor. "It explains the whole thing," but few people in Butler
know about it.
The story of Island Mound is
straightforward, said Tabor, a native of Scranton, Pa.
In October 1862 about 200 black recruits,
almost all of them escaped slaves from Missouri and Arkansas, were training at
Fort Lincoln, a ramshackle post west of Fulton, Kan. President Abraham Lincoln
had not yet authorized black troop levies, but that meant nothing to Kansas
Sen. Jim Lane. He welcomed any man willing to fight and kill
"secesh," a common term used for secessionists.
On Oct. 26, reinforced by other
black troops from Fort Leavenworth, what eventually would become the 1st Kansas
Colored Volunteer Infantry -- about 240 enlisted men, 10 white officers, and
six white scouts -- tramped eastward into Bates County to "clean out a
bunch of bushwhackers" in the vicinity of the Marais de Cygnes river.
Oddly enough, the Union recruits
wore gray uniforms. Most carried surplus Austrian muskets.
Once at the farm of Enoch Toothman,
the troops used the heavy fence rails to throw up a bastion they dubbed
"Fort Africa."
On Oct. 28 there were brief contacts
between the guerrillas and the troops. On the 29th the real fight started when
a foraging party was sent outside the Union position.
Soon the rebels had set the
surrounding prairie on fire. Running fights broke out, and a group of black
troops soon was engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the mounted bushwhackers
near the prominent mounds just south of the Toothman farm.
At that point a large number of the
1st Kansas came running and fired volleys into the enemy, thus driving them
into another volley of fire from a blocking force.
The Confederates skedaddled.
Bill Turman, one of the rebel commanders,
reportedly complained a few days later that the black soldiers "fought
like tigers and the white officers had got them so trained that no one would
surrender."
"Not that it would have
mattered," said Tabor. "This was like most fights between black
troops and rebels. It was fought 'under the black flag,' meaning that no
quarter was given on either side. There were no prisoners."
Tabor said two other Union soldiers
died in the fight, Capt. A.G. Crew and Pvt. John Six-Killer, a Cherokee. Eleven
other Union soldiers were wounded. Casualties on the other side probably will
remain unknown, said Tabor, since irregular Confederate forces in Missouri left
almost no records.
"I think the bodies may still
be out there," said Tabor, referring to the black troops and Six-Killer.
The officer's body was returned and might have been buried in Lawrence.
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