General Order No. 11 (1863)

Four days after Quantrill’s Raid on Lawrence, Union Brigadier General Thomas Ewing Jr. issued General Order No. 11 from District of the Border headquarters at Kansas City on August 25, 1863. The order required all persons living in Jackson, Cass, and Bates Counties, Missouri — and the part of Vernon County within the district — to leave their homes within fifteen days, exempting only those living within one mile of Independence, Hickman’s Mills, Pleasant Hill, and Harrisonville, and those in the part of Kaw Township, Jackson County, north of Brush Creek and west of the Big Blue.¹ The intent was to deny Missouri’s bushwhackers the rural civilian base that supplied and sheltered them.² In execution, troops and irregulars looted and burned farmsteads across the evacuated counties, producing the region long known as the “Burnt District.”² George Caleb Bingham — a Unionist who opposed the order — memorialized it in a painting known as Order No. 11 or Martial Law, which exists in two versions and became a permanent visual emblem of contested Civil War memory in Missouri.³⁴

Summary

On August 25, 1863 — four days after Quantrill’s Raid on Lawrence — Brigadier General Thomas Ewing Jr., Union commander of the District of the Border, issued General Order No. 11 from headquarters at Kansas City. The order was promulgated over Ewing’s name by Adjutant-General H. Hannahs.¹

The operative provisions, per the order’s own text:¹

All persons living in Jackson, Cass, and Bates counties, Missouri, and in that part of Vernon included in this district were ordered to remove from their present places of residence within fifteen days — that is, by September 9, 1863
Exceptions for those living within one mile of the limits of Independence, Hickman’s Mills, Pleasant Hill, and Harrisonville, and for those in that part of Kaw Township, Jackson County, north of Brush Creek and west of the Big Blue — the carve-out that covered the Kansas City and Westport settlements
Those who established loyalty to the satisfaction of the nearest military station commander received a certificate, which permitted them to remove to any military station in the district, or to any part of Kansas except the counties of the eastern border. “All others shall remove out of the district.”
All grain and hay in the evacuated territory within reach of military stations after September 9 was to be taken to those stations; grain and hay not convenient to a station would be destroyed
Paragraph 3 directed vigorous execution of the earlier General Order No. 10 in the parts of the district not covered by paragraph 1, “and especially the towns of Independence, Westport and Kansas City”

What the order text does and does not say. The order commanded the removal of persons and the seizure or destruction of grain and hay. It did not, in its text, command the burning of dwellings.¹ The destruction of houses and barns across the counties happened in execution — Civil War on the Western Border records that federal troops seized the crops “while soldiers and bandits plundered properties and set farmsteads ablaze,” creating the “Burnt District.”² Wikipedia’s account states that Ewing “ordered his troops not to engage in looting or other depredations, but he was ultimately unable to control them.”⁵ Bingham himself charged that the despoilers “perpetrated their crimes in the garb both of soldiers and citizens.”⁶

How many people were displaced

Sources give materially different figures, and this page records the disagreement rather than resolving it:

Civil War on the Western Border (Kansas City Public Library), in Deborah Keating’s entry on Ewing, states the order forced 20,000 Missourians from their homes.⁷ Wikipedia’s article gives the same order of magnitude.⁵
Civil War on the Western Border, in Jeremy Neely’s entry on the order itself, declines a figure and says only that “thousands were displaced.”²
The Kansas Historical Society describes Ewing as “exiling several thousand people” from their homes in western Missouri.⁸

No source consulted for this page establishes a death toll for the evacuation itself. Claims that the elderly and infants died at substantial rates on the roads are widely repeated in popular accounts but were not substantiated in any of the institutional or scholarly sources checked here.

The frequently repeated claim that approximately 80 percent of affected residents had no involvement with the bushwhackers could not be traced to any source consulted.

Assessment

Contemporary and later assessments diverge sharply, and the divergence is itself part of the record:

Albert Castel called it “the most drastic and repressive military measure directed against civilians by the Union Army during the Civil War.”⁶⁹
Thomas Goodrich called it “perhaps the harshest act of the U.S. government against its own people in American history.”⁶¹⁰
Jeremy Neely, writing for Civil War on the Western Border, records that guerrilla violence did decline in the affected areas, “though critics argued the order harmed innocent civilians and Unionists,” and that contemporary Union supporters believed the order necessary to bring some measure of peace to the District.²

Background

Thomas Ewing Jr.

Thomas Ewing Jr. (born August 7, 1829, Lancaster, Ohio; died January 21, 1896, New York City, after being struck by a street car) was a politically prominent Union officer who took command of the District of the Border — Kansas and Missouri north of the 38th parallel — in June 1863.⁷

Ewing was foster-brother to William Tecumseh Sherman, who had been raised in the Ewing household and educated alongside him at Lancaster Academy; Sherman later married Ewing’s sister Ellen, making the two men brothers-in-law as well.⁷ Ewing and Sherman had been business partners in territorial Kansas before the war.⁸

James H. Lane, the Kansas U.S. Senator, was a persistent political antagonist. After the Lawrence raid Lane threatened to lead independent Kansas raids into Missouri; Ewing dispatched cavalry to stop him.⁵ Neely’s account places Order No. 11 as a response both to the guerrilla threat and to the danger of Kansan reprisal raids.² Lane later lobbied against Ewing’s postwar political ambitions.⁷

The bushwhacker problem

Union forces had struggled through 1862 and 1863 against Quantrill’s band and other Missouri bushwhacker units — small mounted groups that struck Union patrols, outposts, and Kansas settlements and then dispersed back into the rural farm country.¹¹

What made them militarily durable was a rural civilian support base: Civil War on the Western Border records that Union forces struggled against pro-Confederate bushwhackers “sustained by Southern sympathizers who provided supplies and shelter.”² Depopulating that countryside was the order’s stated instrument.²

Neely’s account places the escalation in a sequence: the collapse of the Kansas City building used as a women’s prison, which killed five women including relatives of William “Bloody Bill” Anderson, and then Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence on August 21, 1863.²

The order in execution

The fifteen days and after

By September 9 — the deadline — the order had been carried out, as one federal officer put it, “to the letter.”⁶ A Kansas soldier’s contemporaneous account, reproduced by the Cass County Public Library, described the result:⁶

The border counties of Missouri have almost as desolate an appearance as before the soil was trod by the white man. Not a man, woman or child is to be seen in the country to which Order No. 11 applies… Chimneys mark the spot where once stood costly farm houses, cattle and hogs are fast destroying large fields of corn, prairie fires are burning up miles of good fencing every day or two, and turn which way you will, everything denotes a state of utter desolation and ruin.

The surviving chimneys were locally nicknamed “Jennison’s tombstones,” and the depopulated country became known as the “Burnt District.”⁵²

Under the order’s own terms, those certified loyal could relocate to a military station in the district or into Kansas — but not into Kansas’s eastern border counties.¹ Everyone else had to leave the district entirely.¹

Aftermath and return

Neely records that most displaced families relocated temporarily elsewhere in Missouri; some returned after 1865, though many never did.² The Wornall Majors House Museums date the lifting of the order to January 1864.¹² — a scholarly or primary confirmation of the rescission date is still wanted.

Affected families

The Wornall family — John Wornall’s country house, now the Wornall House Museum, stands south of Brush Creek and so lay outside the Kaw Township exception described in the order’s text.¹ The museum’s own history states that the Wornall family purchased a home in downtown Kansas City — at 910 Locust Street — to escape the violence, and returned to the Wornall House after the order was lifted, finding it looted but physically unharmed.¹² (The house was later commandeered as a field hospital during the Battle of Westport on October 23, 1864, first by Confederate and then by Union forces.¹²)
The McCoy family — descendants of John Calvin McCoy, founder of Westport. The specific effect of Order No. 11 on the McCoy family could not be documented in any source consulted.
The James family — Frank and Jesse James lived on the family farm near Centerville (present-day Kearney) in Clay County, which lay outside the four counties named in the order.¹³ In May 1863, before the order, federal militia searching for Frank raided the James-Samuel farm, repeatedly hanged Frank’s stepfather Dr. Reuben Samuel from a tree to make him reveal the guerrillas’ location, and beat the fifteen-year-old Jesse; Samuel survived with lasting brain injury.¹⁴ Civil War on the Western Border does not carry the incident, but does record that later sympathy for Frank James among Jackson County residents “who had suffered the abuse of the jayhawkers and the infamous General Order No. 11, made conviction of Frank James problematic.”¹³
The Younger family — Cole Younger was born January 15, 1844 on the Younger family farm in Jackson County, Missouri; his father, a Union supporter, “was shot dead by a Union soldier from Kansas” during the war.¹⁵ Cole rode with Quantrill at Lawrence on August 21, 1863 and at Baxter Springs on October 6, 1863, and after the war joined Frank and Jesse James in a series of robberies.¹⁶ Claims that the Younger family was specifically displaced by Order No. 11, and the frequently cited 1862 date for the father’s death, could not be confirmed in any source consulted.

The broader causal link often drawn between Order No. 11 and the postwar James-Younger Gang is asserted at book length by T.J. Stiles, who reads Jesse James’s career as a continuation of the guerrilla war by other means.¹⁷

The Bingham painting

George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879), Missouri’s most prominent 19th-century painter and a Unionist, opposed the order and told Ewing directly: “If you persist in executing that order, I will make you infamous with pen and brush as far as I am able.”⁶

Bingham justified the finished painting in his own words:⁶

The lawless instruments of tyranny, who despoiled my neighbors, burned their dwellings, and drove them forth to wander as impoverished exiles upon the earth, perpetrated their crimes in the garb both of soldiers and citizens, and literally adhering to truth, I have thus presented them upon my canvas… this stupendous crime… must go down to posterity, teaching the important lesson that Constitutions and Laws, however carefully framed, are no guarantees of the rights of a people when their public affairs are committed to the hands of unworthy and treacherous agents.

Two versions exist:

The Cincinnati Art Museum holds Order No. 11 (alternate title Martial Law), oil on canvas, 1865-1868, 56 3/16 x 79 7/16 in., The Edwin and Virginia Irwin Memorial, accession 1958.515.³
The State Historical Society of Missouri holds Gen. Order No. 11 (1869/70), on permanent exhibition in the William Guitar Little Missouri Gallery of Art in Columbia, described by the Society as depicting “the execution of a military directive evacuating civilians in four Missouri border counties.”⁴

The painting was deployed against Ewing politically. Wikipedia’s account states that Bingham’s son used the painting in the campaign when Ewing ran for Governor of Ohio — a race Ewing lost narrowly to Republican Charles Foster in 1879 — and cautions that the loss cannot be attributed to the painting alone.⁵ Bingham died in 1879.

Long-term significance

Counterinsurgency and the ethics of collective punishment

Order No. 11 is a standing case in the literature on Civil War hard war and the treatment of civilians. Charles R. Mink treated it as a case of forced evacuation in Military Affairs;¹⁸ Mark E. Neely Jr. takes up where the Civil War’s restraints on destruction held and where they failed.¹⁹ The order’s status as a collective measure — falling on a whole rural population rather than on identified combatants — is what makes it contested. on the specific claim, common in popular accounts, that the order is taught in modern counterinsurgency doctrine.

Western Missouri’s long memory

The Burnt District counties took years to repopulate. Neely records that some displaced families returned after 1865 and many never did.² The order’s memory shaped later politics in the region; the specific claim that western Missouri’s post-war Democratic voting alignment can be traced to resentment over Order No. 11 is a causal attribution this page does not have a source for.

Ewing’s career

Ewing served as an Ohio congressman from 1877 to 1881, ran unsuccessfully for Governor of Ohio in 1879, and never attained his ambition of a U.S. Senate seat; James H. Lane had lobbied against his postwar ambitions.⁷⁵ He died in New York City on January 21, 1896.⁷

Sites in KC and the region associated with the order

The Burnt District — Jackson, Cass, Bates, and part of Vernon counties; the territory depopulated by the order¹²
John Wornall House — the family sheltered in downtown Kansas City during the order and returned to a looted but standing house¹²
Ewing’s District of the Border headquarters, Kansas City — the order is dated from “Headquarters District of the Border, Kansas City”;¹ the specific building is not identified in any source consulted
Independence, Hickman’s Mills, Pleasant Hill, Harrisonville — the four towns whose one-mile perimeters the order exempted; the modern place names preserve the historical locations¹
George Caleb Bingham’s painting — Cincinnati Art Museum (1865-1868 version) and State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia (1869/70 version)³⁴
Cass County Public Library — maintains a public Cass County History panel on the order, including its full text and contemporary accounts⁶

Cultural memory

The order is kept in active local memory through county library and historical-society programming, of which the Cass County Public Library’s history panel — carrying the order’s full text, a Kansas soldier’s contemporaneous account, and Bingham’s own statements — is a working example.⁶ The Bingham painting, in both its versions, gives the order a permanent visual identity in Missouri civic consciousness.³⁴

Modern historiography ranges across three positions:

Necessary military measure — the position Neely records among contemporary Union supporters, who believed the order was needed to bring some measure of peace to the District²
Excessive and brutal — the position of Castel and Goodrich, in the terms quoted above⁶⁹¹⁰
Both at once — Neely’s own summary registers both outcomes: guerrilla violence declined in the affected areas, and critics argued the order harmed innocent civilians and Unionists alike²

Sources

Civil War on the Western Border (Kansas City Public Library) — “Text of General Order No. 11.” — asserts: verbatim order text; dated Headquarters District of the Border, Kansas City, August 25, 1863; issued “By order of Brigadier General Ewing,” signed H. Hannahs, Adjt.-Gen’l; paragraph 1 names Jackson, Cass, and Bates counties “and in that part of Vernon included in this district,” fifteen days to remove, exceptions within one mile of Independence, Hickman’s Mills, Pleasant Hill and Harrisonville and for Kaw Township north of Brush Creek and west of Big Blue; loyalty certificates permit removal to any military station in the district or any part of Kansas “except the counties of the eastern border of the State,” “All others shall remove out of the district”; paragraph 2 covers grain and hay after September 9 (removed to stations or destroyed); paragraph 3 invokes General Order No. 10 “especially the towns of Independence, Westport and Kansas City”; paragraph 4 revokes paragraph 3 of Order No. 10 for those who bore arms since August 20, 1863. Order text contains no directive to burn dwellings. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰
Civil War on the Western Border (Kansas City Public Library) — Jeremy Neely, “General Order No. 11.” — asserts: issued August 25, 1863 by Brig. Gen. Thomas Ewing Jr., commander of the District of the Border; affected Jackson, Cass, Bates and northern Vernon counties; “thousands were displaced” (no numeric figure given); stated purpose was suppressing guerrilla warfare against bushwhackers sustained by sympathizers providing supplies and shelter; escalation followed the Kansas City women’s-prison collapse that killed five women including relatives of “Bloody Bill” Anderson and Quantrill’s Lawrence raid; fifteen days to vacate or relocate to Kansas or within one mile of Union posts; federal troops seized grain and hay while soldiers and bandits plundered and burned farmsteads, creating the “Burnt District” across Cass and Bates counties; most displaced families relocated temporarily within Missouri, some returned after 1865, many never did; guerrilla violence declined in affected areas though critics argued the order harmed innocent civilians and Unionists; Bingham’s Martial Law / Order No. 11 damaged Ewing’s postwar political career. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵
Cincinnati Art Museum — “Order No. 11” (object record) — asserts: George Caleb Bingham (American, 1811-1879); title Order No. 11, alternate title Martial Law; dated 1865-1868; oil on canvas; 56 3/16 x 79 7/16 in. (142.7 x 201.7 cm); credit line The Edwin and Virginia Irwin Memorial; accession number 1958.515; not currently on display. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
State Historical Society of Missouri — “Works by George Caleb Bingham (on permanent exhibition).” — asserts: SHSMO holds Gen. Order No. 11 (1869/70) on permanent exhibition in the William Guitar Little Missouri Gallery of Art, 605 Elm Street, Columbia, Missouri; describes the painting as depicting the execution of a military directive evacuating civilians in four Missouri border counties, issued in 1863 during Missouri-Kansas guerrilla warfare. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Wikipedia — “General Order No. 11 (1863).” — [Class A fallback] asserts: August 25, 1863, issued by Thomas Ewing Jr.; counties and exception zones as in the order text; Ewing ordered his troops not to loot or commit depredations but was unable to control them; most troops were Kansas volunteers who regarded the inhabitants as rebels; James Lane threatened independent raids and Ewing dispatched cavalry to stop him; Bingham accused pro-Union Red Legs of major depredations; surviving chimneys nicknamed “Jennison’s tombstones” and the region called the “Burnt District”; Bingham’s son used the painting in the campaign when Ewing ran for Governor of Ohio, which Ewing lost narrowly, with the article cautioning against attributing the loss to the painting alone. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Cass County Public Library — “General Order No. 11” (Cass County History, panel 13) — asserts: reproduces the full order text; a federal officer’s statement that the order had been carried out “to the letter” by September 9; the Kansas soldier’s contemporaneous account of desolation, chimneys, destroyed corn and burning fencing, quoted in full on this page; Thomas Goodrich’s characterization (“perhaps the harshest act of the U.S. government against its own people in American history,” from Black Flag); Albert Castel’s characterization (“the most drastic and repressive military measure directed against civilians by the Union Army during the Civil War,” cited to Missouri Historical Review, July 1963, vol. LVII no. 4, pp. 357-368); Bingham’s threat to Ewing (“If you persist in executing that order, I will make you infamous with pen and brush as far as I am able”); Bingham’s full written justification of the painting; captions the reproduced painting “Martial Law, Order No. 11” by George C. Bingham, 1868, courtesy of the State Historical Society of Missouri. (Note: this host returns 403 to plain fetches; retrieved via Firecrawl 2026-08-05.) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰
Civil War on the Western Border (Kansas City Public Library) — Deborah Keating, “Ewing, Thomas, Jr.” — asserts: born August 7, 1829 in Lancaster, Ohio; died January 21, 1896 in New York City after being struck by a street car; foster-brother to William Tecumseh Sherman, educated with him at Lancaster Academy; took command of the District of the Border (Kansas and Missouri north of the 38th parallel) in June 1863; Order No. 11 forced 20,000 Missourians from their homes; James H. Lane was a strong political enemy who lobbied against Ewing’s postwar ambitions; Ohio congressman 1877-1881; never attained a U.S. Senate seat. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Kansas Historical Society — “Thomas Ewing, Jr., Papers” (Microfilm MS 569-MS 570) — asserts: Ewing “issued his famous Order No. 11, which cleared the Missouri border” of the population supporting Confederate guerrillas, exiling several thousand people; the collection comprises business and private correspondence, Leavenworth legal materials and account books, with Civil War materials described as scanty and not representative of his military career; documents his prewar business partnership with Sherman in territorial Kansas. ↩ ↩²
Albert Castel — “Order No. 11 and the Civil War on the Border,” Missouri Historical Review 57, no. 4 (July 1963): 357-368. [Class B — journal article] Reprinted in Castel, Winning and Losing in the Civil War (University of South Carolina Press, 1996). Digitized issues of the Missouri Historical Review are hosted by the State Historical Society of Missouri at (CONTENTdm browse interface; the July 1963 issue was not directly retrievable in this pass). — asserts: the standard scholarly treatment of the order’s origins, execution and regional effect; source of the “most drastic and repressive military measure” characterization quoted above via ⁶. ↩ ↩²
Thomas Goodrich — Black Flag: Guerrilla Warfare on the Western Border, 1861-1865 (Indiana University Press, 1995). ISBN 978-0-253-32599-0; paperback ISBN 978-0-253-21303-7. [Class B — book] — asserts: narrative history of the border guerrilla war; source of the “perhaps the harshest act of the U.S. government against its own people in American history” characterization quoted above via ⁶. ↩ ↩²
Albert Castel — William Clarke Quantrill: His Life and Times (1962). ISBN 978-0-8119-0145-1. Internet Archive [Class B — book] — asserts: the standard biography of Quantrill and the operational history of his band, including its dependence on rural western Missouri support. ↩
Wornall Majors House Museums — “The Wornalls and the Civil War.” — asserts: the August 1863 order required residents of four Missouri counties to vacate within fifteen days, creating the “Burnt District” where families were displaced, homes burned and property looted; the Wornall family purchased a home in downtown Kansas City (910 Locust Street) and returned to the Wornall House after the order was removed, finding it looted but physically unharmed; dates the lifting of the order to January 1864; the Wornall House was commandeered as a Confederate and then Union field hospital during the Battle of Westport on October 23, 1864. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Civil War on the Western Border (Kansas City Public Library) — Deborah Keating, “James, Frank and Jesse.” — asserts: the James family lived on the James Farm near Centerville (present-day Kearney) in Clay County, Missouri; Frank joined Quantrill’s band and rode in the August 1863 Lawrence raid; both brothers rode with “Bloody Bill” Anderson in 1864 and took part in the Centralia massacre; sympathy for Frank and Jesse among Jackson County residents “who had suffered the abuse of the jayhawkers and the infamous General Order No. 11, made conviction of Frank James problematic.” Entry carries no account of the Reuben Samuel hanging. ↩ ↩²
Wikipedia — “Reuben Samuel” / “Jesse James.” — [Class A fallback; the incident is not carried by the Civil War on the Western Border entry at ¹³] asserts: in May 1863 federal militia visiting the family’s Clay County farm repeatedly hanged Reuben Samuel from a tree to extract information on Frank James’s whereabouts and beat the fifteen-year-old Jesse; Samuel survived with lasting brain injury, entered a St. Joseph mental hospital in 1901 at age 73 and died there in 1908. ↩
Wikipedia — “Cole Younger.” — [Class A fallback] asserts: Cole Younger born January 15, 1844 on the Younger family farm in Jackson County, Missouri; his father was a Union supporter who “was shot dead by a Union soldier from Kansas.” The article carries no account of the family home being burned, of the family being displaced, and draws no connection between the Younger family and General Order No. 11. ↩
Missouri Valley Special Collections, Kansas City Public Library — “Thomas Coleman (Cole) Younger” (portrait record, via Civil War on the Western Border) — asserts: Cole Younger was a member of Quantrill’s guerrillas at the raid on Lawrence, Kansas, August 21, 1863, and at the Baxter Springs massacre, October 6, 1863; after the war he joined Frank and Jesse James in several robberies; arrested after the Northfield, Minnesota bank robbery of September 7, 1876 and imprisoned at Stillwater; fully pardoned 1903; died 1916 at Lee’s Summit, Missouri. This is a short archival image description, not a full biography. ↩
T.J. Stiles — Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002; Vintage paperback ISBN 978-0-375-70558-8). Open Library work record [Class B — book] — asserts: reads Jesse James’s outlaw career as a political continuation of the Missouri guerrilla war, and supplies the family-level account of the border conflict’s effect on the James household. ↩
Charles R. Mink — “General Orders, No. 11: The Forced Evacuation of Civilians During the Civil War,” Military Affairs 34, no. 4 (December 1970): 132-136. DOI 10.2307/1986782 (JSTOR stable 1986782). [Class B — journal article; verified via Crossref, 2026-08-05] — asserts: treats Order No. 11 as a case study in forced evacuation of civilians under Union military authority. (Previously listed on this page as a book; it is a journal article.) ↩
Mark E. Neely Jr. — The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction (Harvard University Press, 2007). ISBN 978-0-674-02658-2. Internet Archive [Class B — book] — asserts: analysis of where restraints on destruction held and failed in Civil War practice, including treatment of civilians in the trans-Mississippi theater. ↩