From These Honored Dead: Historical Archaeology of the American Civil War

3. Massacre and Battle at Centralia, Missouri, September 27, 1864: Historical and Archaeological Perspectives

3 massacreandBattleatCentralia,missouri,september27,1864 Historical and Archaeological Perspectives Thomas D. Thiessen, Steven J. Dasovich, and Douglas D. Scott During the morning of September 27, 1864, the sleepy little hamlet and railroad stop of Centralia, Missouri, was visited by a band of pro-Confederacy guerrillas led by William T. Anderson, one of the most notorious partisan leaders in Civil War guerrilla warfare history. That visit erupted into violence and mayhem and led to the deaths of several civilians and approximately 150 Union soldiers in a massacre and battle that placed Centralia among the more famous Civil War atrocities (figure 3.1). The violence rendered during these two events that day earned Anderson the lasting sobriquet of “Bloody Bill” (Castel and Goodrich 1998: 96). As a state, Missouri has an incredible Civil War history, ranking third in the nation in scenes of conflict from that war (Dyer 1994: 582). This is not surprising for a state that experienced prolonged and bitter internecine conflict prior to and throughout the Civil War. Apart from several set-piece battles involving substantial numbers of conventional troops on both sides, most Missouri battlefields were small-scale encounters between bands of pro-South guerrillas and Federal troops and state militia forces, typically numbering a few dozen to a few hundred men on each side. Rarely did guerrilla encounters involve irregular forces numbering in the hundreds. The September 27, 1864, battle near Centralia constituted one of the war’s relatively large-scale guerrilla actions in Missouri, involving an irregular force of perhaps 450 partisans against an outnumbered and newly organized Union force of about 150 men. The outcome of this one-sided, unequal contest was disaster for the Union force, which was almost annihilated. It resulted in slaughter on a scale comparable to William Quantrill’s famous 1863 raid on Lawrence, Kansas, when about 180 men and boys, mostly civilians, perished, and the fighting at Baxter Springs, Kansas, when Quantrill’s band virtually wiped out the 100-man escort detail of a Union general. Much has been written about the events of that day at Centralia, but few writers Massacre and Battle at Centralia, Missouri, September 27, 1864 43 Figure 3.1. Centralia, Missouri, area showing the battle site on Young’s Creek. Map by Thomas D. Thiessen. The aerial photograph from the USGS National Map Viewer is in the public domain. agree on the details of what happened except from a very broad perspective. Many eyewitnesses, and particularly participants, seem to have been reluctant to relate what they saw, at least until years later when the passage of time had mellowed their personal perspective and possibly faded their memory. Most of what is known of that day derives from contemporary newspaper articles and the memories of a few eyewitnesses and participants—as well as people who later met and knew eyewit- Thomas D. Thiessen, Steven J. Dasovich, and Douglas D. Scott 44 nesses and participants—who shared their recollections beginning almost immediately afterward through at least 65 years that followed. Few eyewitness accounts of that day agree in detail, many contradict one another, and some are of dubious veracity. Such disagreement in and among Centralia’s historical source material is difficult to resolve without some additional filter or means to rigorously test the sources’ veracity. The filter applied here is a well-tested tool—historic battlefield archaeology, a unique science that shares a common goal with history, that of understanding the past. Summary of the Massacre and the Battle To distinguish events in Centralia itself from those during the afternoon outside the town, the guerrilla actions in town that morning are referred to as the “massacre” in thefollowingdiscussion,whilethecontestbetweentheguerrillasandMaj.Johnston’s command southeast of Centralia during the afternoon is called the “battle.” Major sources of information used by all serious Centralia researchers are the newspaper articles that reported what happened that day. These articles appeared in various local and regional newspapers beginning the day after the battle and continued to appear intermittently until at least October 14, 1864. Thereafter, reminiscent articles appearedfromtimetotimeinmanynewspapers(particularlyin Missouri)beginning as early as 1877 and continuing until at least 1929, when the last purported eyewitness account was published. These articles, which number in the dozens, are highly variable in content. More than 100 accounts, as well as numerous secondary works, were assembled by Thomas Thiessen and colleagues (2008). During the afternoon or evening of Monday, September 26, 1864, an unusually...