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Four. Kansas’s Men in Blue
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72 four v Kansas’s Men in Blue In a letter to his brother on April 22, 1862, George Packard complained that Kansas troops had few opportunities to fight. Instead, he wrote, “We have to march around from one place to another to quell riots, enforce law, and catch jayhawkers, while at heart we are all jayhawkers.”1 Packard’s complaint captures the frustration many soldiers felt—having joined the military to suppress the rebellion , Kansans were far from the front and often engaged in law enforcement and antibushwhacker raids. To men eager for action and adventure, these tasks scarcely seemed different from everyday life on the frontier. While little regular action took place within the state itself, Kansas troops were dispatched along the state’s borders. Occasionally sent north to Nebraska, they were more often occupied combating guerrilla activity along the border with Missouri. In addition, Kansas troops were sent on significant expeditions into Indian Territory to the south. Overall, Kansas’s nineteen regiments and four batteries served both near and far from home. To the south, these soldiers served in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee. They fought under Ulysses S. Grant in the Vicksburg campaign and under William Rosecrans at Chickamauga. Kansas’s troops also were dispatched to the West: participating in the New Mexico expedition, serving in the mountains near Denver, providing escort duty for trains and railroad workers, protecting telegraph lines, building forts such as Fort Halleck in Dakota Territory, and, of course, fighting American Indian tribes resistant to continued American westward movement. Ultimately, Kansas furnished 20,097 men for the Union. Although this number may seem paltry when compared to states like New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, each of which furnished more than 300,000 men for the United States, Kansas had a small population in 1860. According to that year’s census, the state had 107,206 inhabitants, of whom 58,806 were white males; of these, 32,921 were of military age (between fifteen and forty-nine years old). As such, the ability of the state to produce more than twenty thousand men to serve is remarkable in and of itself. But the sacrifice these Kansans made to preserve the Union is equally noteworthy. Kansas’s Men in Blue 73 Kansas had the highest mortality rate (deaths in action and from wounds) of any state in the Union. The general ratio for all states was an average of 35.10 deaths per thousand men, but Kansas had a mortality rate of 61.01. The state with the second-highest mortality rate was Massachusetts, with a rate of 47.76. Overall, Kansas suffered 8,498 casualties. Of these, 1,000 men died through combat : 796 were killed in battle while 204 later perished from the wounds they sustained. However, while war is always deadly, in this era disease commonly claimed more lives than did battle. Chaplain Hugh Fisher of the Fifth Kansas Regiment, for instance, wrote to the governor that there were “not 20 men among us who have not been sick at sometime during our stay” in Arkansas, and that to remain in the area would “disable and destroy us without gaining a victory for our armies in our country’s cause.”2 Indeed, disease felled more than double the number of men killed in combat, taking 2,106 of Kansas’s men. In addition, almost another 2,000 men had to be discharged because disability rendered them unfit for duty. Although an individual’s risk of death depended largely on the vagaries of war, there was one general exception: soldiers well understood that African Americans fighting in the South were at greater risk because they would likely be killed rather than held as prisoners of war. Indeed, when assessing the combat deaths of Kansas troops, this proves true for soldiers in the First Kansas Colored Infantry, which had significantly higher deaths than other Kansas troops. For instance, 4 of its officers were killed, along with 156 enlisted men. The regiment with the second-highest number of deaths was the First Kansas Infantry, which lost 11 of its officers and 86 of its enlisted men. Overall, the highest deaths from disease came from the Fifth Kansas Cavalry, which, having served in Arkansas for more than two years, lost 219 men. Finally, the regiment with the greatest number of desertions was the First Kansas Infantry, with 238 deserters. This rate of desertion is comprehensible when one considers that the First Infantry...