It was also provided in this document, that if the majority voted for it and rejected slavery, then the slaves already held in Kansas, should remain such for life.
At the same election, a separate vote was ordered for legislative and executive officers under the constitution. The hope of the pro slavery party was that the Free State men, who were in a great majority in the territory, would refuse to vote at all, because of their indignation at the tricky manner of the submission, and that therefore, the Democratic Congress would admit Kansas as a slave State completely officered by pro slavery men.
“It was an artful trap,” says one historian of those stirring times, “and the Free State Convention was caught in it by resolving that the party would wholly refrain from voting at that election. Thereupon Mr. Ewing bolted the convention, but only eight out of over a hundred delegates followed him. The bolters nominated a full State ticket and tickets in every county for all the offices, canvassed the Territory, and in spite of the bitterest opposition of the radical leaders and press, succeeded in bringing a large majority of the Free State party to the polls. They thus completely officered the proposed pro-slavery Government with tried and true Free State men—publicly pledged, if the State should be admitted, to immediately call another convention, form a Free State Constitution, and destroy the Lecompton Constitution and Government, root and branch. The pro-slavery leaders, finding themselves outnumbered at the polls, resorted to the most enormous and astounding frauds in the returns, and then officially proclaimed the election of the pro-slavery candidates. Thereupon Ewing went to the Territorial Legislature then in session at Lawrence, a majority of which were Free State men, and got a commission appointed to investigate and expose the election frauds. He was a member of the Board and conducted its proceedings with startling boldness and energy, resulting within a week in the discovery and seizure of the forged returns, which had been buried in a candle box under a wood pile at Lecompton on the premises of the United States Surveyor General, John Calhoun—the exposure of the forgeries—the indictment of the chief conspirators, Calhoun, McLean and others—their flight from Kansas never to return—and the abandonment by Buchanan’s administration, and his party in Congress of the Lecompton Constitution, which fell covered with execrations and infamy. This closed the long struggle to force slavery on Kansas, and the new State was thereupon admitted under a Free Constitution made by her own people.”
To pass from this struggle for freedom to the greater struggle in the wider field of the war that followed, was but a logical step to the young advocate who had devoted so much of his time to the cause that had won his heart. He first appears in that struggle as Colonel of the Eleventh Regiment of Kansas Volunteer Infantry, recruited and organized by him in the summer of 1862. He led his command in several severe engagements in Arkansas—at Cane Hill, Van Buren and Prairie Grove; and for gallant conduct in the last named battle, which was one of the fiercest of the war, was promoted to be a Brigadier-General on the 11th of March, 1863. He was soon after assigned to the command of the “District of the Border,” comprising the State of Kansas and the western portion of Missouri—a command of extreme administrative difficulty and great personal danger, which he held from June, 1863, to February, 1864, and in which he won the emphatic approval of President Lincoln and General Schofield, the Department Commander. His “Order No. 11,” issued while he held this command, directing the inhabitants of large portions of three border counties of southern Missouri to remove to the military posts or out of the border, was and still is severely criticised. It was the result of a peculiarly difficult situation, solvable in no other way.
Those counties had become the impregnable base of operations of about a thousand guerrillas, under Quantrell, the James brothers, and Yeager, who were incessantly making incursions into southern Kansas, to rob and kill the defenceless people, and who had just burned Lawrence, and in cold blood murdered nearly three hundred unarmed and unresisting citizens. After two years of strenuous effort by other Union commanders, it had proved to be impossible to protect Kansas people from these dreadful incursions, and equally impossible to run the guerillas to earth in their fastness on the Missouri side of the border. These counties had been desolated early in the war by Jennison, Hoyt and their lawless bands of Kansas “Red Legs”—burned to the subsoil, nineteen farms out of twenty having been absolutely abandoned, and the houses and fences destroyed or left rotting. The condition of this district can be imagined from the fact that when this “Order No. 11” was issued, Nevada, the county seat of Vernon County, having at least a hundred houses standing and in good order, had not a single inhabitant, and the Court House without door or window-pane, had become a shelter for hogs and cattle running wild, with its records of titles and court proceedings scattered over the floors, and covered with filth. There were not at that time a hundred families left in the entire district affected by the order, outside of the military posts. They were the friends and kinsfolk of the guerillas, who were constantly hanging about the garrisoned towns, buying arms, ammunition and provisions for the guerillas, and carrying news to them of every movement of our troops. It was impossible to kill the guerillas or drive them out of the border while these country people stayed there as their spies and purveyors. Therefore, after full conference with General Schofield, then commanding the Department of the Missouri, and now the honored head of the army, General Ewing ordered the few remaining inhabitants in these desolated districts to remove to the nearest military post, or back to the second tier of counties from the State border, and the order was subsequently ratified by President Lincoln.
In a letter published since the war, General Schofield said: “The responsibility for that order rests with President Lincoln, myself, and General Ewing, in the proportion of our respective rank and authority.” About half of the people affected by the order removed to the posts under the protection of our troops, and the remainder further back in Missouri. They moved in summer—were subjected to no physical force or hardship, and were generally glad to get out of reach of the wild storm which was about to burst on them from Kansas, in revenge for the Lawrence massacre, and which the Government had not troops enough there to quell. Within two or three months after the issuance of this order, Quantrell having lost his spies and purveyors, and finding it impossible therefore to continue the vendetta, led all his guerillas south, and the border war was thus forever ended.
General Ewing’s most distinguished service during the war was in fighting the battle of Pilot Knob on the 27th and 28th of September, 1864. The Confederate General, Sterling Price, having effected an unlooked for and unresisted crossing of the Arkansas above Little Rock, with his army of over twenty thousand men, marched on St. Louis, where General Rosecrans was in command of the Department of the Missouri, and General Ewing of the District of Southeast Missouri. All the Federal troops of the department were scattered in small detachments, with bases in earthworks or stockades in or near the chief towns of Missouri, which were the places of refuge of the Union men and neutrals from the savage warfare of the guerillas. These scattered troops could not be withdrawn from their posts without enormous sacrifice of the people and property they were protecting, and it was, moreover, impossible to assemble them at St. Louis in time and numbers sufficient to defeat Price’s large army, which was increasing rapidly by accessions of guerillas from all parts of Southern Missouri. There was but one possible means of preventing the capture of St. Louis and the vast loss of prestige and resources which would follow. That was to delay Price a few days until re-enforcements could arrive from Little Rock, by occupying and holding fast to Fort Davidson, a small hexagonal work capable of being manned by about one thousand men, situated ninety miles south of St. Louis, at the village of Pilot Knob, which was then the southern terminus of the Iron Mountain Railroad. In this little fort were stored immense amounts of ordnance, commissary and quartermasters’ supplies, which Price greatly needed, and which lay directly between him and the great city, by capturing which he expected to bring Missouri over to the Confederacy. General Rosecrans, at the urgent request of General Ewing, reluctantly consented that he should lead this forlorn hope. He reached Pilot Knob in the nick of time—but four hours ahead of Price’s advance—and with but one thousand and eighty men he held Fort Davidson against two of the three divisions of Price’s army—those of Marmaduke and Cabell—numbering about fourteen thousand men—Shelpy’s division of about seven thousand men having been sent to Ewing’s rear at Mineral Point, twenty miles north of Pilot Knob, to cut the railroad and insure the destruction or capture of his entire command. After repulsing two assaults with great loss to the enemy, General Ewing, under cover of the night, evacuated and then blew up his untenable fort, and, favored by broken ground, though pressed on flank and rear, held his force in hand, and by dogged fighting for two days and nights, brought them to a fortified camp at Rolla, a hundred miles west of Pilot Knob. Price was thus delayed for a week, and drawn so far westward from his march on St. Louis, that reinforcements reached St. Louis and the great objective of his invasion was lost. He turned west and south and was soon driven from Missouri without striking an effective blow. General Rosecrans, in a special order issued October 6, 1864, said of this brilliant episode: “With pride and pleasure the commanding General notices the gallant conduct of Brigadier-General Thomas Ewing, Jr., and his command in the defence of Pilot Knob, and in the subsequent retreat to Rolla. With scarcely one thousand effective men, they repulsed the attacks of Price’s invading army, and successfully retreated with their battery a distance of one hundred miles, in the face of a pursuing and assailing cavalry force of five times their number. General Ewing and his subordinates have deserved well of their country. Under such commanders, the Federal troops should always march to victory.”
At the conclusion of the war, General Ewing once more made his home in his native State. He was soon prominent in political affairs, giving his voice and vote to such measures as in his opinion were for the best interests of his country. He was a member of the Ohio constitutional convention of 1873-4, where his legal attainments and admirable powers of debate gave him a foremost place. As a member of the Democratic majority in the Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth Congresses, he was one of the leaders of his party in resisting and stopping the employment of Federal troops and supervisors at elections conducted under State laws, and also in the successful movement for the preservation of the Greenback currency, the remonetization of silver, and the issue of silver certificates, but for which measures of finance the currency would have been greatly contracted, to the infinite and protracted distress of the industrial and debtor classes. In 1879, he was the Democratic candidate for governor of Ohio, and made an able canvass of the State, but the Republican majority was too large to be overcome.
In 1882, that magnetic attraction that draws so many men to New York city, made General Ewing a member of the bar of the metropolis, where the enlarged opportunities of his profession have been met by a mental equipment and training equal to their most exacting requirements, and where his success has been of a marked character. To this legal ability is added a ripe scholarship, unusual grace as a speaker, and a personal magnetism that charms all with whom he comes in contact. His published speeches in Congress and on the stump have been numerous, and marked by their information, ability, liberality of thought and patriotism. Although his purely literary efforts have been less numerous, because of the active professional life that has been thrust upon him, the work he has done in that direction shows how much he might have accomplished, had his life been given to letters; for example, an address delivered at the Centennial celebration of the settlement of the Northwest territory at Marietta, Ohio, July, 16, 1889, and his address before the Kansas State Bar Association, on January 7, 1890, favoring the abolition of the requirement of unanimity, of juries in civil cases, and urging the codification of the “private law”—both of which speeches have attracted wide attention, and most favorable comment.
While General Ewing has accomplished so much, he is still in his prime, and is one of the moral forces in his profession in New York city, a strong, well-balanced and successful man. As has been said, he takes a deep interest in the affairs of the Society he did so much to create, and with him, an “Ohio man,” whether known or unknown, is always sure of a cordial welcome; while he enjoys life in his new home, his love for the State that gave him birth, and which his honored father so long served, is as deep as that of a son for a mother whose face he does not see, but whose memory is forever carried in his heart.