From the window of a moving car, the rolling terrain of western Jasper County, Missouri, has stretches of land that don’t look like much: old fence lines, overgrown fields, and the occasional weathered farmhouse. It’s simple to drive by and not notice anything odd. History, on the other hand, tends to show that this is not true.
Most well-known Civil War books don’t talk about the fight at Rader’s farm on May 18, 1863. There isn’t as much to it as there was at Gettysburg or Vicksburg. But what happened that afternoon, when about 70 guerrillas led by Confederate commander Thomas Livingston charged out of the woods at a Union foraging party, answered some of the war’s most important questions without Washington even having to say a word.
On that day, the Union detachment had members of the First Kansas Colored Infantry, which was the first Black regiment to be formed in a Northern state. Their being in southwest Missouri wasn’t a coincidence. That’s what it was, even if no one called it that at the time. A few months before, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which let Black soldiers join the Union army. In politics, the officer corps, and the press, there was still a lot of talk about whether those soldiers would actually fight and whether they could be trusted under fire. Rader’s farm, which was harsh and disorganized, made them give only part of the answer.
It was four in the afternoon when the attack happened. Twenty Black soldiers were inside the Rader farmhouse getting supplies and corn. Their muskets were stacked outside next to a wagon. It looked like the guerrillas had been waiting behind the group of hunters for hours. When Livingston’s men broke through the trees, they caught everyone by surprise. Several soldiers who were able to get their guns set up a rear guard and fired volleys at the enemy to slow them down. Later, a reporter for the Leavenworth Daily Conservative wrote that both white and black soldiers fought hard, but the black soldiers stood out in every case. It’s the kind of sentence that sounds pretty casual when read on old newsprint, but it has a lot of weight when you think about what was being debated at the time.
In some ways, what happened after the battle told us more than the battle itself. Colonel James M. Williams showed up with more troops early on May 19 and saw the bodies of at least ten Black soldiers still lying on the field. After they died, they were stabbed and hit. The house of Rader was turned into a graveyard. Williams couldn’t find the rebels because they had spread out overnight, so he burned down eleven nearby farms and Sherwood, which was the third-largest town in Jasper County at the time. It was never built again. Something strange about that is that a whole town was erased from the map, but the event itself is almost completely forgotten.
Two days after the battle, Livingston used a civilian courier to send Williams a letter. He was willing to trade the three white prisoners he had, but he wouldn’t recognize the two captured black soldiers as enemy combatants. These things were “war illegal goods,” he said. The language was direct; it could have been meant to make fun of or threaten, but it was almost certainly done on purpose. At the time, Confederate policy, which was made official just a few weeks before in the Retaliatory Act, let captured Black Union soldiers be enslaved again or killed. It’s still not clear if Livingston was using that policy or just making fun of Williams. What is clear is that that ambiguity held the fates of two men, and there is no clear ending in the history books.
Having that doubt for a moment is a good thing to do. A lot of the time, the Civil War is told as a story that is moving toward a happy ending—towards freedom, reunion, and a clear national identity. But in the spring of 1863, at Rader’s farm, nothing was really decided. In a Missouri cornfield, people were answering the questions that people in Washington were thinking about in blood and chaos. This story takes place in that space between policy and reality.
The Sherwood/Rader Farm Civil War Park takes care of the site today. There is a certain kind of quiet outside that doesn’t feel empty. The fact that a Missouri farmer’s backyard find helped bring this site back to people’s attention shows how important local history is often forgotten. A lot of the most important events in the Civil War did not happen on well-known ridgelines. They took place in places just like this.
