Centralia Massacre And Centralia Battle

Paraphrasing someone: if we don’t read history, we are doomed to repeat it.

Hmmm, I worked for a few brief years as  a NYPD cop. The other day a jury in Brooklyn acquitted one of three men who had gunned down a young cop in the precinct where I had once worked, and where I had once shot one of two gunmen.

The jury’s decision enraged me, and I came face to face with an inner racism within me. I blamed ‘Black Brooklyn’ for always freeing its worst criminals…and then I said I was happy that they came back to their neighborhoods where most crime is ‘black on black,’ a sort of what comes around goes around thing.

I write this rather than simply focus on the civil war massacre for a reason, to show the link between past and present. Meaning this: after I reacted so angrily, I delved into civil war history to take my mind off things.

I came across the massacre inadvertantly. It appalled me. Bloody Bill Anderson with his rebel guerillas, including Jesse James, stopped a train in Missouri and robbed the passengers. But they removed 24 unarmed Union Soldiers on furlough. Keeping one as a prisoner, they executed the other 23. Real heroes, real men, these guerillas.

Shortly afterwards a Union force of 155 soldiers, most untrained and equipped with single shot muskets tracked them down. Their officer seemed to lack good sense and experience; he had the Union dismount and form a skirmish line. They managed to fire one volley at the attacking 80+ guerillas on horse back, killing a handful.

What ensued could rightly be called a massacre as well, but the Union force apparantly challenged these guerillas to stand and fight, and the guerillas accepted and then rode them down. Armed with revolvers and superior speed and mobility, they proceeded to kill 123 of the 155 soldiers. In this they can’t be denigrated as cowards at all because it was a stand up affair at the start. Still, they did track the fleeing soldiers for ten miles, killing the unarmed troops as they fled.

I forgive Brooklyn to a degree, but not much, because the aftermath of the battle showed how Jesse James went on to establish his famous gang that was successful until 1882. What angered me is that the local populace, all white mind you, supported and hid the gang from outside authorities all that time.

The governor was even forbidden to use state money as a reward; he had to talk the railroad into putting up a large enough reward to entice a gang member into killing James. One did, a man named Ford who shot James in the back of the head while James straightened a picture on the wall.

The public was outraged and called Ford a coward. Me, I salute him. I’d like to mention that most shootings in the west did not take place man to man on Main Street. They took place as ambushes, usually with shotguns. Smart tactics.

So, it is not race that dictates a community’s action. It seems no matter the color, culture, or creed that like-minded people will protect their own. This leads back to the adage of not knowing history we then are doomed to repeat it. Brooklyn probably doesn’t know how Boone County protected Jesse James, but they instinctively protected one of their own in a police shooting. They are repeating history.

I, though, have no excuse. I have now read a similar history, where Boone residents acted like latter day Brooklyn residents, and I can change me: I can be angry at Brooklyn for moral reasons, the same ones I have against Boone residents back then. It frees me from the cancer of racism that I had spark in me, an ugly thing, but it showed its head nevertheless. This is a case where reading and knowing past history has helped me out as an individual.

I would like to take you off on a tangent, one regarding superior firepower:

We have seen how 80+ men on horseback, armed with probably more than one revolver…quite possibly four or five, destroy a larger, less well armed force. 

 Let’s settle on two revolvers apiece. The opposing force, 155 men, armed with single shot muskets fired 155 rounds at the fast, elusive horsemen, killing three. This left about 80 horsemen, with two revolvers, ten rounds total, to fire 800 bullets in less than a minute at the 155 soldiers, cutting them down and making them flee unarmed. The horse men either had more revolvers immediately ready or they rearmed within a minute or so. Again, 800 more rounds to help the rout. Then another 800…the arithmetic is horrifying.

Three decades before this, twenty or so Texas Rangers had the first opportunity to demonstrate how repeating arms could ensure victory over single shot arms and lances and knives.

They faced 80+ Native Americans who ordinarily would have expected the Rangers to hightail and flee, with them in pursuit. When they saw the Rangers get down and form a skirmish line they were shocked. But happy because slaughter would surely follow; and so they attacked.

The Rangers fired their one volley from their muskets. But unlike the Union troops years later, the Rangers all had two revolvers at least on their persons. They leapt back on horseback and charged into the mass of warriors, firing their revolvers and cutting the warriors to pieces, who either died there and then or fled for sanctuary.

So was the legend of the Colt revolver born. Yet it appears many did not learn from history and thus missed the benefits of repeating arms over single shot arms. The Union ceratinly did. Had they adopted repeating arms early enough, and history shows they had the opportunity, or even adopted breech loading muskets, they could have ended the war sooner.

Maybe.

This is why I love studying this war. Some say if the Union had ended the war victorious and early, like in 1862 or ‘63 that the South would have not had enough time to expend either their anger or learn hardcore total defeat. And a guerilla war on a massive scale would have ensued.

So, who knows who’s right. We can merely speculate and debate.