What can I say – except…….Thank God the Manson family couldn’t afford automatic weapons!

Jon

Tactical Response CEO James Yeager made his best case against gun control (and inadvertently, the best case for it) on Thursday by posting a video in which he promised to “start killing people” if President Obama uses executive orders to regulate guns. In the video, spotted by Raw Story, Yeager refers to Vice President Joe Biden saying his gun commission would consider both legislative options and executive action, news that the Drudge Report illustrated with photos of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. “Vice President Biden is asking the president to bypass Congress and use executive privilege — executive order to ban assault rifles and to impose stricter gun control,” Yeager says. “Fuck that! I’m telling you that if that happens, it’s going to spark a civil war, and I’ll be glad to fire the first shot.” He closed with more threats: “I’m not fucking putting up with this. I’m not letting my country be ruled by a dictator. I’m not letting anybody take my guns! If it goes one inch further, I’m going to start killing people.”

The murders perpetrated by members of Charles Manson’s “Family” were inspired in part by Manson’s prediction of Helter Skelter, an apocalyptic war he believed would arise from tension over racial relations between blacks and whites.[1]:311-2 This “chimerical vision”—as it was termed by the court that heard Manson’s appeal from his conviction for the Tate/LaBianca killings[2]—involved reference to music of The Beatles (particularly songs from the album The Beatles, also known as The White Album) and to the New Testament’s Book of Revelation.[1]:

Manson had been predicting racial war for some time before he used the term Helter Skelter.[3][4] His first use of the term was at a gathering of the Family on New Year’s Eve 1968. This took place at the Family’s base at Myers Ranch, near California’s Death Valley.[4][5]

In its final form, which was reached by mid-February 1969,[6] the scenario had Manson as not only the war’s ultimate beneficiary but its musical cause. He and the Family would create an album with songs whose messages concerning the war would be as subtle as those he had heard in songs of The Beatles.[3][7] More than merely foretell the conflict, this would trigger it; for, in instructing “the young love,”[8] America’s white youth, to join the Family, it would draw the young, white female hippies out of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury.[6][9][10] Black men, thus deprived of the white women whom the political changes of the 1960s had made sexually available to them, would be without an outlet for their frustrations and would lash out in violent crimes against whites.[10][11] A resultant murderous rampage against blacks by frightened whites would then be exploited by militant blacks to provoke an internecine war of near-extermination between racist and non-racist whites over blacks’ treatment. Then the militant blacks would arise to sneakily finish off the few whites they would know to have survived; indeed, they would kill off all non-blacks.[12][13][14]

In this holocaust, the members of the enlarged Family would have little to fear; they would wait out the war in a secret city that was underneath Death Valley that they would reach through a hole in the ground. As the only actual remaining whites upon the race war’s true conclusion, they would emerge from underground to rule the now-satisfied blacks, who, as the vision went, would be incapable of running the world; Manson “would scratch [the black man’s] fuzzy head and kick him in the butt and tell him to go pick the cotton and go be a good nigger….”[13][15]

The term Helter Skelter was from the Beatles song of that name, which involved apparent reference to the British amusement-park ride of that name and was interpreted by Manson as concerned with the war.[3] The song was on the so-called White Album (formal name, The Beatles), first heard by Manson within a month or so of its November 1968 release:[16]

General Order No. 11 is the title of a Union Army directive issued during the American Civil War on 25 August 1863, forcing the evacuation of rural areas in four counties in western Missouri. The order, issued by Union General Thomas Ewing, affected all rural residents regardless of their allegiance. Those who could prove their loyalty to the Union were permitted to stay in the affected area, but had to leave their farms and move to communities near military outposts. Those who could not do so had to vacate the area altogether.

While intended to deprive pro-Confederate guerrillas of material support from the rural countryside, the severity of the Order’s provisions and the sometimes savage nature of its enforcement alienated vast numbers of civilians, and ultimately led to conditions in which the Rebel bushwhackers actually found themselves with even greater access to supplies than before. It was repealed in January 1864, as a new General took command of Union forces in the region.

Bushwhacking was a form of guerrilla warfare common during the American Revolutionary War, American Civil War and other conflicts in which there were large areas of contested land and few governmental resources to control these tracts. This was particularly prevalent in rural areas during the Civil War where there were sharp divisions between those favoring the Union and Confederacy in the conflict. The perpetrators of the attacks were called bushwhackers.

Bushwhackers were generally part of the irregular military forces on both sides. While bushwhackers conducted a few well-organized raids in which they burned cities, most of the attacks involved ambushes of individuals or families in rural areas. In areas affected by bushwhacking the actions were particularly insidious since it amounted to a fight of neighbor against neighbor. Since the attacks were non-uniformed, the government response was complicated by trying to decide whether they were legitimate military attacks or criminal actions.

Contents [hide]
1 Union and Confederate bushwhackers
2 Partisan rangers
3 Jesse James
4 Atrocities
5 Postwar banditry
6 Popular culture
7 See also
8 References
9 External links

[edit] Union and Confederate bushwhackersThe term was widely used during the conflict, though it came to be particularly associated with the Confederate guerrillas of Missouri, where such warfare was most intense. Guerrilla warfare also wracked Kentucky, Tennessee, northern Georgia, Arkansas, and northern Virginia, among other locations. Two bands operated in California in 1864.

Pro-Union guerilla fighters in Kansas were called “jayhawkers”. They used tactics similar to the Confederate bushwhackers. A typical jayhawker action was a cross-border raid into Missouri.

In some areas, particularly the Appalachian regions of Tennessee and North Carolina, the term bushwhackers was used for Union partisans[citation needed] who attacked Confederate forces.

[edit] Partisan rangersIn most areas, irregular warfare operated as an adjunct to conventional military operations. The most famous such “partisan ranger” (to use the title adopted by the Confederate government in formally authorizing such insurgents) was Col. John Singleton Mosby, who carried out raids on Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley and northern Virginia. Partisan rangers were also authorized in Arkansas.

In Missouri, however, secessionist bushwhackers operated outside of the Confederate chain of command. On occasion, a prominent bushwhacker chieftain might receive formal Confederate rank (notably William Clarke Quantrill), or receive written orders from a Confederate general (as “Bloody Bill” Anderson did in October 1864 during a large-scale Confederate incursion into Missouri, or as when Joseph C. Porter was authorized by Gen. Sterling Price to recruit in northeast Missouri). Missouri guerrillas frequently assisted Confederate recruiters in Union-held territory. For the most part, however, Missouri’s bushwhacker squads were self-organized groups of young men, predominantly from the slave-holding counties along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, who took it upon themselves to attack Federal forces and their Unionist neighbors, both in Kansas and Missouri, the latter in response to what they considered a Federal invasion of their home state.

[edit] Jesse JamesThe guerrilla conflict in Missouri was, in many respects, a civil war within the Civil War. One of the most famous men who fought as a bushwhacker was Jesse James, who began to fight in 1864. During months of often intense combat, he only battled fellow Missourians, ranging from Missouri regiments of U.S. Volunteer troops to state militia to unarmed Unionist civilians. The single confirmed instance of his exchanging fire with Federal troops from another state occurred a month after the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, during a near-fatal encounter with Wisconsin cavalrymen. In the course of the war, his mother and sister were arrested, his stepfather tortured, and his family banished temporarily from Missouri by state militiamen— all Unionist Missourians.[1]

[edit] AtrocitiesThe conflict with Confederate bushwhackers everywhere rapidly escalated into a succession of atrocities committed by both sides. Union troops often executed or tortured suspects without trial and burned the homes of suspected guerrillas and those suspected of aiding or harboring them. Where credentials were suspect, the accused bushwhacker was often executed, as in the case of Lt. Col. Frisby McCullough after the Battle of Kirksville. Bushwhackers frequently went house to house, executing Unionist farmers.

One of the most vicious actions during the Civil War by the bushwhackers was the Lawrence Massacre. William Quantrill led a raid in August 1863 on Lawrence, Kansas, burning the town and murdering some 150 men and boys in Lawrence. The raiders justified the raid in retaliation for the Sacking of Osceola, Missouri two years earlier (in which the town was set aflame and at least nine men killed) and for the deaths of five female relatives of bushwhackers killed in the collapse of a Kansas City, Missouri jail. Following the Lawrence raid, the Union district commander, Thomas Ewing, Jr., ordered the total depopulation of all men, women, and children (both Unionists and Southern sympathizers) of three and a half Missouri counties along the Kansas border from Kansas City, Missouri south, under his infamous General Order No. 11. (The Missouri-Kansas border conflict was in many ways a continuation of Bleeding Kansas violence.) In other areas, individual families (including that of Jesse and Frank James and the grandparents and mother of future President Harry Truman) were banished from Missouri.

Next to the attack on Lawrence, the most notorious atrocity by Confederate bushwhackers was the murder of 22 unarmed Union soldiers pulled from a train in the Centralia Massacre in retaliation for the earlier execution of a number of Anderson’s own men. In an ambush of pursuing Union forces shortly thereafter, the bushwhackers killed well over 100 Federal troops. In October 1864, “Bloody Bill” Anderson was tricked into an ambush and killed by state militiamen under the command of Col. Samuel P. Cox. Anderson’s body was displayed and his head was severed.

[edit] Postwar banditryAfter the end of the war, the survivors of Anderson’s band (including the James brothers) remained together under the leadership of Archie Clement, one of Anderson’s lieutenants, and began a series of armed robberies in February 1866. This group became known as the James-Younger Gang, after the death or capture of the older outlaws (including Clement) and the addition of former bushwhacker Cole Younger and his brothers. In December 1869, Jesse James became the most famous of this group when he emerged as the prime suspect in the robbery of the Daviess County Savings Association in Gallatin, Missouri, and the murder of the cashier, John W. Sheets. During Jesse’s flight from the scene, he declared that he had killed Samuel P. Cox and had taken revenge for Anderson’s death. (Cox lived in Gallatin, and the killer apparently mistook Sheets for the former militia officer.) Throughout Jesse James’ criminal career, he often wrote to the newspapers with pride of his role as a bushwhacker, rallying the support of former Confederates and other Missourians who had been brutalized by Federal authorities during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

After the end of the war in 1865, the Mason Henry Gang continued as outlaws in Southern California with a price on their heads for the November 1864 “Copperhead Murders” of three men they believed to be Republicans, in the San Joaquin Valley. Tom McCauley, known as James or Jim Henry, was killed in a shootout with a posse from San Bernardino on September 14 of that year, in San Jacinto Canyon, in what was then San Diego County. John Mason was killed by a fellow gang member for the reward in April 1866 near Fort Tejon in Kern County.

In 1867, near Nevada, Missouri, a band of bushwhackers shot and killed Sheriff Joseph Bailey, a former Union brigadier general, who was attempting to arrest them. Among those suspected of his killing was William McWaters, who once rode with Anderson and Quantrill.

[edit] Popular cultureThe films The Outlaw Josey Wales and Ride with the Devil are both about bushwhackers.
Bushwackers appear in the side-stories of the HBO series Deadwood, set in South Dakota
The_Bushwhackers were a professional wrestling tag team that wrestled in the World Wrestling Federation.
Contents [hide]
1 Origin and provisions of the order
2 Text of General Order No. 11
3 Implementation of the order
4 Repeal and legacy of the order
5 George Bingham and Order No. 11
6 See also
7 References
8 External links

[edit] Origin and provisions of the orderOrder No. 11 was issued four days after the August 21 Lawrence Massacre, a retalitory effort led by bushwhacker leader William Quantrill. The Union Army believed Quantrill’s guerrillas drew their support from the rural population of four Missouri counties on the Kansas border, south of the Missouri River. These were: Bates, Cass, Jackson, and Vernon. Following the slaughter in Lawrence, Federal forces were determined to end this by any means necessary—no matter what the cost might be to innocent civilians. Hence, General Thomas Ewing, who had lost several lifelong friends in the raid, issued Order No. 11. Ewing’s decree ordered the expulsion of all residents from these counties except for those living within one mile of the town limits of Independence, Hickman Mills, Pleasant Hill, and Harrisonville. The area of Kansas City, Missouri north of Brush Creek and west of the Blue River, referred to as “Big Blue” in the order, was also spared.

President Abraham Lincoln approved Ewing’s order, but he cautioned that the military must take care not to permit vigilante enforcement. This warning was almost invariably ignored. Ewing had issued his order a day before he received a nearly identical directive from his superior, Major General John Schofield. Whereas Ewing’s decree at least tried to distinguish between pro-Union and pro-Confederate civilians, Schofield’s allowed no exceptions and was significantly harsher. Ewing’s order was allowed to stand, and Schofield would later describe it as “wise and just; in fact, a necessity.”[1]

[edit] Text of General Order No. 11General Order № 11.

Headquarters District of the Border,
Kansas City, August 25, 1863.

1. All persons living in Jackson, Cass, and Bates counties, Missouri, and in that part of Vernon included in this district, except those living within one mile of the limits of Independence, Hickman’s Mills, Pleasant Hill, and Harrisonville, and except those in that part of Kaw Township, Jackson County, north of Brush Creek and west of Big Blue, are hereby ordered to remove from their present places of residence within fifteen days from the date hereof.

Those who within that time establish their loyalty to the satisfaction of the commanding officer of the military station near their present place of residence will receive from him a certificate stating the fact of their loyalty, and the names of the witnesses by whom it can be shown. All who receive such certificates will be permitted to remove to any military station in this district, or to any part of the State of Kansas, except the counties of the eastern border of the State. All others shall remove out of the district. Officers commanding companies and detachments serving in the counties named will see that this paragraph is promptly obeyed.

2. All grain and hay in the field or under shelter, in the district from which inhabitants are required to remove, within reach of military stations after the 9th day of September next, will be taken to such stations and turned over to the proper officers there and report of the amount so turned over made to district headquarters, specifying the names of all loyal owners and amount of such product taken from them. All grain and hay found in such district after the 9th day of September next, not convenient to such stations, will be destroyed.

3. The provisions of General Order No. 10 from these headquarters will be at once vigorously executed by officers commanding in the parts of the district and at the station not subject to the operations of paragraph 1 of this order, and especially the towns of Independence, Westport and Kansas City.

4. Paragraph 3, General Order No. 10 is revoked as to all who have borne arms against the Government in the district since the 20th day of August, 1863.

By order of Brigadier General Ewing.

H. Hannahs, Adjt.-Gen’l.
[edit] Implementation of the orderOrder No. 11 was not only intended to retard pro-Southern depredations, but renegade pro-Union activity, as well. Ewing not only had his hands full with Confederate raiders; he equally had troubles with Unionist Jayhawkers, led by radical Kansas Senator James Lane. There was immense anger sweeping Kansas following Quantrill’s raid. Convinced that Ewing was not retaliating sufficiently against Missourians, Lane threatened to lead a Kansas force into Missouri, laying waste to the four counties named in Ewing’s decree, and more. On September 9, 1863, Lane gathered nearly a thousand Kansans at Paola, Kansas, and marched towards Westport, Missouri, with an eye towards destruction of that pro-slavery town. Ewing sent several companies of his old Eleventh Kansas Infantry (now mounted as cavalry) to stop Lane’s advance—by force, if necessary. Faced with this superior Federal force, Lane ultimately backed down.[2] Order No. 11 was partially intended to demonstrate that the Union forces intended to act forcefully against Quantrill and other bushwhackers, thus rendering vigilante actions (such as the one contemplated by Lane) unnecessary—and thereby preventing their occurrence, which Ewing was determined at all costs to do.

Ewing ordered his troops not to engage in looting or other depredations, but he was ultimately unable to control them. Most were Kansas volunteers, who regarded all Missourians as “rebels” to be punished, even though many residents of the four counties named in Ewing’s orders were pro-Union or neutralist in sentiment. Animals and farm property were stolen or destroyed; houses, barns and outbuildings were burned to the ground. Some civilians were even summarily executed—a few as old as seventy years of age.[3] Ewing’s four counties became a devastated “no man’s land,” with only charred chimneys and burnt stubble showing where homes and thriving communities had once stood, earning the sobriquet “The Burnt District.” There are very few remaining antebellum homes in this area due to the Order.

Ironically, Ewing’s order had the opposite military effect from what he intended: instead of eliminating the guerrillas, it gave them immediate and practically unlimited access to supplies. For instance, the Bushwhackers were able to help themselves to abandoned chickens, hogs and cattle, left behind when their owners were forced to flee. Smokehouses were sometimes found to contain hams and bacon, while barns often hold feed for horses.[4] Although Federal troops ultimately burned most of the outlying farms and houses, they were unable to prevent Confederates from initially acquiring vast amounts of food and other useful material from abandoned dwellings.

[edit] Repeal and legacy of the orderEwing eased his order in November, issuing General Order No. 20, which permitted the return of those who could prove their loyalty to the Union. In January 1864, command over the border counties passed to General Egbert Brown, who disapproved of Order No. 11. He almost immediately replaced it with a new directive, one that allowed anyone who would take an oath of allegiance to the Union to return and rebuild their homes.

Ewing’s controversial order had greatly disrupted the lives of thousands of civilians, most of whom were entirely innocent of any guerrilla collaboration. Furthermore, there is no evidence that Order No. 11 ever seriously hindered Confederate military operations. No raids into Kansas took place after its issuance, but historian Albert Castel credits this not to Order No. 11, but rather to strengthened border defenses and a better organized Home Guard, plus a guerrilla focus on operations in northern and central Missouri in preparation for General Sterling Price’s 1864 invasion.[4]

The infamous destruction and hatred inspired by Ewing’s Order No. 11 would persist throughout western Missouri for many decades as the affected counties slowly tried to recover.

[edit] George Bingham and Order No. 11American artist George Caleb Bingham, who was staunchly pro-Union, called Order No. 11 an “act of imbecility” and wrote letters protesting it. Bingham wrote to Gen. Ewing, “If you execute this order, I shall make you infamous with pen and brush,” and in 1868 created his famous painting reflecting the consequences of Ewing’s harsh edict (see above). Former guerrilla Frank James, a participant in the Lawrence, Kansas raid, is said to have commented: “This is a picture that talks.”[5]

Bingham, who was in Kansas City at the time, described the events:

It is well-known that men were shot down in the very act of obeying the order, and their wagons and effects seized by their murderers. Large trains of wagons, extending over the prairies for miles in length, and moving Kansasward, were freighted with every description of household furniture and wearing apparel belonging to the exiled inhabitants. Dense columns of smoke arising in every direction marked the conflagrations of dwellings, many of the evidences of which are yet to be seen in the remains of seared and blackened chimneys, standing as melancholy monuments of a ruthless military despotism which spared neither age, sex, character, nor condition. There was neither aid nor protection afforded to the banished inhabitants by the heartless authority which expelled them from their rightful possessions. They crowded by hundreds upon the banks of the Missouri River, and were indebted to the charity of benevolent steamboat conductors for transportation to places of safety where friendly aid could be extended to them without danger to those who ventured to contribute it.[6]

Bingham insisted that the real culprits behind most of the depredations committed in western Missouri and eastern Kansas were not the pro-Confederate bushwhackers, but rather pro-Union Jayhawkers and “Red Legs,” whom he accused of operating under the protection of General Ewing himself. According to Bingham, Union troops might easily have defeated the Bushwhackers if they had tried hard enough, and exercised a requisite amount of personal courage.[4] Albert Castel refutes Bingham’s assertions, however, demonstrating that Ewing made conspicuous efforts to rein in the Jayhawkers, and to stop the violence on both sides. He furthermore argues that Ewing issued Order No. 11 at least partly in a desperate attempt to stop a planned Unionist raid on Missouri intended to exact revenge for the Lawrence massacre, to be led by Kansas Senator Jim Lane himself (see above).[2][4]

Further scholarship indicates that although Bingham’s son used the painting in 1880 to attack Ewing when he ran for Governor of Ohio, it did not prove to be the deciding influence in Ewing’s narrow loss. President Rutherford Hayes, a Ewing family friend but political opponent of Ewing’s campaign, urged Ohio Republicans not to use the painting as it would show Ewing’s strong war record against the South, which was contrary to his effort to show Ewing as a weak business leader, and a repudiationist on hard money/soft money issues.[7] This more recent scholarship reviews Ohio newspaper accounts of the 1880 campaign, and indicates Ewing, running as a Democrat, faced significant third-party challenges, and was trying to oust the Republicans during a time of economic prosperity—always a difficult political task, at best.[7]