EL DORADO REPUBLICAN, 1900:

‘The soldiers of today don’t know what war is’

By Dr. Sam Dicks,
ESU Historian

An editorial in the “El Dorado Republican,” and reprinted in the “Emporia Weekly Republican” of May 24, 1900, seems timely today as many Kansans again watch Ken Burns’s television series on the Civil War.

The Spanish-American War was popular on Kansas campuses and in Kansas communities. Civil War Union veterans, often through local units of the Grand Army of the Republic, championed the war and encouraged their sons, nephews, and grandsons to enlist and defend the honor of their country.

About three-fourths of the Kansas State Normal School student body had fathers, grandfathers, or other family members who had fought for the Union cause during the Civil War. KSN even led in the formation of a College Company, commanded by a KSN professor.

However, not all Civil War veterans were impressed with the Spanish-American soldiers, even though many had died of typhoid or cholera, as well as in battle. Railroads had barely touched the eastern edge of Kansas when the rebellious southerners had been defeated, and the Union saved. Kansas changed greatly between 1865 and 1900:

War and War.

When we read about the extra rations, travel pay, women nurses, government transports, Pullman cars, and the like, now furnished to discharged soldiers, it makes us huffy. It was different in 1864 and 1865. We know a private soldier who was discharged in Little Rock in September, 1864. He got on top of a stock car, with his blanket, overcoat, knap-sack and haversack, with a chunk of bacon, some hard-tack and coffee. It rained all the way over to Duvall’s Bluff. Two days later he got onto a “lighter” hitched onto a steam boat with 300 or 400 other Kansas soldiers. There was no awning over the “lighter,” no stove and no place to fry a piece of bacon or make a cup of coffee, except on the coals before the boiler fires of the boat, when the negro roust-abouts were not shoving in wood. An oyster can answered for a coffee pot, while a piece of fat bacon, held on a stick, before the fire did the rest.

It took 10 days to get to St. Louis, and during all these days and nights this discharged soldier held down his two by six place on the “lighter,” and it rained every night. At St. Louis he struck out for the North Missouri railroad, got into a box car and was hauled to the Hannibal & St. Joe line. After a day or two he got over to St. Joe. Then down to Iatan. He crossed the Missouri on a ferry boat and walked three miles into Fort Leavenworth, carrying his baggage. Going to Leavenworth city he waited a day or two and struck a freight team to haul his baggage home. He walked home -- an hundred miles -- and was glad he was alive. He didn't have a dollar when he got home, not even a cent to buy a shave.

When he went over to town the next day, the “stay-at-homes” wondered why he hadn’t re-enlisted, as the war was not over. And that is just what the soldier thought. He had served three years. A week at home cooked him. Back to Leavenworth he went and again he held up his hand and solemnly swore in the presence of Almighty God that he would serve his country for three years longer.

Two months thereafter he was in the battle of Nashville. A month later he was camping in the mud and rain, without tent and with nothing to eat, at Bridgeport, Ala. In April, 1865, when Lee surrendered, he was in Chattanooga. The war was now over and he quit for good.

As it would take a column to print how he worked his way home from Chattanooga we will not tell it now. But there was no travel pay, no Pullmans, not anything but 1500 miles of grief, spiced with the joyful thought that the war was over. The soldiers of today don’t know what war is.

Last Updated July 2, 2007>