Today in History:

719 Series I Volume XLI-II Serial 84 - Price's Missouri Expedition Part II

Page 719 Chapter LIII. CORRESPONDENCE,ETC.-UNION.

MACON CITY, MO., August 15, 1864.

Major-General ROSECRANS,

Commanding Department of the Missouri:

Your dispatch of the 14th has reached me. I have endeavored to the best of my ability to infuse vigor and strategy into the commanders you name. I am now at this end of the district to do all I can by my personal presence to organize a sufficient force to exterminate the fiends; but this is a very difficult task, when in all the Missouri River counties from force to exterminate the fiends; but this is a very difficult task, when in all the Missouri River counties from Buchanan to Saint Charles the guerrillas have three times the number of friends we have. Nothing short of holding the bushwhacker aiders and abettors responsible with their lives and property for these barbarous acts will ever drive out the murdering villains. The troops are all out from Fayette, Sturgeon, Mexico, Fulton, and Macon, and in the western portion of the district every available man is at work day and night. I am adopting the bushwhacking tactics, and now bushwhack them. The recruiting of the new regiments is progressing favorably. A large meeting at Chillicothe to-day instructed the county court to pay volunteers $100 bounty. The new regiments raised and partly mounted, and rebels held to an accountability for the atrocities committed by th guerrillas, will soon give us tranquillity.

CLINTON B. FISK,

Brigadier-General.

SAINT JOSEPH, August 15, 1864.

Colonel O. D. GREENE,

Assistant Adjutant-General, Saint Louis:

E. W. Price, of Chariton County, formerly a brigadier-general in the Confederate service, and son of Sterling Price, at my suggestion, and by the approved of the major-general commanding, visited the camp of the leading bushwhackers of North Missouri to ascertain from them if they claimed to be operating under orders from Confederate authority. Price visited Perkins and Holtzclaw, and has rendered an interesting report of his interviews with these distinguished guerrilla chieftains. They have the written authority of Sterling Price to come into Missouri. Perkins proposes to remain here and recruit and fight as best he can until corn ripens, when, if General Price does not come to him, he will go to General Price. Perkins professes to be here to protect the peaceable citizens of Southern sympathy against the acts of such parties as Truman, and says all he wants is to be let alone until his forces are all recruited, and then he will leave, provided the Confederate lines shall not at that time extend over all Missouri. Holtzclaw's mission appears to be chiefly the extermination of the Radicals, especially all who have in the least countenanced the measures adopted by the Government for the recruitment of negroes. The Confederate authorities are, therefore, chargeable with the barbarous atrocities visited upon the Unionists of Missouri by these fiends in human form. Perkins pretends to deprecate bushwhacking and murdering, but confesses that men under his command are guilty of these infamous acts, and that it is done under the cover of authority from General Sterling Price. What punishment should be inflicted upon the people of the counties where these barbarians are fed, protected, and encouraged in their nefarious wickedness, and in what manner shall the so-called Confederate authorities be made to feel the responsibility for these atrocities?

CLINTON B. FISK,

Brigadier-General.


Page 719 Chapter LIII. CORRESPONDENCE,ETC.-UNION.