War to Words - Following the Civil War, the Verbal Fight Continued

In my previous article, I wrote about the war of words that occurred nationally, at the state, and local levels, leading to fighting in Howell County and the suppression, sometimes total, of the opposing side's speech. Simply put, what you said could get you killed, kidnapped, or arrested before and during the Civil War. In what should have been the end of the story, the end of the Civil War did not bring peace to our county. Families and neighbors who had been at war now had to learn to live together again. Real peace would be elusive.

 

As the war ground to an official close in April 1865, and other parts of Missouri were notably quiet, combat in the Ozarks was still being done in earnest. Many Union loyalists driven out of Howell County had come back as Union soldiers and fought with a vengeance those who had persecuted them in the early part of the war. On January 16, 1865, Captain William Monks and Company K of the 16th Missouri Cavalry were ordered to build and occupy an 80-by-84-foot stockade or fort in Licking in Texas County and to scour the countryside for bushwhackers and anti-Union partisan bands that were infesting Howell and Oregon counties. In the final months of the Civil War, Monks claimed to have traversed 5000 miles over Texas, Howell, and Oregon counties to kill over 50 men, bringing in no prisoners. On July 1, 1865, Monks and his men were mustered out of United States service, but the war was far from over. 

 

Many in Howell and surrounding counties alleged that in the final months of the war, Monks and his men had not just killed bushwhackers and enemy soldiers. They accused him of killing former Confederate soldiers and southern sympathizers who had quit the war and returned home, attempting to live peaceably as civilians with their families, until troops arrived and murdered their husbands and fathers. After the war, Monks was eventually indicted in Howell County on murder charges, which did not stick. Ben Alsup, who had been imprisoned for three years of the war by the rebels, was also accused of murdering at least one of his kidnappers in Arkansas after the war. A significant number of bushwhackers remained in South Central Missouri and North Central Arkansas, and Monks and Alsup would be engaged for years in militia activities to eradicate them, stirring up further controversy. Howell and neighboring counties remained an unsettled place for a decade after the war, and while the shooting was sporadic, a war of words was continual.

 

During the war, the Union suppressed at least 300 newspapers across the nation (that remaining in the Union) for expressing disloyal sentiments or viewpoints sympathetic to the Confederate side. After the war, the ban was lifted and the gloves came off. A renewed war of words was underway, and a central target in Missouri was William Monks.

 

Although there were no newspapers in the war-torn no man's land of South Central Missouri, surviving papers in Rolla, Batesville, and Little Rock, Arkansas, had readers here and were familiar enough with the troubles of Howell and Oregon counties to write about the problems in these areas frequently. Local people and some visitors wrote letters to the editor about the troubles, and anything written that included the name Monks did not seem to require an explanation of who he was for readers anywhere in Missouri or Northern Arkansas.

 

Missouri, under Radical Republican rule, had taken the right to vote from former Confederates, and an act of the state legislature passed on January 30, 1865, exempted those who had served on the Union side from state taxes. Former Confederates and Missouri State Guardsmen were liable not only for the current year's taxes, but for the other four years of the war. Consequently, many who had supported the Confederacy in this area were losing their land, along with the right to vote or hold public office. The only outlet for their frustration, barring armed opposition, was a war of words. 

 

In October 1868, a Howell County correspondent submitted to the North Arkansas Times in Batesville, "A History of the Notorious Robber and Murderer, Wm. Monks," telling of Monks, "He (was) is a native of Fulton Co., Ark., and was raised on Bennett’s Bayou; is about 35 or 33 years of age; large and muscular; light, or rather red, complexion, considerably marked by smallpox. When a young man was noted as one of the most worthless in the country, always being very ragged and dirty. In 1859 or ’60, he married and moved to Howell Co., Mo., where he erected a black-jack pole cabin, about 11 feet square, in a barren hollow, upon vacant land, and fenced in with black-jack poles about six acres of prairie land. His property consisted of one old blind horse, estimated by his neighbors to be worth $15; one cow and calf, supposed to be worth $10, and five or six hogs, and a few things in the house, (for they could not be called bedding or household furniture.) He would ride his old horse to West Plains, four miles distant, in the morning, and have to lead him home at night, as the horse was so poor that it was unable to carry him to town and back on the same day." 

 

The North Arkansas Times continued, "The war came on and found him in this condition. He took sides with the Union party and immediately commenced improving his pecuniary condition by appropriating any little valuable that his more fortunate neighbors might be in possession of, even to provide clothing for his children from the wardrobes of those who had the article. His thirst for plunder improved with his practice, and from robbing houses he commenced stealing horses, and in the course of a twelve-month he was considered one of the most expert and daring robbers upon the border, (the Allsops not excepted.) He went on in his profession, acquiring considerable notoriety, and all the lawless men in the surrounding country fell in with Monks, and directly enough of them had collected together to form a company, and as a matter of course elected Monks captain, which rank he holds to this day, for he never was higher in rank during the war, neither was he ever in the regular federal army; and as soon as he was elected captain he reported his company as Missouri enlisted militia, and encamped at a place called the Lick Settlement, and built, or made prisoners build, a kind of stockade fort. He and his outlaws completely laid waste to the country from there to some distance into the State of Arkansas, robbing and murdering all whom he chanced to come upon, but never being in the first battle of any kind. He and his men have killed boys and old gray-headed men whom they chanced to catch at their homes. One gentleman, named Holtman, was shot by them while lying in a bed of sickness. It would take a week to recount all the robberies and murders committed by Monks while in command of the fort before spoken of."

 

"After the war ended Monks was as wealthy a man as there was in Howell County. During the fall of 1867, Monks was commissioned by Gov. Fletcher to raise a company of militia and look for and catch up horse thieves that were said to abound in Oregon County, Mo., and to turn them over to the civil authorities, to be dealt with according to law. He organized his militia and proceeded to Oregon County, but instead of hunting up thieves, he arrested the sheriff and a great many other prominent men, and hung up the sheriff as he did Bryant and Deshazo recently in Fulton County, and tied several of his prisoners together in a wagon and hauled them around over the country, sometimes making them walk behind the wagon, tied hard and fast, saying to them he would kill them on a certain day if they did not tell certain tales on certain men; and he not only hung the sheriff, but sent a squad of men into the State of Arkansas and murdered Capt. Smith, at his home near Salem. They also arrested the Circuit Court then in session, judge, lawyers, and all, and committed other outrages in different localities, in open defiance of the law. – These statements can be established by living witnesses. "    

 

The letter was simply signed "Absence." Anonymous letters to the editor were permissible in this period. They were representative of hundreds of articles and letters carried by the papers in opposition to the government and Monks in particular. 

 

Not that William Monks was defenseless in this war of the pens. In a letter to the Rolla Herald, dated September 1871, in a response to another written in criticism of him, Monks wrote, "Silence ceases to be a virtue when such accusations are publicly heralded forth by the off scouring of horse thieves, cut-throats, and Ku-Klux. Now, I say that the author of the above article is a calumniator, a thief, a cut-throat, a bastard, a coward, and a liar of the deepest dye. I am not afraid of the record of the past, and will, if desired, begin at Alpha and go through to Omega, and show the world who the thieves are. If you are for a showing of records, come out like men and show your colors.  -Wm. Monks."

 

The newspaper battles raged for years. In 1873, Monks tried another tactic, filing a slander suit against one John Spradley, followed by another against a former ally, Ben Alsup, who had run against him for a state representative seat in 1874. The Rolla Herald reported in February 1874, "The case of Monks vs. Alsup, et al, for $60,000 damage for defamation of character, was tried last week, on change of venue from Howell County. Monks sued for $60,000 as a slight equivalent for the damage he claimed to have been done to his character. The jury couldn’t see that Monks ever had any character to be damaged, but awarded him the enormous amount of one cent, as damages for any character he might have had, which they failed to discover. Monks certainly should be satisfied by this time as to his 'character'.” Monks even sued the West Plains Journal the following year with little result.

 

Perhaps a final insult to be found for Monks in the press was in May 1878, a full thirteen years after the war had ended. Monks had allowed a former Union soldier and friend, Adam Wright, to use his hotel, "The West Plains House," to start a Disciples of Christ or Christian Church in West Plains. In the process, he began attending services, was converted to the faith, and eventually became an ordained minister himself. The Rolla Herald noted, "The West Plains Journal says that the notorious South Missouri scalawag, Colonel Monks, has been baptized into the church. We’ll bet two to one he only done that to spite the devil."

Monks sent a parting shot toward the end of his life, in his book "A History of Southern Missouri and Northern Arkansas," which was published in 1907, and related his side of the story. Although in many ways a changed man, perhaps due to age and his faith, he remained unapologetic in the book, which, predictably, was —and still is—controversial.