Tribute to John Richard Longacre
PART I Preface Allow me to introduce you to a man I’ve met just recently through newly discovered cousins. He died long before I was born, so I didn't have the privilege of knowing him in person. However, I would like to nominate him for special Fathers’ Day honors today because of his ordinary, yet remarkable, life.
Early Years
My great grandfather, John Richard Longacre, was born in Tennessee in 1839 – part of a family of Swedish extraction that immigrated to North America in 1643, arriving on the Swedish ship, the “Kalmer Nyckel” and first residing in the New Sweden area (Chester County) of Pennsylvania. John Richard’s mother died before he was 7 years old. His father re-married in 1847, and he moved with his family to Missouri.
No one knows what his early childhood was like, but we do know that his family was lovingly close, despite the hard times of the day. Numerous letters and pictures that they exchanged throughout their long lives survive and are testaments to their affection for each other, even after they had been separated by a continent, a war, and a lifetime.
It is evident that his family taught him how to read and write because he left at least two diaries and numerous letters for his descendents. His family also imbued him with self-discipline, self-reliance, basic business sense, as well as generosity and compassion for others and a strong moral character. All that is clearly evident from the surviving written record.
John Richard Longacre as a young man
I do not know what impetus was behind my great grandfather’s trek to the Oregon Territory, or exactly how old he was when he made the arduous trip; but a study of the times, as well as family records, suggests many incentives. His Missouri home was the jumping off point for the wagon trains headed west. Gold had been discovered in California when he was a just boy of nine, and the traffic heading west past his father’s farm swelled to more than 350,000 people by the time he was a teen.
One can only imagine how he may have wheedled and cajoled his father and stepmother to allow him to join the crowd of emigrants that gathered every spring in St. Joe, Westport, and Independence. In later years, members of the family who visited Longacre homesteads in Missouri told of observing deep, grass covered wagon ruts cutting across the countryside between the farms. They were told that those scars were all that remained of the Oregon Trail. The temptation for a young man to set forth on a great, western adventure must have been irresistible.
Wagons gathering in Missouri at the head of the Oregon Trail
Continued at Part II…
John Richard Longacre, Part II
Rumblings of the Civil War – Border Wars
In stark contrast to the festive anticipation displayed by eager emigrants forming wagon trains in St. Joe, Independence, and Westport, civil strife that would soon erupt into the Border Wars was brewing along the western border of Missouri.
Kansas City today embraces the early town of Westport, which was built just east of the Missouri Line, not far from Independence. Independence was the most popular "jumping off" point on the Oregon Trail. Here emigrants stocked up on supplies and prepared their wagons. There was a festive air in Independence in the spring. The newcomers collected information and misinformation, made friends and enemies, changed proposed destinations, and behaved in general as though they were on a picnic. At Westport (Kansas City), an observer wrote:
Whiskey, by the way, circulates more freely in Westport than is altogether safe in a place where every man carries a loaded pistol in his pocket.
Missourians and Kansans joined the trek to Oregon by the multitudes in the months predating the official start of the Civil just to escape the bloodshed and impoverishment of the Border Wars, and it is likely that John Richard was one of those.
Several Congressional compromises attempted to determine whether Missouri and the surrounding territories should be slave or free. As a result, the people living in the counties on the western border of Missouri suffered from repeated raids on their farms and villages for more than seven years – three years longer than the Civil War raged.
There is no evidence through wills or oral family history that the Longacres ever were slaveholders themselves. Indeed, they seemed to be farmers, schoolteachers, and ministers. However, they considered themselves Southerners by heritage and so they were greatly affected by these political disagreements amongst their neighbors.
There is a great deal of information on the Web about the ruthless Kansas/Missouri Border Wars for anyone who is interested. Check out Missouri Partisans and Bushwackers and Jayhawkers If your sympathies lie with Missouri, look up Quantrill’s Rangers, and if your sympathies are firmly with Kansas and the abolitionists, you will want to look for Col. Charles Jenison’s Jayhawkers, Gen. Jim Lane, or Gen. Thomas Ewing.
Writing about the 7th Kansas Regiment (Jennison’s Jayhawkers), author Stephen Z. Starr says, …they killed civilians and prisoners, they pillaged the loyal and disloyal alike, and they burned homes and barns wherever they went.
Indeed, long after the Civil War was over, members of John Richard’s family visiting in Missouri were shown the burned out remnants of Uncle John’s farmstead where the 62 year patriarch had been routed out of bed and forced to hold a lantern to provide light while marauders shot his son dead in 1864. He was then murdered himself, his farm and home burned, and his wife and daughters left homeless. They claimed that they could still see blood and bullet marks on the chimney where the men had stood, waiting to be shot. Long after the fact, John Richard’s younger brother, Elbert S. Longacre, wrote of the strife at Pleasant Hill:
Yes, twenty years since we parted – I had not thought how long the time was till you mentioned it…Still I have seen many sights and heard solemn sounds since that time.
I saw the lights of forty houses that were burned in one night around out old home. Forty families turned out in the snow by Kansas Jahawkers or thieves. I saw houses pillaged and robbed as though the red men of the woods were again among us. I heard the moaning of women and children whose husband, father, or son, as the case might be, had been attacked in the field at church, or perhaps dragged from the sick bed and shot.
I helped to bury the old grey headed father and son (old Uncle John Longacre and Wiley) both in the same grave, they having been called to the door and shot by trash that should have been neighbors.
But enough of that. I grew sick of it and resolved to go where if blood was shed it was a two handed game; where man might at least have some chance to avenge his wrongs…If I had room I would tell mor of the tiresome all night march, the charge, the retreat of dead and dying soldiers, of twice feeling the pang of the merciless ledd. If I could see you I could tell more and more and I hope you will come. Write soon and often. E.S.L.
George Caleb Bingham, Missouri artist, illustrates the devastation in Pleasant Hill, MO, resulting from Gen. Thomas Ewing’s General Order Number 11. Members of the Longacre family lived in Pleasant Hill and were affected by this event.
Order Number 11
Noted author and historian Albert Castel wrote:
Order Number 11 was the most drastic and repressive military measures directed against civilians by the Union Army during the Civil War. In fact…it stands as the harshest treatment ever imposed on United States citizens under the plea of military necessity in our Nation’s History.
Continued at Part III…
THE BRIDGE
We took my grandfather to to the edge of Key West the year before his death. An old man, walking with our help and quietly living with the pain brought about by old age and old memories.
We stood there, at the Southernmost point in the US and looked south, three generations with three different sets of memories.
I looked at the old man, squinting as if trying to see across the miles, maybe seeing things I couldn't.
"Abuelo, it's only 90 miles away, if there was a bridge we could drive there in two hours!"-said I, seventeen years old at the time.
My father looked down and walked to the car, out of my sight, but the old man didn't move.
"You can't build that bridge Luisito, man can't build that kind of bridge."
"Of course it can be built abuelo, look at the one we crossed to get here!"-I said and smiled the smile of youth, a smile not jaded by lost innocence and betrayed promises.
"You do that Luisito, build your bridge, I know that you will do just that."-he turned and walked back to my father and our car.
My grandfather died a year later, the bridge all but a forgotten fantasy of my younger days. Except maybe not; maybe I am building our bridge, my grandfather's and mine, a bridge between a people's, spanning time and memories, for the old man who couldn't see but could remember, who placed his trust in my hands.
I love you old man, I'm building our bridge.