Dean Halliday Smith* presented a lecture at the Kansas City, Missouri Public Library on his biography of Thomas Ewing Jr.: Frontier Lawyer and Civil War General. The book was published by the University of Missouri Press as part of their Blue and Grey series.
Smith takes readers and listeners back to Bleeding Kansas, with its border ruffians and land speculators, to show how Thomas Ewing Jr. and his Ohio family roots played pivotal roles in the history of Kansas before the civil war, and during that war and its aftermath.
This presentation took place on October 21, 2009, at the Central Library, 14 W. 10th Street, Kansas City, Missouri. Interestingly Ewing is universally honored or hated in the Kansas City area as the architect of Order No. 11. Depending on family sympathies in August, September and October, 1863, when after Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence, Kansas, Ewing’s efforts at rooting out southern sympathizers in the Kansas City area using federal cavalry and driving those 10,000 civilians into Arkansas was either dark days of retribution or enlightened action by federal troops, depending on which side of the war you favored.
Ron, a.k.a. “Dean Halliday Smith” (pen name), is introduced by Library Director of Public Affairs Henry Fortunato. You can listen to the presentation here.
Audio Source: https://archive.org/details/RonaldSmithThomasEwingJr
Used in accordance with Creative Commons license.
