Political hatreds are always bitter, but none were ever more bitter than
those which existed along the border line of Missouri and Kansas during my
boyhood in Jackson county in the former state from 1856 to ’60. These
hatreds were soon to make trouble for me of which I had never dreamed.
Mine was a happy childhood. I was the seventh of fourteen children, but my
father had prospered and we were given the best education the limited
facilities of that part of the West then afforded.
My people had always been prominent, politically. It was born in the
blood. My great grandmother on my father’s side was a daughter of
“Lighthorse Harry” Lee, whose proud memory we all cherish. The Youngers
came from Strasburg, and helped to rule there when it was a free city.
Henry Washington Younger, my father, represented Jackson county three
times in the legislature, and was also judge of the county court. My
mother, who was Bursheba Fristoe of Independence, was the daughter of
Richard Fristoe who fought under General Andrew Jackson at New Orleans,
Jackson county having been so named at my grandfather Fristoe’s
insistence. Mother was descended from the Sullivans, Ladens and Percivals
of South Carolina, the Taylors of Virginia and the Fristoes of Tennessee,
and my grandfather Fristoe was a grand nephew of Chief Justice John
Marshall of Virginia.
Naturally we were Southerners in sympathy and in fact. My father owned
slaves and his children were reared in ease, though the border did not
then abound in what would now be called luxury. The railroads had not
reached Jackson county, and wild game was plentiful on my father’s farm on
Big Creek near Lee’s Summit. I cannot remember when I did not know how to
shoot. I hunted wild geese when I could not have dragged a pair of them
home unaided. But this garden spot was destined to be a bloody battle
ground when the nation divided.
There had been scrimmages back and forth over the Kansas line since 1855.
I was only a boy, born January 15, 1844. My brother James was born
January 15, 1848, John in 1851, and Robert in December, 1853. My eldest
brother, Richard, died in 1860. This was before the conflicts and
troubles centered on our home that planted a bitterness in my young heart
which cried out for revenge and this feeling was only accentuated by the
cruelties of war which followed. I refer in particular to the shameful
and cowardly murder of my father for money which he was known to have in
his possession, and the cruel treatment of my mother at the hands of the
Missouri Militia. My father was in the employ of the United States
government and had the mail contract for five hundred miles. While in
Washington attending to some business regarding this matter, a raid was
made by the Kansas Jayhawkers upon the livery stable and stage line for
several miles out into the country, the robbers also looting his store and
destroying his property generally. When my father returned from
Washington and learned of these outrages he went to Kansas City, Mo.,
headquarters of the State Militia, to see if anything could be done. He
had started back to Harrisonville in a buggy, but was waylaid one mile
south of Westport, a suburb of Kansas City, and brutally murdered; falling
out of his buggy into the road with three mortal bullet wounds. His horse
was tied to a tree and his body left lying where it fell. Mrs. Washington
Wells and her son, Samuel, on the road home from Kansas City to Lee’s
Summit, recognized the body as that of my father. Mrs. Wells stayed to
guard the remains while her son carried the news of the murder to Col.
Peabody of the Federal command, who was then in camp at Kansas City. An
incident in connection with the murder of my father was the meeting of two
of my cousins, on my mother’s side, Charity Kerr and Nannie Harris
(afterwards Mrs. McCorkle) with first my father and then a short distance
on with Capt. Walley and his gang of the Missouri Militia, whose hands are
stained with the blood of my father.
[Illustration: Nannie Harris and Charity Kerr]