Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 2.djvu/136

called to his assistance Captain Hoyt and a few men, who followed them towards the Missouri River, to learn their intentions. The bushwhackers managed to conceal themselves in the brush, where they lay in ambush until the marshal and his party came within gunshot, when they fired, killing Van Eaton and wounding one of his men. The survivors returned the fire, wounding one of the bushwhackers, but the whole party escaped. On the night of the 17th of November, a party of mounted armed men intercepted the pickets guarding the road leading into Sidney from the west. After a sharp skirmish and rapid firing the enemy made a hasty retreat. On the 11th, a gang succeeded in entering the town by night and in blowing up the court-house, built at a cost of $36,000.

On the 17th, Adjutant-General Baker sent two hundred muskets, 4,000 ball cartridges and authority to Colonel Sears to call out as many companies of the Southern Border Brigade as were necessary to protect the county from marauders. Captain H. B. Horn, in command of a company in the Southern Border Brigade, stationed in Davis County, in March, 1863, reported to the Adjutant-General the doings of the disloyal citizens in that county. On the 9th of February, a force of armed men seized a negro and carried him into Missouri to slavery.

Captain Horn writes:

“Davis County is not the place to punish men for such crimes. The disloyal men among us have banded themselves together to resist the law and authority of those in power. At a recent peace meeting in our county, resolutions were unanimously adopted, in which they pledged themselves to resist to the death all attempts to draft any of our citizens into the army, and that they would permit no arbitrary arrests to be made among them by the minions of the Administration. ‘That we will resist the introduction of free negroes into Iowa—first, by lawful means, and when that fails we will drive them, together with such whites as may be engaged in bringing them in, out of the State, or afford them honorable graves.’”

When the draft began in the fall of 1864, these disloyal utterances led to murder and mob violence. A draft had