The bloodiest war on American soil.

States versus states, Brothers versus brothers.

Join hosts bang and dang as they take you battle by battle through the most divisive time in American history.

Welcome to Battles of the American Civil War.

Here we're going finishing off battles of an American Civil War.

Behind the battles war crime Edicians, it's time going to wrap it up.

It's a little four episode stretch with some guerrilla warfare that the South had going on, the Saltville Masker, the Centralia Mansker, and we'll take another quick relook at the Lawrence massacre, all of which and uh indiscriminate killing of either civilians or wounded and unarmed black soldiers they love doing that.

And racist democrats.

We'll start office Saltville, October eighteen sixty four.

Some paper doesn't look like the kind of place that should decide the fate of anything.

Small town tucked into apple Ascian hills underneath the der is one thing Confederacy can't live without salt.

Salt.

It's like keep meat from rotten.

Un So you feed armies and horses and cities when the weather turns out.

That does do anything.

By eighteen sixty four, the Compederacy is starving Saltville's big salt works.

They're a lifeline.

Take those away.

You're not just hurting Southern morale, you're taking food out of their mouths.

The Union they know it, so they sent a rating force out of Kentucky under Brigader General Steven Burbridge.

You got about five thousand men cavalry, mounted infantry, and tucked inside a column is a brand new unit.

The half of the Army doesn't even respect.

That's the fifth United States Colored Gallery.

Well, most of those men had been enslaved not long before this.

They have had almost no training, lousy equipment, and plenty of abuse from the white soldiers who think this whole idea of a black man in blue uniforms as a joke.

They get the worst horses, the worst guns, and all the jokes in far of the worst jokes too.

But the men of the Fifth did not come to entertain anybody.

They came to fight.

Old Burbridge has one job.

Ride through the passes, punched the Confederates aside hit Saltville, smashed those salt works.

The one problem is this is Virginia mountain country.

The roads are bad.

The hills of Steep and the old ReBs, they're not asleep.

As Burbridge tries to push his way east, he runs into Confederate forces under Elfred Jackson, in a mix of regular troops home guard.

It's in local militia.

Every time the Union tries to squeeze through a gap, climb a ridge, somebody in gray is up there with the cannon, rifle or sometimes both.

Oh.

By the time the Union column finally closes in on Saltville, the defenders have had time to dig in on the high ground, earthworks, rifle pits, artillery on the heights looking down over the open slopes.

So you don't want that exact a good kind of places.

You don't want to be uh, charging on foot if you like being alive.

That is so, of course they send the fifth United States Colored Cavalry up the hill.

You're in the regiment right.

You have had maybe three weeks of sear straining.

Your saddle doesn't fit, your carbine is not great.

You're going uphill in the open, straight at dugging Confederates who don't want to stop you.

They literally want to murder you.

A black man in the Union uniform terrifies and enrages them in equal measure.

The Confederates load grape and canister into the cannons.

When it fires, the air in front of you turns into flying metal.

The fifth they charge anyways, what else are they going to do?

Right?

Wow?

Even some ReBs emitted later that they had never seen men fight like this.

Wave after wave, Black troopers keep going up that hill while their friends are being cut down in front of them, horses dropping, saddles empty, and men running on foot, still trying to close the distance.

It is brave and his horroric, and it's not enough.

By the end of the day, the Union attack stalled, Burbridge's forces mauled.

Total catch dees.

Well, it will be somewhere in the hundreds, with the Union taking the worst of those scouties.

Yeah, the old Rabs.

They hold the heights, they hold the salt works, they hold the town.

Yeah.

But that's not why we here, Because on the surface it looks just like another failed raid, another Confederate defensive wind that buys us out.

A little more time and a little more salt.

A little more salt for the wounds of the Union z oders as well.

The real story what happens after dark, oh Man Burbridge, he pulls back.

He can't take everyone with them.

The field is littered with wounded Union surgeons set up in hospitals, including an Emory and Henry College, and in the nearby town of Emory, wounded men from Ohio, Kentucky, and those black troopers from the Fifth They're lining in barns and halls and classrooms turn into makeshift wards.

They're off the field, unarmed bandage, waiting for someone to decide what happens next.

Where are we gonna go at home?

That someone is not a committee in Washington.

Unfortunately for them, it's a group of Confederates who have spent the last few years riding the borderlands like an outlaw gang in Gray.

And that's where we enter Champ.

Ferguson, Oh Ferguson, this guy, this guy, you're building civil wars most wanderless.

You guess what Ferguson near the top, a pro Confederate guerilla from Tennessee.

He has been running his own personal war from day one.

Ambushes, executions, revenge killings.

His reputation simple.

He thinks you're a union man.

He thinks you should be dead.

After Saltville.

As the smoke is clearing, men like Ferguson and other irregulars they move across the battle field.

They're not bringing stretchers, No, they're bringing the grim Reaper along with them.

Witnesses later talk about wounded Black soldiers being shot where they lay, some ReBs bragging letters that they slew negroes that day and felt no shame at all because they're a fit of a human.

There are stories of Ferguson walking calmly among the wounded at the hospital, picking out men in blue uniforms black and white, put bullets in them at close range.

One Union officer, Lieutenant Elsa Smith, he's said to have been shot in the head in his bed.

Other wounded Black troopers from the Fifth never even make it out of those rooms alive.

Dang, that's war crime right there.

He should be hung right.

Oh.

The numbers are obviously like every battle we've ever covered, and they'll be debated.

Some early reports talk about a handful of killings, Others say dozens.

Modernishments usually land somewhere around forty five to fifty Black soldiers murdered after the battle.

Jeez, we're no longer even fighting and no longer a threat, man enough that had earned its own name, the Saltville Massacer.

And it's not the kind of moment you can write off as two sides shooting at each other during the fog.

No shit, there's some men stepping over bodies to get to the ones who are still breathing, making choices with full control of their trigger.

Figure.

Regular Confederate troops eventually arrive in greater numbers, and some sources suggest that once firmly organized units take charge of the prisoners, the worse of the killing stocks.

Oh shuh.

But by then damage is done.

Word spread stories leak out for Black troops across the Union.

Saltville joins a growing list that already has Fort Pillow on it, and we're about to add a couple more before the war's over.

Fight hard, and if you fall in the Confederate or hands, God help you.

The massacre does not destroy the fifth United States Colored Cavalry, No, it does not.

Survivors going to fight again and again, but the regiment will never forget Saltville.

Many of the men, this is the moment.

When the mask come off and they see exactly what they're up against, and you know, high command hears about it, newspapers hear about it, and for once, somebody pays.

When the war ends, Champ Ferguson is hauled into a military courtroom.

Not as a hero, no, not as some noble freedom fighter, but as a murderer.

They put him on trial.

Go through a long list of names.

Some deaths happen in battle, some are disputed, others not.

Below it all sits Saltville, with the witnesses talking about wounded men in beds and the man who walked in and shot them, and the very an Ferguson is convicted of multiple murders and sentenced to hang.

He swings from a rope in Nashville in the fall of eighteen sixty five, one of the very few men from either side to be executed specifically for what we would now call war crimes.

The other being the uh former warden guy of Fort Anderson are Anderson villperson.

Which we talked about an episode right.

Saltville doesn't become a tourist stop yeah, never gets to the fame.

Mcgettysburg Grant eat them, but pursued ins of the war, especially for anyone looking at the story of the black soldiers in Union blue sits there like a scar on the map, a reminder that for some men the idea of a black soldier was so offensive they would rather shoot a wounded man in a hospital bed than let them live to tell the tale.

Salt Works.

They're finally destroyed a couple months later at the Second Battle of Saltville.

That's when George Steman comes back with another raid and finishes the job that Burbridge couldn't.

The Confederates.

They lose their salt they lose the war, they lose their dignity, and the country stumbles into reconstruction.

Everybody pretends they're ready to move on Saltville.

They don't.

Hangs there in the background like an old crime scene photo shoved in the back of the file.

Probably talk about honor and gallantry and brother against brother.

The Civil War also had moments that looked a lot more like gangland hits than grand strategy.

Men like old Champ Ferguson turn whole regions into their personal killing grounds, And on cold October day in Virginia, the wounded of the fifth United States Colored Cavalry paid the price that leads us to the Centralia massacre, which we don't think we've even touched on this at all in our any other episodes, Probably not.

Well, there's outlaw stories that stay in the bank vaults and saloons, and then they're the ones that start with a train and in the cornfield and leave the ground so soaked in blood that the locals are still talking about it one hundred and fifty years later.

Today we are in mid Missouri, September twenty seventh, eighteen sixty four, a little railroad town called Centralia.

On paper, nothing special, a depot, there's a hotel, a couple of stores, farms all the way around.

But Centralia well has the misfortune of sitting right in the middle of Civil War Missouri, which means it is not really a town anymore.

It's a target.

By this point in the war, Missouri is a less of a state and more of an fight.

You have got Union militia, you got Confederate regulators, you got Kansas jayhawkers, you got Missouri bushwhackers, and everybody has a score to settle.

There's no clean front line.

There's just whoever's armed, whoever's unlucky, and riding into that mess is one of the nastiest names to war ever produced.

You guessed it, Bloody Bill.

William Anderson, Yeah, I have.

Quadrille Raiders are the celebrity gang of the Missoury Bushbackers scene.

Old Bloody Bill is a guy who looked at Control and said, you're not going far enough.

Scalping, mutilation, no quarter.

It's not a man interested in prisoner exchanges and plate surrenders.

This whole reputation is built unscaring the hell out of anyone in blue.

And On the morning September twenty seventh, Anderson and roughly eighty gorillas came into Centralia like they owned it, long hair pistols on their belts, union jackets stolen off dead men, some of them with bits of uniforms from three different armies on at once.

Among them a young ex farm kid who will go on to be famous for Robin Banks instead of trains.

Oh, you know him as Jesse James.

But today he's not an outlaw yet.

He's just a gorilla confederate, gorilla taking part in a massacre.

He's taking notes from Bloody Bill on how to make a name for himself.

Well, all these gorillas, they hit the town hard, and they hit the town hard and fast.

They raid the stores, grab whatever they want, force the locals to cook for them.

Barrels get tapped, Whiskey starts a flowing even, stop a stage coach and rob the passengers.

Because if you're already committing one crime spree before lunch, why I add another one on the list.

All right?

Then they hear it a train whistle into distance.

Oh well, now a train in eighteen sixty four is a big deal.

It's money mail, it's news manpower.

All road in one.

This one, well, it's coming from the east, head towards Saint Louis.

Anderson's men right out flag it down just outside of town.

Out horses, Pranson, bushwhackers, grinning through tobacco smoke.

The engineer does the math and stops.

The Graylests swarm the cars.

They're not here for the civilians, no, though they'll rob a few.

They're hunting uniforms on board our union enlisted men heading home on furlough.

They're unarmed, they're relaxed, probably thinking more about their families than about ambushes.

Like what the hell's going on here?

Or Anderson he has them haul out of the cars lining up alongside the track.

Depending on who you read, there are about two dozen of them twenty three twenty four, all in blue, no rifles, no bail nets, just travel clothes and leave papers.

One of them's sergeant named Thomas Goodman, Oh bloody Bill, or one of his lieutenants.

He tells the line they want to volunteer and step forward.

Come on, when you got step forward?

Well, when you're an unarmed you and soldiers standing in front of a bunch of men who's nicknamed for their bosses.

Bloody, you know what's about to come?

You step forward?

Are they shoot you first?

Nobody moves, They ask again.

Finally, Sergeant Goodman steps out, figuring he's about to take one for the team.

It's ted Anderson grabs him, pulls him aside.

Then the Gorilla's open fire on the rest the men in blue standing where Goodman had been or cut down at close range.

Some are shot in the back as they try to run.

Wow, if you were finished off on the ground.

Several of the bodies are mutilated afterwards, scalped, faces slashed, close stripped.

Jeez.

The civilians on the train they get to stand there and watch it happen and get to when it's over.

The bushwackers torch the locomotive and some of the cars leaven Sergeant Goodmen alive as a captive, and ride back towards their camp southeast of town.

Oh wow.

They leave behind burn rolling stock and a row of dead men thrown in a shallow hurried graves wive and bury him right.

That alone will be enough to get you into the Wars Hall of Shame.

But they're not done with Centralia, not yet.

Oh.

News of the massacre does not take long to spread.

By that very afternoon, Union A.

V.

E.

Johnson of the third ninth Missouri Mounted Infantry.

He's gotten this very word of what's this happened?

He's got a few companies.

Were all troops, maybe one hundred and twenty men riding out of the area around Hallsville and Mexico, Missouri.

These are not grizzled veterans know a lot of them have barely been shot at an anger.

But they have just heard about the Union soldiers murdered on a sighting, and that flips a switch.

These guys are pissed.

They want revenge.

Johnson pushes his men hard towards Centralia.

When they get there, they find Anderson's gang already gone from the depot, but the town's still smoldering from the morning's visit, dead.

Men and charred train.

Local shaking and angry.

Johnson hears that the bushwackers have a camp about a few miles away in the fields and timber.

Besides, we're gonna go get them boys.

Out on the.

Prairie near Centralia, Anderson and his men are resting horses, grazing luke, gather, drunk on whiskey and adrenaline.

They're not expecting a phone Union regiment.

Nope, They're only expecting a small detachment.

Well, that's what they're ready for.

They picked their ground on a low rise near some timber and brush, where they can disappear and then come roaring out of cover.

Anderson lines his men out in a loose front, with more riders conceal it on the flanks.

Johnson he rides up with his column and marching order rifles and carbines.

Most of these are mountain it mounted infantry that battle hard in Calvary.

He sends a small skirmish line forward on foot.

They trade a few shots with the Bushwackers, who then start to fall back.

Johnson's eye looks like the gorillas are breaking to Anderson it's bait.

Johnson orders a full charge, his men swinging to gallop into a gallop across open ground toward that thin line of bushwhackers, and at the last second, Anderson's force whips around and comes straight at him, revolvers a blazing.

It's the thing about Gorilla is like Bloody Bill's crew.

They don't fight like regulars.

Where a Union soldier might have a rifle in a bay, these guys have two three four pistols each, plus knives.

They're close in tight dumping shot after shot a near point blank range.

While Johnson's men are still trying to get off a couple of carbine rounds, the bushwackers are already on top of them.

Union line disintegrades almost instantly, sharing.

The fuck does.

Horses go down, riders go under, men fall in the first volley, they get trampled, They get shot again as the grillers ride through them, wheel and then they come back.

Some of the thirty ninth try to run for the trees.

U the tree and It's his men run them down.

Some throw up their hands to surrender.

Guess what what is that?

The killing spills off the field and into the corn and grass around it.

Later accounts talk about heads, blown up, bodies mutilated, men strip the boots and clothes.

At least one Union soldiers are poorly skelped.

Some are shot after the fighting stops, executed where they're found hiding.

By the time it is over, Johnson is dead, his body left so riddled and abused, as some witnesses claimed they could barely recognize him.

Of this, roughly one hundred and twenty men over a hundred are killed outright or hundred down in the aftermath.

The aftermath, hanfill escape, some are chased for miles.

On paper, It's a skirmish in reality, slaughter.

And that's why Centralia will go down.

And the record rooks for two numbers, the two dozen unarmed soldiers executed the tracks, and the stagger and kill rate on Johnson's command that afternoon in terms of percentage of a unit wiped out in a single engagement.

The thirty ninth Missouri is near the very top of the Civil War's grim leaderboard, and riding in the middle of it all is old bloody Bill Anderson.

This legend cemented and gun smoking blood with a young Jesse James supposedly watching and learning exactly what fear looks like when you apply it at scale.

For the Union sides, Centralia is proof what everybody in Missouri already suspects.

It's not a gentleman's war.

It's a vendetta for the Confederates.

Even some of the regular officers are not comfortable.

They might hate the Yankees, but there's a difference between beating an enemy and a fair fight and mass current prisoners on leaving front of civilians.

Right.

Gorilla warfare erases that line, then stops on the eraser with then a month Anderson himself dead shot from his saddle in another fight with Union troops, his body put on display as proof.

The nightmares over doesn't really help, though the memory of Centralia has already baked in people's minds.

The railroads keep running, the town rebuilds, corn gets planted again in the fields.

For anyone who knows the story, that stretch of ground outside Centralia is not just another Missouri pasture.

It's a place where a train stopped, two dozen un armed men got pulled off, and an you small a Union command rode into a trap that turned a war into something that looked a lot more like an organized Moida.

That is the Centralia massacre.

Not a bang job, not a saloon shooting, not a mob hit in the big city, Nope, just a quiet little town on the prairie.

They had the bad luck to cross paths with.

One of the meanest grillas the Civil War ever produced, and in the rap sheet of outlaws and gunslingers that earns Bloody Bill Anderson his own ugly page.

This is because sometimes the worst crimes do not belong to the guys and fedoras and pinstripes.

Nope.

Sometimes they're riding horses, weren't stolen uniforms and calling it a cause.

Well, he's a stew the old Lawrence masker, And what a masker it was.

We're in the summer of eighteen sixty three.

No place proved my point better than Lawrence, Kansas.

August twenty first, a little after sunrise, the doors of hell opened.

The devil himself, William Clark control Quantrolle, rode out of them doors with four hundred men behind them.

Ooh, wasn't a raid, wasn't a skirmish.

This was a hit.

And everybody in Lawrence was on the list.

You just made the list.

Before we get to the Burnham buildings and gun smoke.

You have to understand why eastern Kansas had a bow's eye on it.

Civil war didn't start in Charles and a Richmond started right here, Bleeding Kansas.

We did a whole episode on that right a borderland where slavery and freedom took baseball bats to each other years before the rest of the country followed.

Pro slavery Missourians versus anti slavery Kansas bushwhackers, Jayhawkers, everyone caring a rifle, a pistol, about five years worth of grudges.

Now you got.

To mix that in with the fact that Lawrence was the hot met of abolitionist politics, was a stronghold of the free state movement.

It was a town where pro slavery Missourians said, every man walking down the street thought they were better than you, and then had one more ingredient revenge.

August eighteen sixty three, a jail in Kansas City collapsed, and not just any jail, the one holding the wives, the sisters and daughters of the Missouri Grillas.

A structural failure killed several women and injured more.

To the Union, it was an accident, but to the Bushwhackers it was straight up moiita, and that's when Quantrell steps in.

Quantrell is the closest thing that the Confederacy has to an outlaw rock star.

He's a former school teacher turned gorilla leader who rides with the long coat, twin pistols, and a personal list of names he wants dead.

He has a simple plan riding to Lawrence, kill every adult male, torture down, leave nothing behind but rubble and screams.

He gathers about four hundred and fifty riders, the worst of the worst, bloody bills there.

George Todd and he's there.

Cole Younger he's also there.

And then there's just fifty year old.

There's a fifteen year old, Oh, Jesse James.

He might be riding nearby with another group of gorillas at the time as well, depending on who you believe.

I've never been proven, but either way, the whole pantheon of future outlaws, they're at this very location before dawn, August twenty.

First, they crossed the border from a zoo.

No lionns, no bugles, just the quiet sound of four hundred horses jogging toward a target that still has no idea.

It's about to become the most famous crime scene.

It's very quiet.

Right around five am, Lawrence wakes up to the worst alarm clock ever invented.

The sound a gunfire quantrells.

Men slam into the town like a sledge hammer.

They split into squads, already known exactly.

Who they're hunting.

They have lists of names.

They got prominent Kansas officials, abolitionist leaders, union militia officers, newspaper editors.

If your name's on the list, your day is about to end violently.

They start setting buildings on fire immediately, Hotels, stores, saloons, houses, all of them flames that licked the morning sky.

As squads ride down the streets, shooting any man they see.

Doesn't matter if he's in uniform or in his night shirt.

If he's mail and breathing, he's fair game.

Some men try to run for the river.

They're cut down before they make it ten yards.

Others hiding wells, barns, and root sellers.

The bushwackers go house to house, calling people out, then firing before the door even fully opens.

Witnesses talk about men begging for their lives.

Some are shot in their knees, some are even shot in their beds.

A few were executed in front of their families.

Quantrill himself rides calm Me down Massachusetts Street, drekking squads like he's running a twisted military parade.

Some men pour whiskey in the street and light it.

Fire, runs along the gutters, windows shatter, horses, rear ups spooked by the roar of flames and pistols, and one hotel bushmackers force men into the lobby, line them up and gun them down at point blank.

Rash go to nearby house.

Man tries to shoad his suns.

They shoot him first and then and then they shoot him first and then his sons.

Oh fuck wow.

There's one story.

It says a group of men try to flee across the cornfield well.

The Grill is riding to the rows, firing pistols, dropping bodies between the stalks.

The whole Masaker lasts roughly four hours, four hours of killing, four hours of torch and buildings, four hours where humanity isn't just optional, it's actively discouraged.

About one hundred and fifty to maybe as many as one hundred and eighty men and boys dead by the time Quantraill's men form up again outside of town.

That's not battle casualties.

That's a murder fucking spree.

They leave Lawrence looking like a city that had a meteor dropped on it.

Over one hundred and eighty buildings burned, whole block scorts down to the chimneys.

Quantrille had promised his men loot if they succeeded.

They take everything, horses, watches, rifles, silverware, whiskey, coats, jewelry.

One bush wrecker rides off wearing three top hats stacked on top of another, just to mock the town, and then just as fast as they appeared, they're gone.

Union cavalry shows up too late, finds the smoking ruins, and hears the stories of survivors still shaking in the boots.

And what follows will shape the entire war in Missouri.

Union forces unleash retaliation with the same Fury family suspected of helping gorillas around it up.

Homes are seized, and within day's Union General Thomas unsigned General Order number eleven, which.

We talked about last episode.

Yeah, it is the mass evacuation of four Missouri counties, which we know as the Burnt District.

Lawrence.

Don't just burn the town, it burns whatever it was left to restraint in the Border War Quantrelle Anderson Todd.

They become legends, not the good kind kind whispered about and bars long after midnight.

To some of the Confederacy, they are heroes of resistance to the Union, of the devil's own triggerman.

To historians, there's what happened when a civil war turns into personal vengeance with pistols.

Lawrence rebuilds, always does.

Inside the town.

There's a street where the ghosts don't sleep.

That's Massachusetts Street.

Because the Lawrence massacre isn't just a tragic event.

It's a reminder that once you tell men they're justified in anything, absolutely anything, I'll show you how imagine if imaginative cruelty can get when you mix ideology with an empty conscience and lots of whiskey.

And on that August morning, the sun rose over a crime that looked less like a raid more like a chapter ripped out of a serial killer's notebook.

That's the Lawrence massaker.

Another entry in the Outlaw Files, or the line between soldier and murderer wasn't just crossed, it's flat out erase with fire.

Before we go though, where we obviously know why the Lawrence Massaker was a war crime and atrocity.

But take a look a why people consider the Salt Belt.

Well, we know why those two, but uh, why it's considered today It would be well eve been back then.

I guess, like we said, while the soldiers were in makeshift hospitals, they weren't fighting anymore.

Number one, they weren't a threat.

There were men on stretchers, men with bandages, men waiting for treatment.

And exactly when the Federate irregulars and gorilla stepped in.

They didn't guard the wounded, they didn't give medical aid, they didn't are They walked up to bed.

They walked bed to bed and shot the men who couldn't stand up.

Some were killed in the field hospitals, Some are dragged outside.

Some are executed on the ground where they'd fallen earlier that day.

And that is why Saltville crosses into a try territory.

When a man is too hurt to fight, you don't get too empty of revolvers right into his face.

No, not today, not then, not under any rule book written in any century.

Well, I don't know.

Well, in the Mongols that's appreciate crazy shit even the Union's own wartime Cold liber Code of eighteen sixty three said you can't harm a wounded prisoner.

And by modern standards on the Geneva Conventions, this isn't a violation, just a violation.

It's one of the.

Clearest types of work crime that exists.

Right, Saltville wasn't a battle.

It was a cleanup job, carried out with hate and loaded pistols.

And that's why historians and anybody with a brain don't hesitate to call it what it was.

An atrocity of war.

Sure, and fuck was.

We'll see how they classify Centralia.

No rifles, no bayonets, just travel papers in their pockets.

You and soldiers on a train.

Bloody Bill Anderson and his Bushwagger stopped the train, dragged the soldiers off, line them up, execute them one by one, as we said.

Some are shot in the back, some are mutilated after death.

These are not combatants, These are prisoners, and prisoners aren't targets.

The second act of that ambush, well, it was the ambush of a major Johnson's men in the cornfields.

Now this part begins as a battle.

There's guns on both sides, shots fired.

But when the Union soldiers throw up their hands.

The gorillas are like no quarter Men who give up the fight are killed on spot summer scalp Some are found stripped and shot in the head.

That's the key point.

Once a soldier surrenders, the war ends for that guy.

You don't get to shoot him because he picked the wrong uniform.

Execute in prisoners of war has been outlawed in every set of war rules since nations started writing them down.

You can't argue tactics.

You can argue desperation, but you cannot argue this.

What happened at Centreila wasn't warfare, It was mermoid.

And they both count has atrosities obviously because they both have one thing in common.

None of the victims were fighting anymore.

We know that.

That's what makes these two events stand apart.

Not the number of bodies, not the location, not the units involved.

Some choices made after the fight and should have been over.

Saltville shows racial hatred turned into execution.

Centralia shows revenge turned into massacre.

That's why both events sit on the same shelf as the worse atrocities of the Civil War, the moments where the war stopped being about armies and turned into something a whole lot darker and a whole lot bloodier.

Yeah, ridiculous gobbage.

Yeah, ridiculous gobbage.

Wow.

And that my friends, it's great.

We've covered all of the major atrocities by both sides, and there's plenty of more smaller versions where people went into villages and it it's pretty fucked up things.

But yeah, obviously these.

Are the ones history remembers them most.

So there you go.

We got several instances on both sides because both sides were both pieces of shit during the war.

Next week we're returned to regular scheduled programming and as we will be taking on a Union general somebody that's gonna bean, somebody we've got a lot of juice from, so you know, we'll be back with the Union guy and some more profiling and styling and limousine riding.

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