El Borak's Myopia

El Borak's Myopia

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Hero of the Blue

By the end of the war, George Hoyt's time in Kansas was drawing to a close. On July 9, 1867, he became the editor of the Leavenworth Conservative, the same day it was noted that, thankfully, the grasshoppers were all gone from Leavenworth. The next year he was elected Kansas' sixth Attorney General. In 1871, the year after he completed his two-year term as the state's chief law enforcement officer, Hoyt moved with the wife he had married in the middle of the war back to Athol, Massachusetts. It was the home town of both of them.

Hoyt spent two years as Athol's representative in the Massachusetts legislature, where he led an effort to censure Senator Sumter – the same Senator who had written him in his youth - for introducing a bill he deemed insulting to the Union's soldiers . He edited his hometown newspaper and was active in the Grand Army of the Republic. On February 2, 1877, George Hoyt died, leaving a wife and two children behind. He was thirty-nine years old.

“Here Hoyt, the hero of the Blue, fought brave and well the battle through .” So wrote the poet Thomas Brower Peacock in his epic Civil War poem, The Rhyme of the Border War. To Peacock, like most Kansans, Hoyt's war on the border made him a hero in blue. Many Missourians and not a few Democratic partisans in Kansas considered him a baby-faced demon loosed from the Union-blue bowels of hell itself. But what are we, separated by generations from the passions of that age, to make of him?

That he was a horse thief? The evidence is thin, though it might be noted that while Jennison retired to a horse ranch , Hoyt became the attorney general of Kansas. That he was a looter just playing soldier? It must be stated that while Jennison was run out of the army and prosecuted for jayhawking, Hoyt was appointed a brevet brigadier general.

Perhaps we might be tempted to think that he sought military glory, a fame that would last the ages. If that was his hope he failed, for one of Sumner's biographers, writing a mere two decades after Hoyt's death, noted that he had been a soldier, “but not one remarkable for any service .” No author ever honored him with a biography as they did Sumner or John Brown or even “Doc” Jennison. Even the town named for him - Hoyt, Kansas, a bedroom community on the northern outskirts of Topeka – contains no monument to his glory.

Surely he was brave; one can hardly imagine the fear he swallowed while throwing himself into the hornet's nest of John Brown's trial or the cavalry charges at Westport. No one who knew him could doubt for a moment that he was loyal and articulate and intelligent.

But mostly he was a young man of exceptional talent and drive with a misleadingly innocent face who – like so many others of his generation - threw himself, sickly body and bloodstained soul, headlong into the greatest struggle this nation has ever faced. Somewhere along the bloody trail that led to Kansas and back, he managed to forge hatred into leadership.

Labels: history

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