Margaret Janes Watts married Upton Hays on February 4, 1852 in Jackson County, Missouri. When the Civil War began, Margaret lived with her husband on their farm near Westport in Jackson County, Missouri. While her husband was away at war, she witnessed jayhawking being performed by Federal troops. After Order Number 11 was issued, she and her family were forced to move from their home. She described a lot of these events in letters she wrote to her family and friends.
She wrote a letter to her Mother describing how pro-Union Missourians stole from their pro-Southern neighbors.
"Cass Co. has turned out a great many Robbers, about the worst company of men we have for Robing at Kansas is the Cass Co. Jay Hawkers [Cass County Home Guards] … Now these men looks upon going to a Secessionest house with wagons and loading everthing they can find, negros and everthing else, as right. They dont think it is Stealing."
In two letters written to her mother in November and December of 1861, Margaret Watts Hays described the depredations carried out by the “self-sustaining” regiment from Kansas.
"We have a band of Jayhawkers at Kansas City … that has been robbing ever person … In the eavening their was fifty three came to our house and surrounded it … They took two wagons loaded full from hear, my carriage and every negro on the place … Last week Generson's [Jennison] whole command came … their be as many as many as sixty waggons sent out [and] they carried off what they wanted, ran over the rest with their wagons and stock."
Margaret also described how her husband, Upton Hays, had organized some of the men in the area to begin to resist and try and stop the jayhawking. Because of this Margaret now became a focus of Jayhawker revenge:
"Some of our men thought they would make up a company to protect their propperty … They would move from place to place, have their cooking done at the houses and carried to them … [Jayhawkers] came to our house surrounded it. Demanded my husband. I told them I had not saw him but once in nearly two months … They then gave me thirty minutes to take out what I wanted in the house … They went to the barn … set it on fire … Set fire to the rest of my outhouses … Then next the house … Set fire to ever corner."
Margaret wrote how she was ostracized by some of her neighbors because they feared retribution from the Federals for harboring a secessionist:
"People is not allowed to harber Secessionists nor their property. Any one that shelters me or my Children runs the risk to have their property destroyed and their lives taken. I hid my things out the woods in brushpiles. The day after I moved my things out of the old house their was a company of three hundred came through and burned my last shelter."
Doerschuk, Albert N., and Virginia H. Asbury. “The Hays’ of Westport Who Came West.” The Westport Historical Quarterly 5, no. 2 (September 1969): 7–12.
Hays, Margaret Watts. “The Watts Hays Letters,” January 9, 2018. Link.
Webb, William L. “Colonel Upton Hays.” In Battles and Biographies of Missourians, or, the Civil War Period of Our State, 322–25. Kansas City: Hudson-Kimberly Pub. Co., 1900.