William Quantrill

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William Clarke Quantrill of Quantrill's Raiders
William Clarke Quantrill of Quantrill's Raiders

William Clarke Quantrill (July 31, 1837 – June 6, 1865), was a Confederate guerrilla leader during the American Civil War.

Contents

[edit] Early life

Quantrill, the oldest of 8 children, was born at Canal Dover (now just Dover), Ohio, on July 31, 1837. His father was Thomas Quantrill, formerly of Hagerstown, Maryland. His mother, Caroline Cornelia Clark, was a native of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. They were married on October 11, 1836, and moved to Canal Dover the following December. Thomas Quantrill died December 7, 1854, apparently of tuberculosis. [1].

Little is known of Quantrill’s life in Dover, though it appears that he was raised by his mother in a Unionist family, however he always had a loathing for it Free-Soil beliefs. After several years working as a teacher, Quantrill traveled to Utah Territory with the Federal Army as a teamster in 1858 as part of the Utah War, but left the army there to try his hand at professional gambling. In 1859, he moved to Lawrence, Kansas, and again taught.

[edit] Guerrilla leader

When the Civil War began in 1861, Quantrill claimed he was a native of Maryland and may have joined the Missouri State Guard. However, his dislike of army discipline led him to form an independent guerrilla band by the end of that year. This bushwhacker company began as a force of no more than a dozen men who staged raids into Kansas, harassed Union soldiers, raided pro-Union towns, robbed mail coaches, and attacked Unionist civilians. At times they skirmished with the Jayhawkers, undisciplined Union militia from Kansas who raided into Missouri. The Union commanders declared him to be an outlaw, even though Quantrill apparently did secure a Confederate commission as a captain of partisan rangers. When the Union Army ordered all captured guerrillas to be shot, Quantrill ceased taking prisoners and started doing the same. He quickly became known to his opponents as a feared Rebel raider, and to his supporters as a dashing, free-spirited hero.

[edit] Lawrence Massacre

Main article: Lawrence Massacre

The most significant event in Quantrill's guerrilla career took place on August 21, 1863. Lawrence had been seen for years as the stronghold of the anti-slavery forces in Kansas and as a base of operation for incursions into Missouri by Jayhawkers and pro-Union forces. It was also the home of James H. Lane, a Senator infamous in Missouri for his staunch anti-slavery views and also a leader of the Jayhawkers. These people had plundered Missouri for years prior to the war, and Lawrence, the center of their operations, was reputed to contain all the goods looted from Missouri during those years. Moreover, during the weeks immediately preceding the raid, Union General Thomas Ewing, Jr., had ordered the detention of any civilians giving aid to Quantrill's Raiders. Several female relatives of the guerrillas were imprisoned in a makeshift jail in Kansas City, Missouri. On August 14, the building collapsed, killing four young women and seriously injuring others. Among the casualties was Josephine Anderson, sister of one of Quantrill's key guerrilla allies, William T. "Bloody Bill" Anderson. Another of Anderson's sisters, Mary, was permanently crippled in the collapse. Quantrill's men believed the collapse was deliberate, and the event fanned them into a fury. Many historians, however, believe that Quantrill had actually planned to raid Lawrence in advance of the building's collapse, in retaliation for earlier Jayhawker attacks[2] as well as the burning of Osceola, Missouri.

Early on the morning of August 21, Quantrill descended from Mount Oread and attacked Lawrence at the head of a combined force of as many as 450 guerrillas. Senator Lane, a prime target of the raid, managed to escape through a cornfield in his nightshirt, but the bushwhackers killed about 200 men and boys of fighting age, dragging many from their homes to execute them before their families. When Quantrill's men rode out at 9 a.m., most of Lawrence's buildings were burning, including all but two businesses. His raiders looted indiscriminately and robbed the town's bank.

On August 25, in retaliation for the raid, General Ewing authorized General Order No. 11 (not to be confused with General Ulysses S. Grant's General Order of the same name). The edict ordered the depopulation of three and a half Missouri counties along the Kansas border (with the exception of a few designated towns), forcing tens of thousands of civilians to abandon their homes. Union troops marched through behind them, burning buildings, torching planted fields and shooting down livestock to deprive the guerrillas of food, fodder, and support. The area was so thoroughly devastated that it became known thereafter as the "Burnt District." However, Quantrill and his men rode south to Texas, where they passed the winter with the Confederate forces.

[edit] Last years

Grave of Captain William Quantrill
Grave of Captain William Quantrill

While in Texas, Quantrill and his 400 men quarreled. His once-large band broke up into several smaller guerrilla companies. One was led by his notable lieutenant, William "Bloody Bill" Anderson, whose men came to be known for tying the scalps of slain unionists to the saddles and bridles of their horses. Quantrill joined them briefly in the fall of 1864 during fighting north of the Missouri River.

In the spring of 1865, now leading only a few dozen men, Quantrill staged a series of raids in western Kentucky. He rode into a Union ambush on May 10 near Taylorsville, Kentucky, and received a gunshot wound to the chest. He died from it on June 6 at the age of 27.[3]

As is often the case with famous figures, fanciful stories of his survival spread. One apocryphal story from British Columbia in Canada involves a recluse living in an isolated cabin on Quatsino Sound on northern Vancouver Island late in the 19th Century. Inquiries after the recluse allegedly were made in Victoria by unidentified Americans. The men claimed the recluse was Quantrill and later said they had killed him to avenge the deaths of fellow Union soldiers.

[edit] Marriage

During the war, Quantrill met fourteen-year-old Sarah Katherine King at her parents' farm in Blue Springs, Missouri. They married and she lived in camp with Quantrill and his men. At the time of his death, she was seventeen.[4]

[edit] Legacy

Quantrill’s actions remain controversial to this day. Some historians view him as an opportunistic, bloodthirsty outlaw; James M. McPherson, one of America's most prominent experts on the Civil War today, calls him and Anderson "pathological killers" who "murdered and burned out Missouri Unionists."[5] Others continue to regard him as a daring horse soldier and a local folk hero. Some of Quantrill's celebrity later rubbed off on other ex-Raiders — Jesse and Frank James, and Cole and Jim Younger — who went on after the war to apply Quantrill's hit-and-run tactics to bank and train robbery. The William Clarke Quantrill Society continues to research and celebrate his life and deeds.

According to Lost Treasure and similar related (and not very accurate) magazines, Quantrill allegedly cached treasure worth millions of U.S. dollars all over the area he operated in. Just where he is supposed to have obtained this fortune is never made clear.

[edit] In fiction

  • Dark Command (1940), in which John Wayne opposes former schoolteacher turned guerrilla fighter "William Cantrell" in the early days of the Civil War. William Cantrell is a thinly veiled portrayal of William Quantrill. Ironically, in the movie True Grit (1969), it is strongly implied that Wayne's character Rooster Cogburn rode with Quantrill during the Civil War.
  • Renegade Girl (1946) deals with tension between Unionists and Confederates in Missouri.
  • The Stranger Wore a Gun (1953), in which a former Quantrill Raider becomes bank robber until his old comrades catch up with him.
  • Arizona Raiders (1965), in which Audie Murphy plays an ex-Quantrill Raider who is assigned the task of tracking down his former comrades.
  • A Belgian comic series, Les Tuniques Bleues ("The Blue Coats"), is set during the American Civil War. The emphasis is on humour, though there is also a good deal of drama and bodies are shown littered all over battlefields. An adventure published in 1994 had the main protagonists, Sergeant Cornelius Chesterfield and Corporal Blutch of the Union Army, confronting Quantrill and his henchmen Jesse and Frank James. Quantrill is depicted as twisted, even psychotic. He insists on being called "Mister Quantrill" and furiously slaps people who fail to show what he considers proper respect. He especially expresses loathing for people who steal items from dead corpses, even though it was he and his men who produced those corpses in the first place. Nevertheless, he is still shown as a brilliant strategist.
  • The USA Network's television show Psych, in an episode entitled "Weekend Warriors", featured a Civil War reenactment that included William Quantrill. The episode spoke about Quantrill's actions in Lawrence, but the reenactment featured his death at the hands of a fictional nurse Jenny Winslow, whose family was killed at Lawrence.
  • Quantrill's Lawrence Massacre of 1863 is depicted in Spielberg's mini-series "Into the West" (2005)
  • Depicted in Robert Schenkkan's play The Kentucky Cycle.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ William G. Cutler's History of the State of Kansas, Miami County Part 2
  2. ^ Paul Wellman, A Dynasty of Western Outlaws, 1961
  3. ^ Kentucky Historical Society
  4. ^ Sarah King Head at Find a Grave
  5. ^ James M. McPherson: "Was It More Restrained Than You Think?", The New York Review of Books, February 14, 2008

[edit] External links