America’s Civil War: Missouri and Kansas

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Quantrill and his followers sacked Lawrence on August 21, 1863. The deed was so dramatic, so bestial, and of such magnitude that it caught the imagination of the public and, in the end, made more of Quantrill than was really there. Other guerrilla leaders such as Bill Anderson and Jo Shelby accomplished more militarily. Quantrill’s raid, conversely, symbolized the senseless violence that characterized Bushwhacking at its worst, and perhaps for that reason more than any other has been granted a permanent niche in American folklore.

Revenge for Union atrocities, real or imagined, was one stimulus for the Lawrence raid. A three-story brick building in Kansas City was used by the Federals as a prison for women alleged to have aided Bushwhackers. On August 14, the building collapsed; among the five women who died were the sisters of Bushwhackers Bill Anderson and John McCorkle. Quantrill used this incident to fire up support for an attack on Lawrence, plans for which until then had drawn a cool reception even from his hard-bitten associates.

There were other motives for the raid, as well. Loot, of course, was always a motivation among Bushwhackers. To some extent, there was also the desire to show the Federals that they could operate with impunity in Union territory. Quantrill’s need to invigorate his flagging support was another. And information that Jim Lane was in Lawrence whetted Quantrill’s appetite. He wanted Lane’s scalp–figuratively or literally–very badly. If it were to be literally, teenager Archie Clement would be delighted to please his leader. Archie’skelpt’ more than one dead Union cavalryman and beheaded another.

Quantrill, Bill Anderson and George Todd led 450 men into Lawrence at 7 a.m. on August 21. They carried lists of specific targets for assassination, but they also heeded Quantrill’s final instructions to ‘kill every man big enough to carry a gun.’

The first Kansan to die was the Reverend S.S. Snyder, shot in his yard as he milked his cow. At 9 a.m. the Bushwhackers rode out, saddlebags laden with booty, many of the raiders swaying from the effects of newly liberated spirits. In 120 minutes, they had devastated the dusty town of 2,000 inhabitants and killed 150 of its male citizens. Many were gunned down before their wives and children; others died trapped in their flaming homes. Then the raiders torched the entire community, burning $2 million worth of property.

Jim Lane was, indeed, at Lawrence that day. The gaunt spellbinder heard the raiders coming and accurately guessed they would be looking very particularly for him. In his nightshirt, he ran from his house and hid in a corn patch. He survived then, as he did so often through his bizarre political career, on quick wit and quicker action, with no compunctions about his public appearance. Better a live coward than a dead hero, he reasoned.

Ironically, Quantrill’s well-known and senseless raid on Lawrence was followed six weeks later by an almost forgotten but militarily more significant encounter. Leading his men southward to winter in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), Quantrill was drawn to the Union outpost at Baxter Springs, Kan., just west of Joplin, Mo. Here, on October 6, his forces captured the small fort and a wagon train of Union Maj. Gen. James Blunt’s headquarters entourage. Blunt escaped to nearby Fort Scott, but 90 of his soldiers were captured and massacred, and Blunt was relieved of command. A drunken Quantrill boasted that he had accomplished in one day what Confederate Colonel Jo Shelby and Maj. Gen. John Marmaduke had failed for years to do: whip Blunt. The assertion was true, but it also emphasized Quantrill’s increasingly desperate need to counter through acclaim the growing apathy and disgust of many of his own followers.

By the third year of the war, a vast area of Missouri had been burned and depopulated. The western counties closest to Kansas were the hardest hit. Many former residents were either dead, had fled before torch and ambuscade, or had been evicted as a result of Union Brig. Gen. Thomas Ewing’s notorious Order Number 11 of August 1863, which mandated the removal of all western counties inhabitants and the burning of their homes so that they could not harbor Confederate guerrillas.

Typical of the towns affected by Ewing’s order was Nevada, about 25 miles east of Fort Scott. So many guerrillas lived in and around the little community that it had become known to Unionists as the ‘Bushwhacker capital.’ On May 24, 1863, it was the site of an attack on a Federal militia party by Bushwhackers led by Captain William Marchbanks and ‘Pony’ Hill. Two days later, reinforced Union militia returned to Nevada and burned it. In some ways, Order Number 11 simply confirmed what had already been happening.

For all its infamy, Order Number 11 did achieve one goal: it deprived Bushwhackers of the protection, nurture and victims that fed their depredations. They simply took their business elsewhere. Elsewhere was ‘Little Dixie,’ the area flanking the rich valley of the Missouri River. Little Dixie’s presence in the northern half of Missouri derived from a topographic peculiarity. As settlers, mostly Southerners, moved north and west into Missouri, the Scottish-Irish ‘hillbillies’ from the upper South naturally gravitated toward the mountainous area of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas. Lowland planters from the deep South crossed the path of the highlanders, settled in the fertile river basin, and financed pillared mansions with the income from slave-raised hemp and cotton.

Despite desperate Union efforts to suppress Confederate Bushwhackers, Little Dixie witnessed almost daily–even into the war’s last year–the savagery of guerrilla warfare. Take, for example, the three months from mid-July to mid-October 1864. By then, moody Bill Quantrill’s behavior had become too bizarre for many of his own men. Some adopted Bill Anderson as their leader; others followed George Todd and John Thrailkill. Quantrill was left to wander at the head of a small band of loyalists.

Bill Anderson had grown up in Huntsville. Hometown allegiance, however, apparently did not deter Bill from raiding the place on July 15, robbing merchants and a bank of $45,000 and shooting down a passerby imprudent enough to try to stop the raiders. Anderson did, at least, make his boys return money stolen from people with whom he had gone to school.

Two days later, Anderson led 35 followers into nearby Rocheport, savaging the town and terrifying its inhabitants. On July 23, 100 of his raiders gutted the railroad station in Renick. The next day, the Bushwhackers ambushed and dispersed a pursuing company of the 17th Illinois Cavalry. Two slain Federals were found scalped. Attached to the collar of one was a note: ‘You come to hunt bush whackers. Now you are skelpt. Clemyent Skept you.’ Eighteen-year-old Archie had left his mad calling card.

Following the engagement, Anderson’s men moved north into Shelby County, where they destroyed the Salt River railroad bridge and torched depots at Shelbina and Lakenan. Then, in August, Anderson attacked the riverboat Omaha near Glasgow and raided Rocheport again, shooting up more boats and snarling all river traffic.

Todd and Thrailkill, for their part, moved to Keytesville on September 20, capturing the Union garrison and burning the courthouse. During the same month, Anderson’s men robbed 13 stagecoaches in Howard County. On September 23, Todd joined Anderson. The 300 guerrillas thus mustered together wiped out a 12-wagon Federal train near Rocheport, capturing 18,000 rounds of ammunition and killing 15 Union troops. The combined forces, briefly joined by Quantrill, then attacked Fayette, where they were repulsed by Federal soldiers barricaded in the courthouse.

Seeking revenge for this setback, Anderson’s guerrillas raided Centralia on September 27. They prowled the village for three hours, looting stores and terrorizing citizens. Drunken Bushwhackers burned the depot, and the arrival of a stagecoach from Columbia gave them an opportunity for more plunder. A westbound train from St. Charles provided unexpected bounty: 25 unarmed Union soldiers. The helpless Federals were lined up on the platform and stripped of their uniforms. Anderson ordered Clement to ‘muster out’ the naked and half-naked prisoners. Little Archie, a pistol in each hand, gleefully began to shoot them, and the fusillade was joined by the other guerrillas. The event became known as the Centralia Massacre.

A Union detachment chased the fleeing guerrillas, who turned at bay outside Centralia and killed 114 of their pursuers. David Pool proved that Archie Clement was not the only barbaric Bushwhacker. Pool chose to enumerate fallen enemies by jumping from one body to another. ‘If they are dead, I can’t hurt them, ‘he asserted. ‘I cannot count ‘em good without stepping on ‘em.’

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Tags: 19th Century, America's Civil War, American Civil War, Historical Conflicts

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