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Quantrill: The Bloodiest Man In American History

Smoke drifts over a scene of murder and pillage as General Thomas Ewing, mounted at left center, observes the execution of his Order No. 11. One Union officer, the painter George Caleb Bingham, was so sickened by the carnage that he told Ewing he would use his brush to make him infamous.

On August 19 three hundred bushwhackers began marching westward from the Blackwater River in Johnson County, Missouri. Along the way they added 150 more men, making them the largest such force to be assembled at one time during the Civil War. Late in the afternoon of August 20 they crossed the Kansas border south of Aubry. The Union post commander spotted them, but instead of alerting the countryside he merely forwarded word of the incursion to district headquarters in Kansas City - a blunder, which proved fatal for many people.

All through the moonless night Quantrill's column rode steadily across the Kansas prairie "like a monstrous snake, creeping upon its prey." At daybreak, August 21, it halted on a hill southeast of Lawrence. Some of his men urged Quantrill to turn back - surely the townspeople had been warned and would be waiting for them. "You can do as you please," replied Quantrill, "I am going into Lawrence!" Then, drawing a revolver, he shouted "Charge!"

Moments later hundreds of longhaired, wild-looking men in slouch hats and sweat-stained shirts pounded down the main street of Lawrence, yelling and shooting. The inhabitants, taken completely by surprise, offered no resistance. Neither did the only soldiers present, two squads of Negro and white recruits who were slaughtered in their tents.

Waving one of the four Colt revolvers he carried in his waistband, he led 450 men into the sleeping antislavery town of Lawrence, shouting, "Kill! Kill! Lawrence must be cleansed, and the only way to cleanse it is to kill! Kill!", soon he saw that the town was his.

Kill they did. His men systematically butchered at least 150 men and boys, most of them unarmed, while their mothers, wives, and daughters were made to watch. (Jim Lane, Quantrill's main target, had managed to escape through a cornfield in his nightshirt.) Then they looted and burned all of the town except the saloon, whose inventory they carried away with them. With a triumphant yell the raiders fanned out, ransacking stores, shops, saloons, and houses, then setting them afire. Every man they encountered they shot down. They did not, however, kill or rape women.

All the while Quantrill enjoyed his return to the town where he had lived as "Charley Hart" and which had driven him away as an outlaw. He ate a hearty breakfast at the hotel of some old friends, then paraded through the streets in a buggy. At 9 a.m. his lookouts reported troops approaching. Quickly the bushwhackers reassembled, then rode out the same way they came in. Behind they left devastation and horror. The business district was in ruins, two hundred houses burned, and the bodies of 150 men sprawled in the streets or under smoldering rubble. An overhanging shroud of smoke darkened the entire town, the "sickening odor of burning flesh" filled the air.

The bushwhackers evaded their wrathful but outnumbered pursuers and by the next morning were back in their favorite haunts in west Missouri. Tactically the raid on Lawrence was a masterpiece, and Quantrill deserves recognition as a highly able cavalry commander. But it was also the most atrocious event of the Civil War. And it gave to Quantrill a reputation that still stands unchallenged - "the bloodiest man in American history."

Ewing's Order No. 11 Nowhere was the looting, burning and murder more vicious and unrestrained than along the Missouri border, which had not seen lasting peace since 1854. Northern and southern guerrillas fought one another there and slaughtered civilians with a murderous abandon unmatched elsewhere in the war. The leader of the Union guerrillas, or Jayhawkers, was James H. Lane, a cadaverous former United States Senator from Kansas, who considered Missourians "wolves, snakes, devils, and, damn their souls, I want to see them cast into a burning hell." He did his conscientious best to cast them there, following in the wake of an invading force of Confederate troops, first to ravage the homes of those settlers who had dared welcome the rebels, then to burn and plunder whole towns. His actions set the bloody pattern for the atrocities that followed: soon Confederate guerrillas, or Bushwhackers, in the Ozarks were shooting and hanging men "with no charge against them except that they had been feeding Union men." The best-known Bushwhacker was William Clarke Quantrill, a transplanted Ohioan and one-time schoolteacher who began his wartime career as a Jayhawker, switched sides, and won a captaincy from the Confederacy for helping to capture Independence, Missouri, for the South in 1861. He then gathered together a band of wild young men, most of them more interested in excitement and plunder than States' Rights, and began to raid northern sympathizers wherever they could be found. Jim Lane, Quantrill vowed, would be burned at the stake. Just four days after Lawrence, Kansas, was ravaged by Quantrill's Confederate guerrillas, the district Union commander, Brigadier General Thomas Ewing, retaliated by a drastic measure designed to cut off the raiders' grass-roots support in the bordering Missouri counties. Ewing's Order No. 11, issued on August 25, 1863, was an eviction notice of stunning scope. It gave civilians in three counties and part of a fourth just 15 days to leave their homes and quit Ewing's command, unless they could prove their loyalty to the Union cause - and few of them could. Scarcely able to grasp what was happening to them, Missourians piled possessions into wagons and set off into the unknown. Chaos was compounded by nightmare when pro-Union guerrillas swept in from Kansas and, joined by some of General Ewing's troops, embarked on an orgy of looting, burning and murder. Ewing's decree virtually wiped out an entire region: the population in Cass County dropped from 10,000 to 600, and Bates County was left all but empty. Yet his strategy of vengeance failed. The Confederate guerrillas subsisted easily on stray cattle and chickens; they retired from Missouri a few months later, but only because of the onset of cold weather. The following year the irregulars returned to operate with undiminished ferocity, enjoying more sympathy from outraged Missourians all across the state than ever before. And at the end of the Civil War, the natural heirs to this sympathy were the ex-guerrillas in the James gang, in whom many aggrieved citizens of the countryside were disposed to see a last unquenchable flame of the Confederate cause. Unable to stop sympathetic settlers from supplying the guerrillas, the Union commander, General Thomas Ewing, Jr., brother-in-law of William Tecumseh Sherman, then issued Order No. 11, forcing from their homes every man, woman, and child living in three Missouri border counties and half of a fourth. Ten thousand people were driven onto the open prairie, while bands of jayhawkers plundered and burned the empty houses they left behind, then slashed at their huddled refugee columns, looting wagons, stealing even wedding rings - the region would be known for years as the Burnt District. "It is heart sickening to see what I have seen here ..." wrote a Union officer who tried to maintain some semblance of order during this forced exodus. "A desolated country and men & women and children, some of them almost naked. Some on foot and some in old wagons. Oh God."

Order No. 11 was the harshest military measure imposed on civilians during the Civil War. Like its predecessor, Order No. 10, it was based on the premise that the bushwhackers' sway could be broken by depriving them of their civilian support.

During the next two weeks a mass exodus took place from the area covered by the order. Marauding by Kansas troops and Red Legs intensified the suffering of the refugees. Ewing's efforts to prevent plundering and suppress the Red Legs proved unavailing.

By September 9 most of Jackson, Cass, and Bates counties was a silent desert dotted by chimneys standing above the charred debris of farmhouses. Yet the bushwhackers remained in their customary hideouts, although forced to stay low during the daytime by heavy Union patrolling. Hams and bacon still hung from the rafters of abandoned smokehouses and the countryside was full of stray cattle and chickens left behind by their owners and overlooked by the Red Legs. Hence the guerrillas had no trouble getting plenty to eat, and Quantrill spent most of his time quite comfortably at a house near Blue Springs with his mistress, Kate King.

Late in September Quantrill decided to head south for the winter - not because of Order No. 11 or pressure from Federal troops-but because cold weather had come early and the season for profitable operations was ending. On October 1, with 400 men, he began marching down the border towards the Indian Territory, crossing after several days into Kansas south of Fort Scott.

On the morning of October 6 Quantrill's scouts reported that there was a small Union fort ahead at Baxter Springs. Sniffing an easy victory, Quantrill sent part of his band under Dave Poole to strike the fort from the south while he moved in with the main body on the other side. Poole, who already was in advance, got there first and attacked, but the ninety-man garrison drove him back with the aid of a cannon.

Thirty minutes later Quantrill emerged from some timber several hundred yards north of the fort. Instantly he drew rein. Approaching down the Fort Scott road was a column of wagons escorted by cavalry. By sheer coincidence he had come upon the headquarters train of Major General James G. Blunt, Union commander of the District of the Frontier!

Blunt's soldiers thought that the bushwhackers, who wore Federal uniforms, were cavalry from Baxter Springs out drilling. Before they realized their mistake Quantrill's men charged, screaming and firing their revolvers. The Union troops broke in panic. Rapidly the better-mounted guerrillas overtook and killed most of them - 89 out of 100. Later the slain were found with their heads pulverized by bullets, their bodies stripped and castrated. Blunt himself escaped only through the speed of his horse.

Quantrill, finding a demijohn of whiskey in Blunt's buggy, proceeded to get drunk - the only time his men ever saw him in that condition. First Lawrence - now Baxter Springs! He had reached the pinnacle of his career, carried there on a wave of blood.

From Baxter Springs the bushwhackers marched through the Indian Territory. On the way, Quantrill informed Sterling Price in the only military report he ever filed that they had killed "about 150 Federal Indians and Negroes." Late in October they crossed the Red River and camped near Sherman, Texas.

On November 2 Price, who now commanded Confederate forces in Arkansas, congratulated "Colonel" Quantrill on his Baxter Springs victory and thanked him for his "gallant struggle" in Missouri. However, he asked for a report on the Lawrence raid so that "your acts should appear in their true light before the world." Like most Southerners, Price discounted Northern stories of wholesale butchery at Lawrence, but he was worried by the charges against the bushwhackers and also uneasy over their "no quarter" policy.

Indeed, the Confederate military authorities did not know quite what to make of Quantrill and his men. Brigadier General Henry McCulloch, commander of the Sub-District of North Texas, who from his headquarters at Bonham had the closest view of them, definitely did not like what he saw. Their mode of warfare, he wrote Lieutenant General Edmund Kirby Smith, head of the Trans-Mississippi Department, "is like that of the savages," and he recommended that the Confederate Government disavow their acts and tell them to stay clear of the Army.

Kirby Smith, however, disregarded McCulloch's advice. The Trans-Mississippi needed fighting men, and whatever else they were the bushwhackers were that. Hence he recommended that McCulloch employ "Colonel Quantrill" to round up deserters, large numbers of whom lurked in the hills and forests of north Texas, a region where many of the settlers were German immigrants and opposed to secession.

Until the Confederate conscription law of 1862 most of the Texas Unionists remained passive. But when faced with the prospect of being forced into the Rebel army, hundreds of them fled to the North or else formed bands, which defied enlistment officers and harassed Secessionists. In the summer of 1862 they set in motion a "peace plot" whereby north Texas would break away from the rest of the state. The Confederates suppressed the conspiracy ruthlessly, hanging sixty-five "renegados" in one day at Gainesville and imprisoning scores of others. Later, in the spring of 1863, another attempted Unionist "counterrevolution" was put down by a regiment of Texas partisan rangers made up of veteran Indian fighters who "never took prisoners but did take scalps." Even so, the "Tories" continued to be so strong in north Texas that McCulloch expressed fear that they might take over the region completely.

Hence he adopted Kirby Smith's suggestion and sent Quantrill's men after deserters. But not only did they fail to accomplish their assignment, they themselves began marauding in and around Sherman, which they shot up during a drunken Christmas Day spree (Quantrill apologized and paid for the damages). Thoroughly disgusted, McCulloch early in 1864 proposed that the Missourians be disarmed and arrested. They were, he declared, "but one shade better than highwaymen."

Civil War Kansas Reaping the Whirlwind. Castel. Recognized as a key study on the war in the trans-Mississippi West, this book describes the political, military, social, and economic events of the state's first four years. You'll read about the Kansas-Missouri border conflict; the operations of the Missouri guerrillas under Quantrill; the Union and Confederate military campaigns in Missouri, Arkansas, the Indian Territory, and Kansas itself; and more.

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