In border states where the issue of to secede or not
to secede had never been definitively settled, the Civil War was a
precarious time. With territory claimed by both the Union and the
Confederacy, and citizens themselves at odds, guerrilla warfare was
commonplace, and citizens were often harrassed by both the side they
opposed and the side with which they sympathized.
Of the
bushwhackers who fought to gain control of border states, none were as
notorious or feared as Quantrill's Raiders, who supported the
Confederacy by terrorizing Union sympathizers on both sides of the
Missouri-Kansas border for the duration of the war, and gave birth to
the gang led by Frank and Jesse James.
Missouri was one of the
mostly hotly contested border states. Missouri had entered the Union in
1821 as slave state under the Missouri Compromise, which held that no
state north of Missouri's southern Arkansas border could enter as a
slave state. The compromise was stricken down with the 1854
Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed those states to decide their own
status as slaveholding or free. The complication in the Kansas-Nebraska
Act for Missouri slaveholders was the fact that Federal law allowed
slaves who entered free states their freedom; what resulted was
outright war between Missouri slaveholders who wanted a slaveholding
Kansas, and Kansans who wanted a free state.
By 1860 Missouri was
divided almost equally between slaveholders and non-slaveholders; as a
result, the decision was made to remain with the Union but to also
remain neutral, not supplying soldiers or supplies to either region.
This neutrality was hardly peaceful; by 1862 guerrilla warfare was
rampant throughout the state as both Union and Confederate sympathizers
fought to gain control both of Missouri and Kansas.
Of these guerrilla warriors, none was more feared than those led by William Clarke Quantrill.
Quantrill's
renown was due to his impartiality; he attacked both Union officials
and soldiers and civilians alike. While Quantrill and his men fought
Union installations in Missouri by attacking patrol regiments and
supply trains, they directed as much of their ire at civilians with
Union sympathies.
Although he was not sanctioned by the
Confederacy, Confederate generals turned a blind eye to Quantrill and
his band, who made their work easier with their deliberate and
coordinated efforts to destroy the Union presence in Missouri and
Kansas; Quantrill and his men were organized not unlike a military
regiment, and relied on military strategies like assigning rank to
members of the group, planing attacks and escapes when going to battle
with their foes, even up to taking prisoners, which Quantrill did until
the Union Army began shooting guerrillas rather than arresting them, at
which point Quantrill began to do the same for both Union soldiers and
civilians alike.
In an attempt to drive these pro-Union citizens
from Missouri and Kansas, Quantrill and his followers would attack
towns and farms known to be Union. Their most infamous attack came to
be known as the "Lawrence Massacre." Leading as many as 450 guerrillas,
Quantrill descended on Lawrence on August 21, 1863, and before he was
done, almost 200 men and boys lay dead. Many of these men and boys were
very young or very aged, and were executed in front of their families.
The
executions and armed skirmish were not enough; Quantrill and his men
burned nearly the entire town to the ground, after robbing and looting
the bank and other businesses. Leaving a path of devastation behind,
Quantrill and his followers went to Texas, where they joined
Confederate forces there.
By the spring of 1865, Quantrill's band
of guerrillas had dwindled to less than twenty, but nonetheless, they
made their way to western Kentucky, raiding Union sympathizers there.
On May 10, Quantrill and his men were ambushed by Union soldiers, and
Quantrill received a gunshot wound to the chest. He died on June 6.
Quantrill
and his Raiders, as they came to be known in the years after the war,
were reviled as bloodthirsty madmen by those who supported the Union
and beloved by Confederates as brave and heroic warriors.
One of
Quantrill's lasting contributions to history was the James-Younger
Gang, led by brothers Frank and Jesse James and Cole and Jim Younger,
who used their training as guerrillas in Quantrill's Raiders to rob
banks and trains throughout the west in the years after the war.
