The Missouri Guerilla Campaigns of the American Civil War were arguably an extension of the Bleeding Kansas violence that had taken place in the decade prior to the first shots at Fort Sumter. Prior to 1861, anti-slavery Free-Staters of Kansas, led by the infamous John Brown and others raided freely across the border of neighboring slave state Missouri where Border Ruffians, led by William Quantrill and others, intercepted them. The violence back and forth caused nearly two hundred casualties all told and set the stage for how combat in the Civil War between Kansas and Missouri would be conducted. Once the war became official, Free-Staters became Jayhawkers/Reglegs and Border Ruffians became Bushwhackers/Partisan Rangers.
The Guerilla War in overview
Both sides played by their own rules books, many Partisans used guerilla warfare tactics to raid Union and pro-union civilians sometimes for personal gain. In the Centralia Massacre, 22 unarmed Union soldiers were executed and scalped by raider Bloody Bill Anderson. Their ‘noble’ Kansas opponents in the Jayhawker regiments did the same in Missouri on an often-epic scale. The town of Osceola Missouri was sacked and burned to the ground and a number of town leaders executed by Kansas troops under Jim Lane of Lawrence. Lawrence was seen as the root of Missouri’s troubles and it was Lawrence that was targeted by Confederate guerilla leader Quantrill to pay. Colonel Quantrill led some 300-400 guerillas in a daring raid for revenge on this Union town in August 1863.
Review of Quantrill at Lawrence
The popular quote often attributed to Winston Churchill is that ‘History is written by the Victors’, and this has never been as true as in the case of Quantrill’s raid in Lawrence. A number of sources, publications, and popular histories of the War Between the States have covered the engagement in question from an undoubtedly pro-Union stance. To paraphrase these past works would be something as such: “The evil murderer William Quantrill rode into the humble peace-loving town of Lawrence Kansas with a band of pirates on stolen horses to murder, rape and pillage indiscriminately the doe-eyed innocents on the pretext of a war action”.
Retired USMC Master Sergeant Paul R Petersen, a noted lecturer on the Kansas-Missouri border wars, has written Quantrill and Lawrence: The Untold Story after exhaustive research. He most definitely did not take a pro-Union point of view in his work. He uses testimony from victims of the raiders to scrutinize the causes of the raid, investigate the previous accounts, quantify the events against the actual statistics and biographical sketches of those involved, and give a much broader sense of the full story than in many other accounts.
He decisively proves how Lawrence was one of the most heavily armed and defended towns in the world, shattering the myth that it was a sleeping smurf village. He pinpoints those on Quantrill’s Wanted Men lists as Jayhawker leaders and instigators who, more often than not, had bloody hands of their own in houses furnished with looted treasures from Missouri homes, and not peaceful farmers eating cereal in their simple table. Finally Petersen details the epilogue to the raid, where instead of padding the guerilla confederate pockets with the funds seized in Lawrence, it is detailed that Quantrill treasurer Charles Higbee distributed some $75,000 from the towns banks ala-Robin Hood to the families Missouri sessesh.
The only distraction in the book however is the author’s seemingly absolute refusal to be either objective of Quantrill’s men or impartial towards the Kansas fighters. He routinely refers to Kansas Union men as Jayhawkers and Red legs and never to Quantrill’s raiders as Bushwhackers. He often elaborates on how Lane's Jayhawkers are murderous killers but never once mentions Anderson at Centralia in any context even though the man himself is mentioned in detail more than twenty times. The nickname “Bloody Bill” in fact is not even mentioned in the book at all, even though it is the guerilla captain’s most well known moniker.
Over all, Petersen’s work is definitely a revelation on this well-documented raid into Union territory during the Civil War and is most assuredly 'the other side of the story'.
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