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Lawrence, the second largest town in Kansas, was the headquarters of the anti-slavery movement during the Kansas-Missouri Troubles (1854-1857) when pro and anti-slavery settlers struggled for control of Kansas. When the Nebraska and Kansas Territories were opened to settlement in 1854, the government announced that the population of each territory would decide if slavery would be allowed when it entered the Union. Since Nebraska did not border any slave states, it was expected to become a free state but Kansas bordered Missouri, a slave state, so it became a fierce battleground. There was a fragile balance between free and slave-holding states in the Senate, and if both Nebraska and Kansas entered as free states, that balance would be destroyed. Given the stakes, the competition soon turned violent and zealots based in Missouri would kill any settlers who could not prove that they supported slavery, which provoked retaliatory raids by abolitionists, so Kansas soon earned the nickname “Bleeding Kansas.” Hundreds of people were massacred, but the anti-slavery settlers won in the end and Kansas joined the Union as a free state.

Violence died down in 1859 following a massive drought but when the Civil War started in 1861 the cross border raiding returned with a vengeance. Although it was hated as a symbol of the anti-slavery movement, Lawrence was spared because it was too deep in Kansas to be a target but the repeated rampages of guerrillas based on the other side of the Missouri border led to the removal of Brigadier General James Blunt, the ineffective Union commander of the Kansas military district, in the late spring of 1863. His replacement, Brigadier General Ewing Jr., constructed a series of posts along the most dangerous part of the border in an attempt to prevent guerrillas from slipping into Kansas.

When a building in Lawrence housing seventeen Missouri women who had been arrested as Confederate spies collapsed on August 14, killing five and seriously wounding the rest, guerrilla leader William Quantrill saw an opportunity to regain control of his former subordinates, who were now leading their own bands. Despite the danger and likelihood of failure, he persuaded them to agree to lead a massive raid on Lawrence, partially because several of them were related to the women.

Despite the war, Lawrence was a booming, bustling town with three thousand people. It had a small garrison of raw black recruits and young militia who were actually too young to serve, but no one worried because Lawrence had never been attacked. In fact, the militia’s guns were stored in the armory to ensure that they were not damaged through lack of care, so the raiders would not have to face several hundred militiamen.

On August 18, 1863, Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson gathered 300 men near the border. By chance, they ran into a force of 105 Confederate recruits and their commander eagerly agreed to take part in the raid. Fifty more guerrillas joined just before the border, so Quantrill had 450 men. Fortunately for them, the commander of the nearest Union outpost, Captain Joshua Pike, was incompetent. He did not engage the guerrillas because he did not have enough troops, but he refused to even follow them. While he did notify the two outposts to either side, he neglected to send messengers to Lawrence. Immediately after receipt of Pike’s message, Captain Charles Coleman, commander of a nearby post, took his eighty men out to pursue the raiders, and took command of Pike’s men as well, which swelled his force to 180 men. A messenger reached Ewing’s HQ in Kansas City around midnight but Ewing was not there, so his second-in-command, Major Preston Plumb, took the initiative to lead the garrison of fifty men towards Lawrence.

Coleman initially found it difficult to find Quantrill’s trail in the dark but after a while they simply followed the trail of dead bodies. The guerrillas were looking for guides but they still took the time to kill any pro-Union men or soldiers they found on the way. Hundreds of men riding along and occasionally banging on doors attracted attention, so several people who lived outside Lawrence attempted to warn the town but did not get there in time.

After riding for thirty-six hours the raiders were exhausted but they reached their target just before dawn at 5:15am on August 21, 1863. The guerrillas rode in determined to sack the town, and kill any male old enough to carry a gun. The young militia men were slaughtered and the officer in charge of the black soldiers was shot for arming blacks, but his men had enough warning to escape across the river. A detachment of Union soldiers was based on the other side of the river but they were far too outnumbered to risk crossing the river. However, any raiders that went near the river were shot at.

Once the garrison had been eliminated, the men split off in pre-arranged groups to ransack the town and close off the exit points. A death list had been prepared and anyone on it was killed. Although it was a large town, none of the residents could fight back because the mayor had forbidden guns within the city limits, even personal guns. Bodies began to pile up in the street but the residents of the hotel had surrendered, and were spared. Guerrillas rampaged through the streets burning buildings and shooting any men they found. Wives and children saw their husbands and fathers killed in front of them, although a few women saved their husbands by hiding them. Some raiders did not burn houses, or allowed the women to first take out the valuables. The raiders forced the clerks of the town’s largest clothing store to fit them out with the latest fashions, and then shot the clerks. Senator Jim Lane was first on the death list but he escaped by jumping out of a rear window and hiding in the cornfield behind his house, which was looted and then burned.

At 9am, one of Qantrill’s lookouts at the edge of the town saw Plumb’s men approaching. Unknown to either Plumb or Quantrill, Coleman was seven miles behind with 180 men. Quantrill immediately ordered the men to retreat, while giving Bill Gregg and twenty men an hour to collect any stragglers. One drunken guerrilla who waited too long was shot because he went in the wrong direction and he was the first guerrilla to die on the raid.
 
Senator Lane led a posse after Quantrill, and even though he caught up with Quantrill’s rearguard he held back because the posse was heavily outnumbered. However, the knowledge that there was organized pursuit forced the raiders to move quickly instead of lingering to burn more homes along the way. Plumb and Coleman finally encountered each other at 10:30 am. Soon after, Lane tried to take command of the Union forces, but Plumb was not impressed by his authority as a former major-general in the militia. The result was that the two men engaged in a lengthy shouting match instead of chasing Quantrill until Plumb finally ordered an attack which was thrown back by the rearguard under George Todd. Quantrill’s men were drooping with fatigue, especially as they came down after the adrenalin rush but Plumb’s men were hardly in better shape since they had been riding all night. Fortunately, eighty fresh militia and farmers appeared, and eighty of the least tired soldiers were assigned to Lieutenant Cyrus Leland, Jr, who was told to keep up the pursuit in the hope that the guerrillas would not have the opportunity to disappear until reinforcements arrived. Leland’s men made attack after attack but Todd’s rear guard kept throwing them back, although he lost four guerrillas in the process.

At one point, Lt. Colonel Charles Clark set up an ambush at a creek that lay across Qauntrill’s escape route, knowing that the guerrillas’ exhausted horses would rush towards the water, but Quantrill saw the trap, avoided it, and the trap was almost sprung on Major Plumb’s troops. As the senior officer, Colonel Clark took command. Plumb and Coleman’s forces were completely worn out but even though other units of soldiers and militia had recently arrived, Clark ordered all of the men to rest, and refused to renew pursuit until everyone had recovered. Unlike Clark, Quantrill only let the raiders have brief naps, and forced them to keep moving. Clark only permitted his force to start moving again at 3am the next day, but they were so far behind Quantrill that they had no chance of catching them.

The guerrillas finally made it back to Missouri, where they rested a bit and divided the loot, but a force of Union cavalry was moving towards them, so the raiders had to move deeper into Missouri. Almost a hundred of the guerrillas scattered and hid nearby because they were too tired to go on or their horses could not continue, and many were found and executed, along with anyone caught sheltering them. The remaining three hundred men with Quantrill ran into 320 Missouri cavalry under Lt. Colonel Bazel Lazear, but after a short battle, Lazear chose not to pursue the retreating bushwhackers.

Two thirds of the residents of Lawrence had lost their homes, while almost all of the businesses had been destroyed. 185 men and boys were killed during the raid, and most of the bodies were so badly burnt as to be unrecognizable. The dead had to be buried immediately, and since there were not enough coffins, 53 bodies were buried in a single, large trench. Once the dead were in the ground, the survivors began rebuilding their town.

General Ewing had hopes of a political career after the war and since Lane was the most powerful politician in Kansas, he had to agree to Lane’s demand to depopulate much of the Missouri border region or Ewing would lose his command because of the Lawrence massacre, so the people of Missouri would suffer greatly for the raid as well. General Order No. 11, issued on August 25, forced the depopulation of roughly three thousand square miles of western Missouri. Any resident who could not prove loyalty to the Union had to leave within fifteen days. Almost no one was able to prove loyalty, so every building was burned to the ground, and 20,000 families were forced to leave their homes. Since most of the men were away fighting, the huge task of moving all of each family’s possessions was usually left to women, children and old men. No assistance was provided and those who traveled south found that the Confederacy lacked the resources to provide for them.

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Related Movies:

Dark Command (1940)
Directed by Raoul Walsh, starring Claire Trevor and John Wayne
Bob Seton, a Texas cowboy, beats out local schoolteacher Will Cantrell (William Quantrill) for the job of marshall of Lawrence shortly before the Civil War starts. The bitter Cantrell forms a band of lawless guerrillas that rampage through Kansas until Seton learns that they plan to attack Lawrence.

Ride With The Devil (1999)
Directed by Ang Lee, starring Tobey Maguire and Skeet Ulrich
A young Missouri man joins the Bushwhackers, irregular guerrillas loyal to the South, but as he sees his friends die, he gradually tires of the killing and savagery. (please click here to read the review)

Further Reading:

Quantrill’s War: The Life and Times of William Clarke Quantrill 1837-1865-Duane Schultz, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

Schultz has produced a well-written, detailed book about Quantrill that shows how he became a savage raider and explains how the chaotic times enabled him to transform himself from a petty outlaw to the leader of a large band of bushwhackers. Almost a third of the book is devoted to the reasons behind the raid on Lawrence, the raid itself and the pursuit of the guerrillas afterwards, which is fitting since the raid is what made Quantrill famous or rather infamous. Schultz succeeds in walking the delicate line between being too gruesome and presenting the horror of the raid through the eyes of the witnesses. Relating the huge number of firsthand experiences makes you understand how thorough the raiders were in their determination to kill any male old enough to carry a gun. While the focus of the book is naturally Quantrill, the author also presents the exploits of the other leading members of Quantrill’s guerrillas, especially Bloody Bill Anderson, George Todd and Cole Younger, showing both the difficulty of leading so many violently inclined men and how Quantrill gradually lost his position as leader of the group.

Black Flag: Guerrilla Warfare on the Western Border, 1861-1865-Thomas Goodrich, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995.

A large portion of the book is composed of personal accounts which enable the reader to have a firsthand experience of the war. The book also provides a large number of pictures so that the reader can match the name of an eye-witness to a face. However, since it is a slim volume of 164 pages, there is a lack of detailed background needed to make it easier to understand the events.

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