GUERRILLA WARFARE 1861-1866

Quantrill's Raiders were a loosely organized force of pro-Confederate bushwhackers who fought in the American Civil War under the leadership of William Clarke Quantrill. The name "Quantrill's Raiders" seems to have been attached to them long after the war, when the veterans would hold reunions.



William Clarke Quantrill, Confederate Guerrilla Leader



Origins

Missouri was fertile ground for the outbreak of guerrilla warfare in late 1861. Secessionists had already been organized to some extent by the proslavery "Border Ruffian" movement of the 1850s, in which Missourians crossed the border into the Kansas Territory in an effort to make it a slave state. Unionists were less well organized, but the populace was nevertheless deeply divided.



The Territory of Kansas 1854 - 1861




In 1861, pro-Union abolitionist and regular U.S. army commander Nathaniel Lyon, with the help of German immigrants living in Missouri succeeded in forcing pro-Southern forces known as the Missouri State Guard under the command of the Missouri Governor Claiborne Jackson and General Sterling Price, across the state, from St. Louis to Springfield, Missouri.


Nathaniel Lyon (July 14, 1818 – August 10, 1861) was the first Union general to be killed in the American Civil War


Lyon and Frank Blair a St. Louis politician, also effectively cut-off all routes south, preventing Missourians from traveling in that direction to join the Confederate army. These swift actions trapped pro-Southern Missourians in the state and behind enemy lines. Missouri became occupied by pro-Union forces. Men trapped in the state fought any way they could. Loose organizations of pro-Southern men were called partisans, irregulars, guerillas, bushwhackers and rangers.



Claiborne Fox Jackson (April 4, 1806 – December 6, 1862) - lawyer, soldier, and politician. He was the 15th Governor of Missouri in 1861, then governor-in-exile for the Confederacy during the American Civil War.



Sterling Price (September 20, 1809 – September 29, 1867) - lawyer, planter, soldier and 11th Governor Missouri (1853 to 1857), also served as a United States Army brigadier general during the Mexican-American War, and a Confederate Army major general during the American Civil War.



Francis Preston Blair, Jr. (February 19, 1821 – July 9, 1875) American politician and Union Army general during the American Civil War.



An insurgency flared in those areas where Union forces were weakest. As Union soldiers concentrated to fight against Price's State Guard and regular Confederate forces under General Ben McCulloch, few were available to occupy the territory to the rear. It was only in late 1861, as garrisons were established in important towns, that the weaker and more poorly organized Confederate guerrillas were defeated, and stronger, more capable units came together. The most notorious of these was that led by William Clarke Quantrill.



Benjamin McCulloch (November 11, 1811–March 7, 1862) was a soldier in the Texas Revolution, a Texas Ranger, a U.S. marshal, and a brigadier general in the army of the Confederacy.



Methods and legal status



Quantrill was not the only Confederate guerrilla operating in Missouri, but he rapidly won the greatest renown. He and his men ambushed Union patrols and supply convoys, seized the mail, and occasionally struck towns on either side of the Kansas-Missouri border. Reflecting the internecine nature of the guerrilla conflict in Missouri, Quantrill directed much of his effort against Unionist civilians, attempting to drive them from of the territory where he operated.



1851 Navy Colt


Under Quantrill's direction, Confederate partisans also perfected military tactics such as coordinated and synchronized attacks, planned dispersal after an attack using pre-planned routes and relays of horses, and other technical methods, including the use of the long-barreled revolvers that later became the preferred firearm of western lawmen and outlaws alike. The James-Younger Gang, many of whose members had ridden with Quantrill, applied these same techniques after the war.



Jesse and Frank James, 1872


Quantrill claimed sanction under the Confederate Partisan Ranger Act, which authorized certain guerrilla activities, and apparently he had received a regular Confederate commission as a captain. However, like almost all of the Missouri bushwhackers, he operated outside of the Confederate chain of command.


Battle of Lawrence, Kansas


Quantrill's most notable operation was the Lawrence Massacre a revenge raid on Lawrence, Kansas in August 1863. It had been generally regarded for years as the base of operations of Unionist irregular raids by Redlegs and Jayhawkers into Missouri both before and during the war. Also, just a month prior, some of the imprisoned family members, women and children, of Quantrill's men had been killed in the collapse of the overcrowded prison in Kansas City.

According to Union records, 167 men and teenage boys were massacred in this raid. Confederate authorities were appalled; their lawless presence proved an embarrassment to the Confederate command. Yet the Confederate generals appreciated his effectiveness against Union forces, which never gained the upper hand over Quantrill.

Among Quantrill's men was a free African-American man named John Noland. He was one of Quantrill's scouts, indeed reputed to be his best one. Noland who helped in scouting Lawrence, Kansas before the raid by Quantrill's men in 1863. He joined Quantrill's Raiders because of the abuse his family suffered at the hands of Kansas Union Jayhawkers. Post-war pictures show Noland sitting with his comrades at reunions of the Raiders.



Quantrill's Raiders Ninth Annual Reunion



Dissolution and Aftermath


Quantrill lost his hold over his men during the winter of 1863-64, when he led his men behind Confederate lines into Texas. In early 1864, the guerrillas that he had led through the streets of Lawrence returned to Missouri from Texas in separate bands, none of them led by Quantrill himself as "Bloody Bill" Anderson seems to have assumed general command by this time). Though Quantrill would gather some of his men again at the very end of 1864, the days of Quantrill's Raiders were over.

Quantrill died at the hands of Union forces in Kentucky in May 1865, but his legacy would live on. Many of his men, including Frank James, rode in 1864 under one of his former lieutenants, "Bloody Bill" Anderson, who was killed in October 1864. Much of that group remained together under the leadership of Archie Clement, who kept the gang together after the war, and harassed the Republican state government of Missouri during the tumultuous year of 1866. In December 1866, state militiamen killed Clement in Lexington, Missouri, but his men continued on as outlaws, emerging in time as the James-Younger Gang.

REBEL SOULS II

Backdrop


The Missouri-Kansas border conflict during the American Civil War was a continuation of the pre-war Bleeding Kansas violence. Known as “Bushwhacking,” the guerilla conflict in Missouri was, in many respects, a civil war within a civil war.



Original 1857 Map of the United States Showing the Free and Slave States.


Called “bushwhackers,” the perpetrators of the attacks were generally not part of the military command and control of either side. While bushwhackers conducted a few well-organized raids in which they burned cities, most of the attacks involved ambushes of opponent individuals or families in rural areas. Particularly insidious since it amounted to a fight of neighbor against neighbor, the attacks were non-uniformed, and the government response was complicated by trying to decide whether they were legitimate military attacks or criminal actions.


In most areas, irregular warfare operated as an adjunct to conventional military operations. In Missouri, however, secessionist bushwhackers operated outside of the Confederate chain of command. On occasion, a prominent bushwhacker chieftain might receive formal Confederate rank (notably William Clarke Quantrill), or receive written orders from a Confederate general (as "Bloody Bill" Anderson did in October 1864 during a large-scale Confederate incursion into Missouri).



William Clarke Quantrill (July 31, 1837 – June 6, 1865) - Confederate Guerrilla Leader.



William T. "Bloody Bill" Anderson (circa 1839 – October 26, 1864) - Confederate Guerrilla Leader.


Missouri guerrillas also frequently assisted Confederate recruiters in Union held territory. For the most part, however, Missouri's bushwhacker squads were self-organized groups of young men, predominantly from the slave holding counties along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, who took it upon themselves to attack Federal forces and their Unionist neighbors, both in Kansas and Missouri, the latter in response to what they considered a Federal invasion of their home state.

One of the most famous men who fought as a bushwhacker was Jesse James. During months of often intense combat, he only battled fellow Missourians, ranging from Missouri regiments of U.S. Volunteer troops to state militia or unarmed Unionist civilians. The single confirmed instance of his exchanging fire with Federal troops from another state occurred a month after the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, during a near-fatal encounter with Wisconsin cavalry. In the course of the war, his mother and sister were arrested, his stepfather tortured, and his family banished temporarily from Missouri by state militiamen — all Unionist Missourians.

The conflict with Confederate bushwhackers everywhere rapidly escalated into a succession of atrocities committed by both sides. Union troops often executed or tortured suspects without trial and burned the homes of suspected guerrillas and those suspected of aiding or harboring them. Where credentials were suspect, the accused bushwhacker was often executed, as in the case of Lt. Col. Frisby McCullough after the Battle of Kirksville. Bushwhackers frequently went house to house, executing Unionist farmers.


1st National Flag of the Confederacy - The "Stars and Bars"


William Quantrill led a raid in August 1863 on Lawrence, Kansas, burning the town and murdering some 200 men and boys in the Lawrence Massacre.






The raiders justified the raid in retaliation for the Sacking of Osceola, Missouri two years earlier (in which the town was set aflame and at least nine men killed) and for the deaths of five female relatives of bushwhackers killed in the collapse of a Kansas City, Missouri jail. Following the Lawrence raid, the Union district commander ordered the total depopulation of all men, women, and children (both Unionists and Southern sympathizers) of three and a half Missouri counties along the Kansas border under his infamous General Order No. 11. In other areas, individual families (including the James and the grandparents and mother of future President Harry Truman) were banished from Missouri.


George Caleb Bingham painting of General Order No. 11. In this famous work General Thomas Ewing is seated on a horse watching the Red Legs.


Next to the attack on Lawrence, the most notorious atrocity by Confederate bushwhackers was the murder of 22 unarmed Union soldiers pulled from a train in the Centralia Massacre. The action was led by William T. Anderson, one of Quantrill’s lieutenants, in retaliation for the earlier execution of a number of Anderson's own men. In an ambush of pursuing Union forces shortly thereafter, the bushwhackers killed well over 100 Federal troops.

Frank James rode with Quantrill’s Raiders, and Jesse James began his guerrilla career in 1864 (at the age of 16) fighting alongside Frank under the leadership of Archie Clement and "Bloody Bill" Anderson. In October 1864, “Bloody Bill” Anderson was tricked into an ambush and killed by state militiamen under the command of Col. Samuel P. Cox. Anderson's body was displayed and his head was severed.



The Battle Flag of the Confederacy


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