Volume 18 , Issue 17

Quantrill's Raiders (Quantrill's Guerrillas) 1861-1865

Quantrill's Raiders were the best known of the pro Confederate partisan rangers (bushwhackers) who fought in the American Civil War. Their leader was William Quantrill and they included Jesse James and His brother Frank.

Early in the war, Missouri and Kansas, nominally under Union government, had become bandit country, with groups of Confederate bushwhackers and anti-slavery Jayhawkers competing for control. The town of Lawrence, Kansas, a centre of anti-slavery sentiment, had outlawed Quantrill’s men and jailed some of their young womenfolk. In August 1863, Quantrill led a furious attack on the town, killing over 180 civilians, supposedly in retaliation for the casualties caused when the women’s jail had collapsed, possibly by design.

By 1864 Quantrill had lost control of the group, which split up into small bands. Others lived on.

For over six years, ever since Kansas was opened up as a territory by Stephen A. Douglas' Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, its prairies had been the stage for an almost incessant series of political conventions, raids, massacres, pitched battles, and atrocities, all part of a fierce conflict between the Free State and proslavery forces that had come to Kansas to settle and to battle.

Quantrill's forces were principally those bands of guerrillas who had been robbing and murdering along the border for months, with but little opposition.

Newspapers reported in 1863 that nothing in the history of Indian warfare surpasses in atrocity the sack and burning of the flourishing city of Lawrence, and the butchery of its citizens by ehe rebels under Quantrill. The town was surprised in the night. No resistance was made. Men were aroused from their beds to be shot down in their houses, with terrified wives and children clinging to them. The country would demand that the enemy be held to a stern responsibility for this slaughter of the unarmed and unresisting.

The country would expect an explanation from the military officers in Kansas and Missouri, how this raid could have been possible, how the warlike people of Kansas, who for several years had been accustomed to defend their own homes from invasion, could have been left thus unguarded by the military, and defenseless themselves. The public had heard much of the zeal of the military authorities for putting down "jayhawkers" - a term which the democratic press applied to all the Kansas fighting men - and it would naturally inquire whether this was the first fruits of that labor; and if so, whether this effort had not better be directed against the enemy.
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