Bloody Bill Anderson

by Albert Castel

  Two weeks and some days after shooting up the German settlement in Lafayette County, Anderson’s band showed what it was capable of doing in another county, this one in Kansas.

  “The Junction,” Wyandotte County, Kansas: July 31–August 1, 1863

  Except on its northeast corner, where the Missouri River makes an abrupt upward bend, Wyandotte County, Kansas, is separated from Jackson County, Missouri, by only a road, called for obvious reasons the Stateline Road. Hence it was a simple matter for Anderson’s gang to cross into that county on the night of July 31 and head west. Four miles from the town of Wyandotte (now Kansas City, Kansas) the gang came upon and destroyed a wagon train bound for New Mexico. Continuing on, the bushwhackers soon reached “the Junction,” a crossroads between Wyandotte and Shawnee Mission. Here they attempted to rob a recently constructed stone house. But the owner, despite being wounded, managed to fight them off with the aid of several other men, wounding two of the raiders in return.

  Figure 2.2 Archie Clements.

  COURTESY OF THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF MISSOURI.

  Frustrated and infuriated, the raiders vented their feelings by pillaging a neighboring house, burning the home of a Shawnee named Big Knife, and murdering a Wyandotte County commissioner. They then dashed back into Missouri, stopping only long enough to torch four more houses and slay another man.

  In the morning Union cavalry picked up their trail, followed it across the Stateline Road, and surprised them in their camp, killing four and scattering the rest. One of the dead bushwhackers, a man attired in a Federal uniform, had been shot repeatedly while astride his horse, yet had not fallen. When the soldiers got close enough, they discovered why: he was strapped to his saddle. Some of the guerrillas did this to prevent falling to the ground, should they fall asleep during long night rides. Evidently this one preferred to die rather than be wounded, captured, and then hanged—the fate recently suffered at Fort Leavenworth by the “somewhat notorious” Jim Vaughn, who had been apprehended in, of all places, a Wyandotte City barbershop. At this stage of the war the Federals rarely took bushwhackers prisoner except to execute them, and even if that had not been their policy, they would not have spared a “bushman” wearing their uniform.7

  For the bushwhackers, the Wyandotte raid could be deemed a failure, for whatever it gained them in the way of money, loot, and the satisfaction of burning out and killing some Kansans, it did not compensate for four dead and at least two wounded comrades. Moreover, although it enhanced Anderson’s status as a “notorious” guerrilla chieftain, his family was about to pay a heavy price for that notoriety.

  Kansas City, Missouri: August 13, 1863

  The large three-story brick building in the Metropolitan Block, McGee’s Addition, owned by G. C. Bingham, Esq., and occupied for the last two weeks as a guardhouse, fell in yesterday afternoon, carrying with it the adjoining building south. There were in the building at the time nine women prisoners, two children, and one man. Four women were killed, the balance escaped without fatal injuries.

  —Kansas City Daily Journal of Commerce, August 14, 1863

  On June 16, 1863, Brig. Gen. Thomas Ewing Jr., brother-in-law of Gen. William T. Sherman and former chief justice of the Kansas Supreme Court, assumed command of the District of the Border, comprising West Missouri and most of Kansas. That very same day, Quantrill’s band carried out the devastating Westport ambush, slaying fourteen soldiers. This humiliating disaster steeled Ewing’s determination to escalate the campaign against bushwhacking by doing what military leaders before and since have done when unable to suppress guerrillas by direct methods: Attack them indirectly through their families, friends, and sympathizers in the civilian population. Starting in July, per his orders, Union troops arrested nine western Missouri women on charges of spying for and otherwise aiding Confederate partisans. Among them were Mary Ellen and Josephine Anderson, now, respectively, sixteen and fourteen. Ten-year-old Janie Anderson, at her request, went with her sisters, having nowhere else to go.8

  The Federals took the female prisoners to Kansas City and locked them up on the second floor of a three-story brick structure called the Thomas Building on the east side of Grand Avenue between Fourteenth and Fifteenth Streets in what was known as McGee’s Addition. The building was practically new, having been erected in 1859, and until recently had been the residence of its owner, George Caleb Bingham, the famous painter, who added the third story for his studio.

  In an adjoining building being used as a guardhouse, the soldiers, in order to obtain more space, removed the partitions and posts that the center girder supporting the second floor rested on. The guardhouse building began to sag against the prison building, subjecting it to a great and growing pressure. Cracks appeared in the first-floor walls, and plaster dust began falling. Notified by a guard of the danger, the provost marshal sent a soldier to inspect the building. While he was doing so on the afternoon of August 13, it suddenly collapsed, burying the female inmates and one man beneath a huge pile of bricks and timber. Rescuers pulled the crushed corpses of four women from the rubble. One was that of Josephine Anderson. Mary Ellen and Janie survived, the former crippled and disfigured for life, the latter with two broken legs, an injured back, and a lacerated face.9

  News of the incident enraged the bushwhackers. They believed, and always would believe, that Union soldiers had deliberately undermined the prison building in a vicious scheme to kill the prisoners. Anderson’s violent reaction soon revealed its singular purpose. Hitherto he had killed ruthlessly, but as a means to an end: revenge against Arthur Inghram Baker, plunder during a raid, to terrorize Union troops and civilians. Now, though, killing—especially killing enemy soldiers—became an end in itself, one driven by a bloodlust so strong that sometimes Anderson would foam at the mouth and sob because he could not continue pumping bullets into still more blue-uniformed victims.10

  Out of the wreckage of the building on Kansas City’s Grand Avenue came not only the mangled bodies of young women. It also sparked the emergence of “Bloody Bill” Anderson, a man who lived for death and who shortly before he himself died declared: “I have killed Union soldiers until I have got sick of killing them.”11

  Lawrence, Kansas: August 21, 1863

  As dawn broke on August 21, 1863, William Clarke Quantrill reined his horse to a halt on the crest of a ridge overlooking Lawrence, Kansas. Twenty-six, blond, blue-eyed, lean and wiry, the guerrilla captain was a striking figure. Less than three years earlier he had lived in Lawrence, where he went by the name of Charley Hart and belonged to a gang that rustled cattle and “jayhawked” slaves in Missouri—to be sold back to their masters. Forced to flee Lawrence late in 1860 when the authorities issued a warrant for his arrest, he sought and found refuge in Jackson County, Missouri, by luring three Kansas abolitionists into a deadly trap on the pretense of liberating slaves. He gained the confidence of the local inhabitants by telling them that he was from Maryland and that the three dead abolitionists were actually members of a jayhawker gang that had murdered his older brother—all lies, for he was a native of Ohio and had no older brother. Following the outbreak of the war in Missouri, he, too, had served with Sterling Price until the general retreated back toward Arkansas, whereupon Quantrill returned to Jackson County. There he joined, then headed, a small guerrilla band in the Blue Springs area. A superb horseman and crack shot, cool and calculating, and daring yet never rash, he transformed his farm-boy followers into skilled killers whose slashing raids, murderous ambushes, and elusive tactics soon turned Jackson and adjoining counties into “Quantrill country” and made him the top bushwhacker chieftain for all of western Missouri, a status confirmed by his receiving a captain’s commission in the Confederate partisan rangers.12

  Now he was about to return to Lawrence—but not alone. With him were three hundred and fifty guerrillas and one hundred Confederate recruits whom he had invited to come with him and be “christened.” On August 10 he had held a meeting of bushwhacker chieftains,
Bill Anderson included, telling them, “Let’s go to Lawrence . . . the great hotbed of abolitionism in Kansas. All the plunder, or the bulk of it, stolen from Missouri, will be found stowed away in Lawrence. And we can get more revenge and more money there than anywhere else.”

  Initially the others leaders rejected Quantrill’s proposal. To be sure, he had carried out several successful forays into Kansas, bringing back loot and leaving behind corpses. But raiding Lawrence was something else. They would have to ride fifty miles into Kansas to get there, and before they did surely the alarm would be sounded, and hundreds of armed men—the town had a population of three thousand—and probably regular Union troops as well would be waiting for them. No, it was too risky.

  Quantrill persisted, meeting all of their arguments with better arguments. Finally, reluctantly, they agreed. Then came word of the Kansas City prison collapse. All lingering doubts disappeared, replaced by a fierce desire to go to Lawrence and kill, even if it meant dying themselves. The lust for vengeance burned hottest in Bill Anderson. In his mind he could hear the screams of his sisters buried beneath the rubble on Grand Avenue. Only one thing would drown them out—at least for a time.

  Atop the ridge overlooking Lawrence, Quantrill and his raiders waited for the scouts he had sent ahead to find out what the situation was in town. While waiting, some of the men lost their nerve. “Let’s give it up,” they insisted. “It’s too much.” Quantrill had not come this far to quit now. “You do as you please,” he replied. “I’m going into Lawrence!” He then spurred his horse forward. The bushwhackers followed him, revolvers cocked and ready to fire.

  They met no resistance. Lulled into a false sense of security by past alarms of guerrilla raids that came to nothing, the unprepared people of Lawrence were taken completely by surprise. Realizing this, the bushwhackers swarmed through the town, robbing, looting, burning, killing. They spared women and children; men and teenaged boys were shot down mercilessly. Bill Anderson personally slew fourteen, more than any other chieftain. He made his victims crawl at his feet in the dust, tears coursing down their faces as they clawed at his boots, begging to be spared. Around him, still clad in their nightclothes, wives, sisters, and daughters pleaded for their menfolk’s lives. Anderson paid them no heed; perhaps he did not even hear them. He merely cocked his revolver and slowly placed its muzzle to each man’s head. Perhaps their shrieks and cries were drowned out in his mind by the shrieks and cries of young women crushed under a pile of snapped timber and fallen bricks. . . .

  Not until he shot the fourteenth man did Anderson speak: “I had two sisters arrested in Kansas City by Union men, for entertaining Southern sentiments. They were imprisoned in a dilapidated building used as a guardhouse. This building was known to be unsafe, and, besides, it was undermined. One night that building fell, and my two sisters, with three other ladies, were crushed to death.”13

  At 9:00 A.M., four hours after they entered, the bushwhackers rode out of Lawrence, leaving behind a town in flames and the bodies of close to two hundred men and boys. Before departing, Anderson told a Lawrence woman, “I’m here for revenge and I have got it.”14

  Yet it was not enough revenge. It never would be.

  Chapter Three

  Such a Damn Outfit

  Baxter Springs, Kansas: October 6, 1863

  On the morning of October 6, Quantrill and four hundred bushwhackers rode along the Fort Scott Road through the southeast corner of Kansas, on their way to spend the winter in Texas. Would-be historians would later say that they had left Missouri because of Order No. 11. Issued just four days after the Lawrence Massacre by Brig. Gen. Thomas Ewing Jr., it expelled all disloyal residents from three Missouri counties bordering Kansas—Jackson, Cass, and Bates—with the object of making it impossible for the guerrillas to maintain themselves in this region. Actually, though, it had no such effect. While thousands of people were forced to vacate their homes—one of them was an eleven-year-old-girl who would become the mother of President Harry S Truman—their smokehouses remained filled with hams and bacon, and stray hogs, cattle, and chickens roamed the countryside. Moreover, the swarms of Union troops who enforced the expulsion order, many of them vengeance-seeking Kansans, posed little threat to the bushwhackers, who lay low in their hideouts amid the virtually impenetrable hills and forests of the Sni-A-Bar Creek area in eastern Jackson County, emerging only at night to forage. What caused Quantrill to head south for the winter, something he had done the previous autumn, was the unusually early advent of cold weather stripping bare the foliage that provided concealment for the ambushes and surprise attacks that gave the bushwhackers their name.1

  Toward noon a messenger from Dave Poole, who commanded the advance guard on the Fort Scott Road, brought word to Quantrill that a small Federal fort was up ahead at Baxter Springs. At once Quantrill sent reinforcements to Poole with an order to attack the fort from the south while he and his main body moved against it from the north. Perceiving an opportunity to overrun the garrison while it was outside the fort eating lunch, Poole charged before Quantrill could get into position. He drove the Federals into the fort—merely a four-foot-high log barricade open at one end—but blasts from a howitzer forced his men to fall back.

  Figure 3.1 George Todd.

  COURTESY OF THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF MISSOURI.

  Meanwhile, as Quantrill neared the fort, he saw eight wagons and about one hundred Union cavalry approaching. They were the headquarters train and personal escort of Maj. Gen. James G. Blunt, commander of the District of the Frontier, who was riding in a buggy accompanied by some staff officers and a demijohn of whiskey. Quantrill was too far away to identify him, but he knew an inviting target when he saw one and ordered his men to deploy for an attack. Before they could do so, however, Quantrill’s chief lieutenant—the bold and brutal George Todd—yelled “Charge!” Blunt’s escort, mostly raw recruits, fired a ragged volley, then fled in wild panic. Blunt, thanks to his superb horse—which he had mounted on seeing the guerrillas, thinking they were cavalry from the Baxter Springs fort because so many of them wore blue uniform jackets—managed to escape, as did a handful of other Federals. The bushwhackers slaughtered the remainder, eighty-nine in all, among them the musicians of the headquarter’s band, including a twelve-year-old drummer boy. Burial parties subsequently found many of the bodies so badly mauled or in some cases burned that they no longer were recognizable as human beings, much less identifiable.

  Because they were toward the rear when Todd ordered the charge, Anderson’s men, some forty in number, did not participate in the massacre. Instead they ransacked the Union wagons and thus secured the lion’s share of the plunder. This may have satisfied them but not their leader. He craved Yankee blood, not loot. He joined Todd in urging Quantrill to resume the assault on the fort. “No,” Quantrill answered between swigs from Blunt’s demijohn, his share of the spoils. “We’ve done enough. Let’s not take any more chances.”

  Anderson was disgusted. What sort of leader was Quantrill to pass up so good a chance to kill more Union soldiers? Wasn’t that what it was all about? Quantrill might be content with the killing done at Lawrence and now here at Baxter Springs, but, he, Bill Anderson, was not.2

  Northern Texas: March 1864

  “If you are not a damn set of cowards, come on out in the open and fight!” Bill Anderson shouted.

  “You have the most men with you—if you are not a set of damn cowards, come on in and take us out!” George Todd yelled back.

  Anderson and his twenty men began shooting, and Todd and his nine followers fired back from the sheltering woods. After fifty-odd shots had been exchanged, Anderson’s party rode away into the night. Todd’s detachment thereupon returned to Quantrill’s camp on the bank of Mineral Creek, twelve miles northwest of Sherman, Texas.3

  Why were bushwhackers fighting bushwhackers, albeit more for show than for real? Three reasons supply the answer. First, many of Quantrill’s band, including original members and top lieutena
nts, left him after arriving in Texas. Some were appalled by the excesses of the Lawrence massacre, others felt disgruntled by what they deemed an unfair division of spoils from Lawrence, and still more believed that with the defeats in 1863 at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga, the Confederacy had “gone up the spout.” Therefore, to continue the guerrilla war in Missouri would serve no purpose, not even to provide an excuse for what had increasingly degenerated into wanton plunder and murder.

  The second reason took the form of Brig. Gen. Henry McCulloch, commander of the Confederate Sub-District of North Texas. The more he saw of the Missouri bushwhackers, the less he liked what he saw. Soon after they arrived, their drunken sprees, robberies, and occasional murders so terrorized the inhabitants of the region that scores fled—and many who stayed would have welcomed Union occupation. Moreover, attempts by McCulloch to have the bushwhackers perform some military service proved futile, as for instance when, having been sent to round up deserters, they shot more than they returned. By February McCulloch had concluded that the bushwhackers were “but one shade better than highwaymen,” and the only thing that prevented him from disarming and arresting them was that he needed a clear-cut case and sufficient force.4

  The first of these needs came to him as a consequence of the third reason for Todd’s and Anderson’s men taking potshots at one another. Early in March Sterling Price, who acted as de facto military commander of all Missouri Confederates in the Trans-Mississippi, persuaded Quantrill to reduce his band to eighty-four men and transfer the rest to the regular service. This reorganization led Quantrill to take on the title of colonel. Todd became captain; Anderson, first lieutenant. Anderson’s rank testified not only to his enhanced status but also to the change in the makeup of the guerrillas. Most of the “old men,” those who formed the early bands, had left and the ones who remained tended to be wild, reckless teenagers for whom bushwhacking was an end in itself and who admired the “charge straight ahead and the devil take the hindmost” style of Anderson—and of Todd.