Bloody Bill Anderson

by Albert Castel

  Fifty-two years old and of Virginia birth, Benjamin Lewis was wealthy. He had been born into money, he had married into money, and above all he had made money—well over a million dollars of it. For three decades the rich aroma of tobacco rose from his warehouses on the levee, and each year he shipped tons of it down the river. He knew how to spend as well as earn, and no more sublime view in the state existed than that from Glen Eden, his parklike hilltop estate overlooking the Missouri, and his recently built mansion was one of the largest and most lavish in the entire state.

  Despite having been the owner of 150 slaves, Lewis was a staunch Unionist and strong supporter of the policies of his friend President Lincoln. Thus, even though the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to border states like Missouri, Lewis had freed all of his slaves in 1863, paid the passage of those who chose to move to Kansas, and hired on at top wages those who remained. Furthermore, he donated a church to Glasgow’s blacks and had recently urged General Fisk to levy ruinous fines of $5,000 each on local secessionists, whose identities he ferreted out by spies working in his employ. As a result, Lewis was not only the richest man in Glasgow but also the one most hated by the town’s Confederate adherents. Yet with a large Union garrison in Glasgow, he had little to fear from that element, much less guerrillas.7

  His situation had changed drastically when, at dawn on October 15, the war came to Glasgow. Two brigades from Price’s army surrounded the town and bombarded it with artillery. Throughout the morning the sights and sounds of battle swept from one end of town to the other. At length, with much of the business district in flames, the outnumbered and outgunned garrison surrendered, and the Confederates marched in.8 Nevertheless, Lewis remained safe so long as he remained in his mansion. Linked to his family by marriage was a brother-in-law of Price and the mother of Brig. Gen. John B. Clark Jr., commander of one of the brigades that took Glasgow. Both of them had come to Glen Eden to provide it and Lewis with protection, and this they did while regular Confederate troops occupied the town.9

  On the morning of October 17 those troops marched off to rejoin Price’s main army as it continued moving westward along the lower bank of the Missouri River, leaving Glasgow wide open to any marauders who chose to enter it. That evening some of them chose to do exactly that. Among their number was none other than Quantrill at the head of a small band. Two of its members went directly to the home of banker W. E. Dunnica and brought him to his bank, where Quantrill had him open the safe. Quantrill extracted the contents—$21,000—then personally escorted Dunnica back to his residence to protect him from other guerrillas and Confederate stragglers who were prowling the streets. That done, Quantrill and his followers rode back to their Perche Hills hideout, having obtained the richest single money haul ever made by bushwhackers. What they did not know was that Dunnica, foreseeing a robbery of his bank, had the day before removed $32,000 from the safe and buried the money in his yard.10

  For Benjamin Lewis, Quantrill’s sortie into Glasgow was a frightening event. It meant that other guerrillas might seek to emulate him and if they did, surely Lewis would be a prime, if not the prime, target. That was why four nights later he was in his upstairs room, watching the clock’s hands move all too slowly and hoping desperately that Union troops would arrive.

  Figure 9.2 Benjamin Lewis.

  COURTESY OF THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF MISSOURI.

  Finally the clock struck ten. Soon afterward Lewis heard the faint sound of horses’ hooves on the street below. The sound grew louder as it approached Glen Eden, then ceased. Moments later someone knocked, or rather pounded, on the front door. From downstairs came voices, but Lewis could not make out what was being said or by whom. He could only hope and pray that Federal soldiers at long last had come. . . .

  He then heard soft footsteps ascending the long sweeping staircase and stop at the door to his room. Someone lightly tapped—a familiar tap like the one his wife, Eleanor, made. If it was she, surely Union soldiers had come. Trembling with excitement, he unlocked the door and opened it.

  It was Eleanor!

  He started to heave a huge sigh of relief, then froze. Eleanor’s face was not right. It was pale, and her eyes were large and fearful.

  Two heavily armed men were downstairs, she said, her voice low and quavering. Mrs. Clark had let them in. After entering, one of them, apparently the leader, forced a servant to take him to the room where Eleanor had been lying in bed with her and Benjamin’s two-year-old daughter. The man had asked her where her husband was, and she replied that she did not know. But he had not believed her. Instead, after pulling back the bedclothes to see if Lewis might be hiding under them, he had told her to bring her husband downstairs or else he would burn down the house. And he had meant what he said.

  Lewis realized that he had no choice but to go. If they burned the place, he certainly would perish. If he came down and talked with them, both the mansion and he might survive. Perhaps, too, he hoped, the presence of Mrs. Clark and Price’s brother-in-law would deter the intruders from any act of violence.

  So, accompanied by his wife, Lewis went down the stairs and found what he feared he would: two bushwhackers sitting in the elegant dining room, bolting down leftovers and swigging away at wine bottles into which they occasionally poured whiskey. One was Bill Anderson. The other was Ike Berry, Anderson’s orderly whom he called Weasel.11

  Figure 9.3 Glen Eden, Benjamin Lewis’s Mansion, Glasgow, Missouri.

  COURTESY OF THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF MISSOURI.

  As ordered by Price, Anderson had hit the North Missouri Railroad. But it was not a destructive blow; in fact, it was scarcely a blow at all. On October 14 thirty-five of his men burned the depots at Florence and High Hill while he and the main body, eighty strong, had looted Danville—a village not even on the railroad. They had burned its stores and several houses and murdered five former Union soldiers. Ignoring Price’s verbal instructions to destroy the railroad bridge in St. Charles County, Anderson had headed back west, catching up with Price’s army at Waverly, where members of Cliff Holtzclaw’s gang killed six militiamen who had surrendered to the Confederates at Carrolltown along with the rest of its garrison, claiming that they had committed atrocities against Southern sympathizers. Some of Anderson’s men attempted to do the same to wounded prisoners from Glasgow, and only the intervention of their Confederate surgeons forestalled them.12

  For the next two days Anderson had followed in the wake of Price’s army, which on October 18 reached Lafayette County, where Todd’s band joined it and proceeded to serve as advance scouts—and also murder dozens of “Dutch” farmers. Because all of the Federal troops west of Boonville and south of the Missouri River had either been captured or retreated to the Independence– Kansas City area, Anderson and his men could go wherever and do whatever they pleased. And so they did, their trail marked by plundered farmhouses and mangled corpses. Never had they had it so good, so easy, and so safe.

  Then, for some reason Anderson suddenly turned around and headed for Glasgow. Possibly he had heard of Quantrill’s big take there. Maybe someone had told him that the richest man in central Missouri lived there—a nigger-loving, slave-freeing Unionist to boot. Whatever the reason, Anderson now sat in the dining room of Glen Eden, drunk and getting drunker.

  “Here is an old Union man,” he said, looking up at Lewis. “I have heard of you, and Old Price has heard of you down in Arkansas and Texas. You have done more damage to our cause than any ten men in the state.”

  Mrs. Lewis tried to interrupt, but Anderson told her to shut up, as he did Lewis when the latter started to speak. Then, coming to the point, he warned Lewis that if he turned over his money, he would live; if he did not, he would die—it was as simple as that. It would do him no good, Anderson added, to lie, for he knew that there were vast sums in the house.

  Lewis left the room and returned with $1,000 in silver and paper. It was all there was, he said. Without a word Anderson stood up and brought the butt of
a revolver smashing down onto Lewis’s head. The stunned man crumbled to the floor. As screams from terrified women filled the house, the two bushwhackers went to work. Hovering over their victim, they lashed him with the long barrels of their pistols, mixing the blows with obscenities and terrifying Indian war whoops. Once more they demanded money, a lot more. Lewis, blood streaming down his face, pleaded that he had no more. They answered with a new rain of kicks and punches. They then forced Lewis to stand on his head against a wall. A ferocious blow to the stomach doubled him up, and he fell prone on the floor. After repeatedly kicking him with their heavy boots, they jumped up and down on him as though he were a mattress.

  The victim still weakly mumbled that there was no more money in the house. Anderson thereupon knelt down and stuck the barrel of a Colt revolver into Lewis’s mouth. Perhaps furious memories flashed through his burning brain. It was men just like this one—big, wealthy, important, powerful—who had started it all, who had shamed his sister Mary Ellen, who had murdered his pa. . . .

  He had killed Arthur Inghram Baker once. Now he would kill him again, if need be. Only this time he would be there to watch him die—and enjoy it.

  He rammed the pistol barrel down Lewis’s throat, plunging it up and down, up and down, ripping the throat and pumping up gushes of blood.

  “How do you like that?” he screamed. “How do you like that? How do you like that?” After awhile he stood up, delivered some more kicks to the body, and then ordered the black house servants, who were quaking in terror in the basement, to come upstairs.

  “You have been set free, have you?” he sneered. Then, looking down at the bloody heap on the floor, he added, “Yes, you damned old coon, you have set all your negroes free.” A sharp blow from the pistol slammed into Lewis’s head. Anderson then selected a young black girl of twelve or thirteen and led her into a bedroom for a different type of pleasure. When he finished, Ike Berry went in to take his turn.

  Kicking Lewis to his feet, Anderson again demanded more money and again Lewis insisted there was none. Anderson thereupon aimed his revolver and sent a bullet through each of his victim’s pant legs, scorching the fabric. Next he yanked the fallen body upright, pinned it against the wall, drew his knife, and pressed its blade against Lewis’s jugular vein.

  “This old fellow thinks more of his money than his life,” he laughed as Berry returned from the bedroom, “and I’ll cut his throat.” With shrill Indian yells, he repeatedly pricked the bleeding throat. He also slashed Lewis’s clothing and, along with Berry, fired a revolver so close to Lewis’s face that it left powder burns. Finally tiring of these torments, Anderson dragged Lewis outside and dumped him onto the street. He then mounted his horse, a superb gray mare, and rode up to where the pathetic figure lay in the dirt.

  “Paw him! Paw him!” Anderson yelled while the animal struck and stomped the victim with its sharp hooves—an unnatural act for a horse but one that Anderson had trained the mare to do. Two women, hitherto hidden, rushed up to the guerrilla and pleaded with him to stop. Lewis, answered Anderson, had been “fined” $5,000—which, probably by no coincidence, was precisely the sum Lewis had proposed levying on Glasgow’s Confederate sympathizers. If this amount was not paid soon, Anderson warned, he would kill Lewis.

  The women said they would try to raise the needed money and went off to do so. Anderson and Berry thereupon carried Lewis into the town, broke into a store, and placed him on a counter. Bleeding and bruised from head to foot, his throat swollen and shredded, Lewis went into convulsions. His jerking and heaving became so violent that Anderson had Berry pile chairs on top of the “old coon” to keep him from falling to the floor. He then sat down and, between swallows from a whiskey bottle, gazed at Lewis with what an observer described as “very small eyes [that] partially close when [he is] drunk and when furious, emit a peculiar gleam, which can never be mistaken.”

  An hour or so later one of the women, a cousin of Lewis, came with the money—$4,000 in paper, $1,000 in silver—much if not most of it contributed by banker Dunnica. Anderson counted it out. Every dollar was there. The thought of putting a bullet in Lewis’s head crossed his drunken brain, but on looking at him he decided not. The high and mighty millionaire was now nothing but a battered, bloody lump of flesh. Killing him would merely be doing him a favor. It was much better to leave him alive and suffering. So, after telling the cousin that he would rather have had Lewis’s life than the money but that he was a man of his word, he collected his entire band and rode from the town off into the night.

  At daylight Lewis, his body racked with terrible, excruciating pain, fled Glasgow with Eleanor and their two children. It was good that they left. A group of Anderson’s men showed up at Glen Eden, forced two of the black female servants to cook them breakfast, and then after eating took turns raping both of them before leaving.13

  On February 2, 1866, Benjamin Lewis died as a consequence of his torture.14 But for what it might have been worth to him, he had the satisfaction, before his death, of knowing that the man who had done these things to him was himself dead.

  Chapter Ten

  Good Morning, Captain Anderson

  St. Louis Tri-Weekly Missouri Republican, October 19, 1864

  Are the diabolical murders, robberies, and other outrages of the demon, Bill Anderson, never to cease in North Missouri? Is there no power in our troops or people to drive him and his gang of cutthroats from the State, or to exterminate them? Can there not be raised a volunteer force especially for this purpose?

  A Farmhouse Near Albany, Missouri: Dawn, October 26, 1864

  Bill Anderson arose from his camp bed in an unusually good mood. Perhaps this was merely because he did not have, as he so often did, a morning-after hangover—but even if that was the case, he had other, more important, reasons for feeling pleased with himself. First and foremost, his decision to separate from Sterling Price’s army had proved a wise one. Three days earlier, according to the latest newspaper reports, Price’s army had been routed by Union forces on the outskirts of Kansas City at Westport and was now in headlong retreat southward. His campaign was an utter fiasco; far from “liberating” Missouri, Price would be lucky to escape it.

  Then there was the word circulating about George Todd and his bunch. According to the rumor, on October 21 Todd had been shot and killed at Lexington while scouting for Price. The next day Price had ordered Todd’s men to leave his army because they had killed some Kansas militiamen who had been taken prisoners. If all this was true—and there seemed no reason to doubt it—Anderson had another good reason to be glad he had not gotten tied up with Price. Didn’t the pompous old fool understand that was what war was about: killing?

  And since leaving Glasgow, Anderson’s own band had done some killing. Just the day before, while passing through Carroll County, it had rid the world of six more Union men. Anderson particularly enjoyed what Little Archie had done to one of them after being given the standard instruction to “parole” an old “Dutchman” who had been pressed into service as a guide: cut off his head and place it on his chest, his hands folded around it as if holding it. Everybody had laughed at the comical sight. But the bluebellies wouldn’t laugh when they saw it.

  Anderson went into the farmhouse and told the woman living there to fix him breakfast. He washed his hands and face, then combed his long, thick hair. Looking at himself in the mirror, he liked what he saw and with a bow toward his reflection said: “Good morning, Captain Anderson, how are you this morning? Damn well, thank you.”1

  Richmond, Missouri: Early Morning, October 27, 1864

  Acting Lt. Col. Samuel P. “Cob” Cox listened intently while the woman who had ridden to his camp outside of Richmond told him that Bill Anderson and a large number of his bushwhackers were camped near Albany. It was exactly the sort of information Cox had hoped for when, three days ago, he had accepted the mission from Brig. Gen. James Craig, commanding officer at St. Joseph, to go after Anderson. Cox had immediately ordered his tro
ops—about three hundred men of the Thirty-third and Fifty-first Missouri Militia, all of whom were mounted—to begin marching to Albany . . . and to march fast and not stop.

  In his mid-thirties, Cox was a native of Kentucky whose parents had moved to Missouri in 1839 and settled on a farm in Daviess County near Gallatin. During the Mexican War he had served as a scout in the Far West and become acquainted with such legendary frontiersmen as Kit Carson and Jim Bridger. Following that war, Cox had worked for the freighting firm of Russell, Majors, and Waddell as a wagon train master. With the outbreak of hostilities in Missouri in 1861 he became a major of militia cavalry, but in 1862 typhoid fever compelled him to go on sick leave to his home in Gallatin. He had returned to active service in the spring of 1864 and was highly successful, winning the praise of Gen. Clinton B. Fisk for routing two hundred guerrillas at Cameron on July 24. General Craig had chosen him for his special mission because he believed that Cox “would find and whip Anderson.” Now he had found him. As for whipping him, Cox had two assets. First, although his troops were milita and, apart from several companies possessing revolvers, armed solely with single-shot, muzzle-loading infantry rifles, they had plenty of experience operating against bushwhackers and so—unlike Johnston’s hapless neophytes—knew what to expect and how to cope with it. Second, and perhaps most important, Cox had studied guerrilla tactics and realized that the best way to counter them was to use them himself.2

  Which was what he intended to do.

  Albany, Missouri: Midday, October 27, 1864

  About a mile from Albany, Cox’s advance troop met Anderson’s pickets and drove them to and then through the village, which lay on the Missouri River shore below a bluff. Cox followed with his main force until, at about noon, he reached Albany, whereupon he halted and ordered most of his men to dismount. While every fourth man held horses, he led the remainder southward four hundred yards to the edge of an open forest and deployed them in a heavy skirmish line astride a narrow, high-banked lane. At the same time he sent a mounted detachment forward with instructions to locate and engage the enemy, then fall back. After that he waited. “Everything,” a Union officer afterward wrote in his diary, “seemed to stand still—not even a horse appeared to move.”