Bloody Dawn

by Thomas Goodrich

  The guerrillas continued their march out of Missouri, through the Indian Nations and finally, before severe weather set in, crossed into Arkansas behind Confederate lines.21

  Two months after the premature report, Quantrill had gone south and a great and abiding silence settled over the western border. Among Missouri Rebels, however, his aura lingered. He had been little more than a hope, a dream, a vision prior to Aubrey and Liberty and the skirmishes of spring. But over the long and bloody summer months, after Independence and a dozen other encounters, his reality had gained so, his image had grown so that finally, at Olathe and Shawnee, the Missouri ideal was fully realized. Whereas Price and other prominent Southerners had abandoned the state in its hour of need, this stranger, this answer to a thousand prayers, had remained to continue the fight. But more than any one thing, the war, in the shape and spirit of this man, was at long last and with a sweet, sweet vengeance being carried back to Kansas where it all began. Feeble old men, crusty veterans of 1812 and the Indian wars, saluted and hurrahed in their hearts again and secretly urged him on. Daydreaming girls, swept with emotion, dedicated poetry to their romantic, blue-eyed cavalier. One grateful woman, after giving birth to twins, paid the ultimate tribute and named one of her children Quantrill.22 And in a hundred other quiet ways the people’s love was thus expressed.

  And even across the line, although many Kansas families slept in fields and quaked at the very sound of his name, there still was a curious respect building for the daring, phantom Rebel. Some boasted of their experiences in a Quantrill raid—“No counterfeit either,” one man insisted, “but the real, genuine Quantrell”—while others told tall tales about narrow escapes from the hands of the captain himself.23 But through all the yarns the respect held, couched at times, but there nonetheless; a grudging admission among a warlike race that this man, their enemy, was a bold and fearless fighter. And too, there was the tacit understanding that in a grim little war where restraints were rapidly slipping, Quantrill, despite “no quarter” edicts, managed to preserve a degree of humanity, even gallantry, as his parole of Union captives would suggest. A respect it was, but nothing more. All Kansans would concur that any repeat of the previous summer’s onslaught would be the worst possible calamity to befall their state. There was hope that the year 1863 would be better. In the long intervening winter months there was the chance that their nemesis might be killed or that he might grow weary of a war that was looking more every day like a lost cause. Or perhaps he and his Missouri “whackers” considered the debt of 1861 paid and would trouble Kansas no longer.

  But down in Arkansas William Quantrill had no intention of being killed. And if he agreed in his heart that the struggle for Missouri was over, his special war against Kansas was not. As he had said that night at Olathe, he would never be finished until the debt had been paid in full, until the border of Kansas was as stricken and desolate as was that of Missouri. Then all too quickly, and with this haunting thought still fresh in the air, the winter passed; soon from the spring woods of western Missouri a Federal spy was pushing on a secret message bearing the ominous words: “Quantrill is here.”24

  In May 1863, while troops were away on scout, a band of Rebels slipped into Plattsburg, Missouri, and set fire to the courthouse. Before the raiders left, the town’s Unionist press was “knocked into pie.”25 For Missouri loyalists the omen was clear.

  Even clearer to Kansans, however, was Dick Yager’s march from Diamond Springs that same month. Thus the border braced for the summer of 1862 to repeat itself. Then, to the surprise of everyone, nothing happened. Thomas Ewing stepped onto the stage and the war for all appearances ended. Within a matter of weeks the “live” man generated a feeling of trust and confidence like no time in the past, and unlike his bombastic predecessor, the energetic young general allowed actions to speak for themselves. His troops took the field, attacked and scattered Rebel bands, and his spies mixed with the guerrillas so effectively that Ewing felt no major move could be made without his knowledge. Proof of his success, he felt, was Quantrill’s inactivity. And finally, after two agonizing years of sudden descents from Missouri, a guard was placed on the open border in effect sealing off Kansas from the war, or more to the point, locking Missouri out. With this Kansans were given peace and a pledge: Quantrill will never invade the state again.26

  No one bothered to inform Quantrill. As the best weeks for action passed—a time of good grass and water—the man who had wrought such havoc along the line in 1862 remained fast in the woodlands of west Missouri and did nothing; nothing, that is, except watch, wait, and plan.

  Increasingly his mind locked on one place—his boldest stroke of the war: Lawrence. Returning after a three-year absence and taking a town he had left as a fugitive—no one could miss the irony. In view of the huge gamble, however—breaking clear of the border guard, the grueling fifty-mile ride through a hostile land, attacking a city the size of Lawrence, then returning with every Federal of the border between him and Missouri—convincing enough desperate men, enough needed to attempt such a ride, seemed at the time remote. But the wind was shifting. Already, although Kansas failed to see it as such, a fateful chain of events was rapidly unfolding.

  In late spring, while Blunt was still in command, his troops captured a certain well-liked bushwhacker named Jim Vaughn. Clad in Union blue, Vaughn had prankishly come to Wyandotte one day to get a haircut and shave but was soon recognized and taken prisoner. In a bid to gain his release, Quantrill tried to bargain with Blunt, offering not one but three Federal captives, including a Yankee officer. The gesture failed, however, and Vaughn was given to the hangman. At the rope the condemned man spoke his last: “We can be killed but we cannot be conquered. Taking my life today will cost you one hundred lives, and this debt my friends will pay in a very short time.”27

  Then in July came what guerrillas feared most—the arrest of relatives and their exile from Missouri. Bill Anderson did make a mad dash to hide his family, and Younger and Yager lashed out as best they could. And George Todd did send a letter to Ewing threatening to burn Kansas City if the women and children were not released.28 But the prisoners remained, the arrests continued, and in the end it was this frustration at preventing the banishment of their loved ones that loosened restraints to an attack on Lawrence. Quantrill worked out plans for the raid, scheduled to coincide when the full moon illuminated the Kansas prairie, around the first of August. He then did nothing. And, as expected, word of the impending march quickly reached Lawrence.

  Then, on August 13, when the prison in Kansas City collapsed killing the five girls, something snapped and the border war was never the same. Murder! or so the guerrillas felt; the cool, calculated slaughter of women and children. No one seriously believed it was accidental. There were those like Anderson and Younger directly affected, and there were the many more who thought they got a glimpse of what lay ahead for their families. But all were acutely aware of their own inability to do one single thing to stop it.

  “Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand; blood and revenge are hammering in my head.”29 In this mood following the prison disaster, in the red rage and fury to strike at something, no suggestion had more instant appeal than that which Quantrill now proposed. Lawrence … a history all Missourians were well versed in: the New England colony, the Aid Society, abolitionists, jayhawkers, Red Legs, the proud, wealthy refuge of runaway slaves, a place of music and flowers, of pretty homes and united families—lying just beyond the cinder and ash like a sun-washed rose. Rebel spies reported that an atmosphere of calm, even apathy, had settled over the town following the full moon scare. It was agreed—Lawrence!

  This time no Federal spies were around to pass the word when, on August 19, Quantrill led his column up from the Blackwater rendezvous and began the long march to Lawrence and his fourth raid into Kansas. And behind him, a good many who followed were determined that if this raid succeeded it would be unlike any raid of the past.

  No one could miss t
he irony. It all began in 1857 when William Quantrill went west with several other Ohioans to file for homesteads in Kansas Territory. Sleepy little Dover, Ohio, might have been home forever had his father not died a few years before, throwing the young family on its own. The mother fended as well as she could and Will hunted and fished, but it was a shadow of their former prosperity. For a year the teenager, frail of health, tried a hand in Illinois and Indiana—odd jobs, teaching—but never sent back enough money to ease his mother’s burden, a point that troubled him deeply and a concern that grew when the widow was forced to take in boarders. And thus the new start in Kansas.30

  By late March the Ohioans had entered the territory and were soon staking claims near Stanton. Together the pioneers shared a cabin, clearing the land, plowing, planting corn by day, cooking, washing, and cleaning up by turns at night. A neighbor boy about his age paid visits, and although he was from a proslavery family whereas Quantrill was free-state, the difference was not enough to prevent the youths from becoming fast friends.31 And unlike Ohio, Kansas offered a wholesome, invigorating life—the stiff outdoor work each day, the fine hunting and fishing along the river. It was a routine that young Quantrill enjoyed greatly. Writing to Ohio, the excited son asked his mother to sell out and come to their new home in the West. “We all will be square with the world,” he explained, “& able to say our soul is our own.”32

  But it was not to be. The relationship among the Ohioans soured, Quantrill lost ownership of the land, and in the end his dreams of a farm in Kansas came to nought.

  For almost a year following this, Quantrill shifted about the territory. But late in the summer of 1858 the youth struck off once more, and for the next two years he lived a restless, rootless life of roving and adventure, from the brawling army camps of Utah to killer blizzards in the Rockies, from back-breaking work in the Denver gold fields to Indian attacks on the high plains. It was a raw, rough-and-tumble, day-by-day life the Ohioan led, “pretty hard & scaly” in his words—a world of gambling, guns, and sudden death, but a world in which he was becoming more confident every day. Despite his age and gentle appearance, a rugged, resilient character was fashioned from the years in the wilderness, and although it was a life of rigor and uncertainty, it was a life Quantrill loved and thrived upon. Unmistakably, the West, where strength and wit prevailed, was his element.33

  But still, there were the quiet frosty days of winter when the log schoolhouse near Stanton was emptied of its noisy children and the young teacher was left to his thoughts, to meditate and reminisce on his mother and Dover, on family and old friends and the placid, solid life surrounding them. Although he had seen and done much since leaving home—“enough incidents,” he wrote to his mother, “to make a novel of adventures”—on reflection, this budding man viewed his life as empty and aimless. Exciting and free though the past had been, the other nature became increasingly preoccupied with the future and pondered the virtues of working for greater ends, absorbed with channeling his energies toward some lofty, though as yet undefined, goal. And at the same time Quantrill became utterly disillusioned with his home in the territory.

  Shocked on his return from the West at the admiration shown by Kansans for John Brown and his attempt to foment slave revolt at Harpers Ferry, Quantrill’s old notions gave ground. “Contemptible,” he called them. His earlier stand had been naive, he felt; that in fact it was the free-staters, not the proslavery party, who caused the border troubles by raiding into Missouri for slaves and plunder. “The devil has got unlimited sway over this territory.… The only cry is, ‘What is best for ourselves and our dear friends.’ ”34

  Ohio, not Kansas, figured more and more into his future plans. After an absence of three years, the desire to return burned stronger than ever in Will Quantrill. He tried to maintain connections with Dover by copious letter writing, to learn of changes and old friends, but disappointingly, Caroline Quantrill was a poor writer and even the notes she did send were those of a mother fretting for the safety and happiness of her child. By the spring of 1860, the likelihood of Quantrill returning to eastern Ohio became more certain with each passing day. But then there was the school term to finish in Stanton and the scholars to educate, and the young man began spending much of his time in Lawrence.

  Brief as it was, the stay in Lawrence was an experience unlike anything in the past. Quantrill worked with surveying crews for a time on the Delaware Reserve. But as the weeks and months passed he became deeply involved with several other men in the secret and mysterious trade of returning livestock and fugitive slaves to their Missouri masters—a legal, but delicate occupation anywhere in the North, magnified in Kansas, and doubly dangerous in Lawrence.35 There were the lengthy clandestine trips to the border and back, and although he was known to some by his actual name, it was the assumed “Charley Hart” that Quantrill preferred for this work.

  With difficulty the facade was kept up. Eventually, however, suspicion grew, questions were asked, and the game wound down. Late in 1860 an indictment was handed down by county attorney Sam Riggs charging Quantrill, alias Hart, with breaking into and stealing from R & B’s powder house; with arson in the burning of a barn in which a runaway had been hiding; and finally, with returning that same slave to Missouri and bondage. To avoid arrest Quantrill hid in a number of places, including the hotel owned by Nathan Stone. The innkeeper had become especially fond of the young Ohioan, who was a frequent guest; in fact, his daughter Lydia had lately nursed him back from a long illness. Now through this friendship the hunted man was given asylum. In the end, however, Quantrill saw an opening and made good his escape.36

  Shortly afterwards, the fugitive met with a small group of men about his own age—abolitionists from northern Kansas. And from this encounter a plan was conceived to carry out a daring raid upon one of the richer border plantations, to steal its slaves and despoil the master in the process. In December the men started for Missouri.

  On a cool evening just after dark, Quantrill and three others entered the yard and strode to the house. While one of the raiders stood guard on the porch, the rest disappeared through the door. Inside, the owner was confronted. A candle was lit in a nearby room and Quantrill stepped to the side. Shotgun blasts roared out. One abolitionist fell dead. Another, although wounded, was helped away into the night by his friend. A few days later, the slave owner, Quantrill, and several others located the hiding place of the Kansans in a thicket. That same day the two men were buried.37

  During the fateful winter of 1860–61, Southern states made the decision; one by one they began withdrawing from the Union. And that night at the plantation, Quantrill had seceded too in a sense—from Kansas, from Dover, and from much of himself as well.

  At 4:00 A.M. on August 21, 1863, Quantrill was in Kansas again, crossing at Blue Jacket’s ford, five miles from Lawrence. Behind him, splashing through the tiny Wakarusa were over four hundred tired, hungry Missourians. Many had been in the saddle for almost thirty-six hours. Some who had never suffered a night without sleep in their lives had now endured a second. More, the wiser, had snatched a few minutes of rest while they rode strapped to their saddles. None slept now, however. Already on nearby farms cocks were piping in the new day.38

  When the servant sent from Hesper arrived in the darkened streets of Eudora, three townsmen immediately rose, saddled, and galloped west. In the excitement, one rider was pitched from his mount before he had cleared the city limits. Undaunted, the other two continued in their mad dash to Lawrence.

  From Eudora, on fresh horses, Lawrence could easily be reached within half an hour. But just at daybreak and only a few miles from town one horse stumbled and fell, pinning the rider below. Unconscious, terribly crushed, the injured man was pulled to the roadside. And rather than continue, the friend raced to a neighboring home seeking help for his dying companion.39

  With the first tint of dawn to their backs the raiders rode through the village of Franklin. A light fog covered the lowlands but several early ri
sers could hear the clink and tinkle of brass and steel and a long, low rumble as hundreds of horsemen passed.

  “Hurry up,” came a voice from the mist, “we ought to have been in Lawrence an hour ago.”40

  Beyond Franklin the California Road was left, and a gradual ascent began up a small row of hills. After a mile the fog thinned and finally lifted. Ahead, dominating the western horizon was the black, spreading outline of Mount Oread, and suddenly there was no question of how much farther they had to go. A nervous excitement swept the column as the pace quickened. The rear, stretching for some distance, hurried to catch up. At last the guerrillas rode up the final rise. Slowly the rooftops on the outskirts appeared, then the tall Eldridge House emerged, and the business district, and more homes until the entire town lay at their feet. Here, at 4:55 A.M. Quantrill halted.

  Nothing seemed suspicious about the town and there was no apparent movement, yet when the rest of the Rebels finally joined a tremor rippled through the ranks. Many were stunned at the size of the place. A city! A city more than double Olathe, Shawnee, and Aubrey combined. It was a certainty that somewhere to the rear hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Yankee cavalrymen and militia were closing by the minute. Now, before them was a place unlike any in the past. The calm was a ruse, some insisted; word must have spread and hundreds of men and cannon were now waiting to spring the trap. Caught in the jaws of two superior forces, the odds of reaching Missouri again on their bone-sore, spent mounts were nil.

  The arguing continued and some refused to go further. At last Quantrill announced that any who wanted might return, but he was going in, and that those who cared to join should make themselves ready. With that the leader rode slowly ahead. Gradually the remainder of the men followed.