Who was Quantrill?

“He was not naturally a man of blood, but the border strife changed him.” (Interview with John Workman, former member of Quantrill’s Band, 1902.)

William Clarke Quantrill, undated.

  

Letter, written by William Clarke Quantrill to his mother. Missouri River, March 8, 1857.

 

Letter, written by William Clarke Quantrill to his mother. Kansas Territory, Jan. 26, 1860.

 

Poem handwritten by William Clarke Quantrill. 

This poem that Quantrill paraphrased from a poem by Lord Byron was written for Nannie Dawson, the daughter of his host, Jim Dawson, where he was staying in Kentucky, several months before he was killed. 

Douglas County District Court, Warrant for the arrest/capture of Quantrill and others, Dec. 28, 1863.

Quantrill was not arrested or captured following the Raid, though he was pursued.  He died in Kentucky in 1865 without ever facing charges in Douglas County.

William Clarke Quantrill was born in Canal Dover, Ohio in 1837.  He was an educated man, and  briefly, a school teacher. In February, 1857, he went to Kansas Territory with a party of men from Canal Dover.  Upon arrival he filed a claim for a tract of land, but always restless, he joined a U.S. Army expedition that was fitting out for Utah as a teamster in the spring of 1858. 

    Returning to Kansas in in June, 1858, he taught school briefly, and then transitioned to his more well- known role of bushwhacker, as he became increasingly connected with the violence and treachery of the border activity, playing both sides of the Free State and pro slavery causes.   In December, 1860, Quantrill betrayed a group of Kansas abolitionists that he led on a raid to free slaves in Missouri; three of the young men were ambushed and killed.

   When the Civil War began, Quantrill was irregularly connected to the Confederate Army and fought at the Battles of Lexington and Wilson’s Creek in Missouri.  He next appeared as the chief of a band of guerrillas, which one of Quantrill’s biographers described “a scourge in Missouri and Kansas, robbing mail coaches, raiding and sacking communities and farms supposed to be Union in sympathy.”  On August, 1862, Quantrill and his men were mustered into the Confederate army as Partisan Rangers and he was commissioned Captain.