Quantrill of Missouri: The Making of a Guerilla Warrior

One will not find the name of William Clarke Quantrill in the pantheon of noble Civil War personalities but instead near the top of the list of its notorious scoundrels. For nearly 150 years he has been scorned as the devil incarnate, loving -- and loved by -- no one. Most historical accounts portray him as a sadistic, pitiless, bloodthirsty killer. That image, however, does not ring true when weighed against the man's wartime accomplishments, contends author Paul R. Petersen. As Petersen studied the man who affected the conduct of the war in Missouri more than anyone else, he asked, "How could this so-called fiend have been a respected schoolteacher? How could he have organized and led up to four hundred men in the most noted band of guerrilla fighters known to history? How could he be so hated by his own men and still lead them in the van of the most renowned battles through Missouri, winning victories over superior Union forces? Mothers entrusted their sons to him. Others served him as spies. Women willingly tended his wounded, and his followers even guarded him in battle. Most of his people were God-fearing farmers... God-fearing, righteous people who would not have followed a depraved, degenerate, psychotic killer."

Much of the lore about Quantrill that has been accepted as fact was recorded by those who fought against him during the war. In short, the victors wrote the history. Although most historians have generally described a benign spirit that prevailed after the war, this view ignores the long-seated rivalries and personal feuds that characterized the Kansas-Missouri frontier before the conflict and fueled the fighting there. In this region of the country, it can be said that the war began in the mid-1850s, not 1861. The Civil War in Missouri was vastly different from the set-piece encounters in Virginia and Tennessee. Here the conflict was personal, and no injury was ever forgotten or forgiven. In that environment, Quantrill's accomplishments rivaled those of John S. Mosby's partisan rangers and Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry, but Quantrill's victories are labeled as massacres, and his men are judged to be murderers. In the end, after perusing numerous archives and weighing the memoirs of several of Quantrill's guerrillas, Petersen discovers a vastly different Quantrill than the man generally described in Civil War scholarship. Instead of a cutthroat, he finds a leader who assessed the border situation and devised an effective military solution. The result was what we know now as modern guerrilla warfare.