Raider Quantrill Arrested For North Texas Crimes
A party at a Sherman dance hall on Dec. 31, 1863, ended in a drunken brawl as everyone in attendance, all members of Quantrill’s Raiders, welcomed the New Year by beating each other senseless.
A party at a Sherman dance hall on Dec. 31, 1863, ended in a drunken brawl as everyone in attendance, all members of Quantrill’s Raiders, welcomed the New Year by beating each other senseless.
Leaving Lawrence, Kansas in ashes, Col. William Clarke Quantrill decided to lie low in Texas for the winter. On a creek north of Sherman, hundreds of miles from his old haunts, he ordered his 300 Rebel irregulars to make camp. The marauders passed the time by tormenting North Texans and fighting among themselves.
The 26-year-old ex-teacher supposedly started out with honorable intentions. During the early months of the Civil War, he rallied Missouri farmers to resist frequent attacks from the Jayhawkers in neighboring Kansas.
Northern authorities only made matters worse in 1862 by branding the sodbusters as outlaws subject to on-the-spot execution. Strengthened by a sudden influx of vengeful volunteers, Quantrill drove the Yankees from Independence, Missouri, an impressive feat that won him a commission as a Confederate captain.
The schoolmaster’s style of no-quarter combat attracted a cast of bloodthirsty characters. Cole Younger and the James brothers, Jesse and Frank, represented Missouri youths eager to settle the score with Union soldiers, while others like Little Archie Clement, who collected the scalps of fallen foes, were homicidal maniacs plain and simple. The rest were common criminals with no cause other than plunder.
Failing to find the elusive guerrillas, Northern troops seized their wives, mothers, and sisters. The innocent citizens of Lawrence, Kansas, paid dearly for this blunder in August 1863, when Quantrill put the town to the torch and massacred 150 men, women, and children.
That fall at his headquarters in Bonham, Brigadier General Henry McCulloch learned of the raiders’ arrival. Familiar with their dubious deeds, he protested to his superior “certainly we cannot as a Christian people sanction a savage, inhuman warfare in which men are shot down like dogs.”
But Gen. Edmund Kirby-Smith did not share his subordinate’s low opinion of the Quantrill crowd, which he contended was composed of “bold, fearless men” and “the very best class of Missourians.” He encouraged McCulloch to make the most of their special talents by sending them after the many deserters hiding in North Texas.
The Texan reluctantly obeyed against his better judgment and was not surprised by the results. The trigger-happy raiders were proficient at hunting down deserters but even better at finding an excuse for filling them with lead. Few lived long enough to return to active duty.
The New Year’s Eve melee underscored the conflicts festering within the Quantrill ranks. The Lawrence slaughter gnawed at the conscience of a small minority, and many more had given the South up for lost after the defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. But by far the most common complaint concerned the allegedly unfair distribution of their ill-gotten gains.
A rash of murders and robberies in January 1864 was blamed on the incorrigibles and again prompted McCulloch to write Kirby-Smith. Swearing the Missourians were “but one shade better than highwaymen,” he argued the guerrillas “regard the life of a man less than you would a sheep-killing dog.”
By the time the Texan had sufficient evidence to call the colonel on the carpet, petty squabbles and defections had reduced the band to less than a hundred. When Quantrill set foot in Bonham, he was promptly arrested for the recent crime wave.
However, as McCulloch took a dinner break, the resourceful prisoner escaped from his hotel-room cell. Quantrill assembled his remaining riders, hurriedly broke camp and left Texas for good.
Less than a year later, the colonel was replaced at gunpoint by an ambitious underling. But with his blood-curdling reputation, Quantrill had no trouble starting over from scratch. Determined to prove he was not over the hill, he dreamed up his most daring deed to date.
On his way to Washington in April 1865 to kill President Abraham Lincoln, Quantrill heard he had been upstaged by John Wilkes Booth. Gravely wounded the next month in a Kentucky skirmish, he lingered three weeks before finally dying.
At the request of his mother, Quantrill’s body was exhumed 22 years later. Before a second burial in his native Ohio, a family friend auctioned off several of his infamous bones to the highest bidder.
In the 1940s his missing skull was finally traced to a college fraternity, which used the relic in its initiation rites. The ghoulish postscript seemed strangely fitting for William Clarke Quantrill, believed by many to have lost his head while still alive and kicking!
(Bartee Haile welcomes your comments, questions and suggestions at haile@pdq.net or P.O. Box 152, Friendswood, TX 77549. And come on by www.twith.com for a visit!)
