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In the winter of 1862-3, William Clarke Quantrill traveled from Missouri to Richmond, Va., to request a colonelcy from Confederate Secretary of War James A. Seddon. Normally, men fighting for the Confederacy wouldn’t have had to make such a trip, or had the temerity to do so. But Quantrill was no ordinary soldier. He made his request under the provisions of the Partisan Ranger Act, passed by the Confederate Congress in 1862 to organize and promote unconventional warfare along the western border. When Seddon asked Quantrill’s opinions about the war, Quantrill replied, in the florid rendering of the Confederate sympathizer John N. Edwards, one of his biographers, “I would wage such a war … as to make surrender forever impossible. I would cover the armies of the Confederacy all over with blood. … I would exterminate.”

Although we think of the Civil War as fought by armies, the historian Daniel E. Sutherland has recently reminded us that it was also marked by extensive guerrilla warfare that spread throughout the Confederacy and into Northern border areas. Such fighting occurred first and most virulently in Missouri. Another historian, Matthew C. Hulbert, calls the guerrilla war in Missouri “hyper-violent,” making it a “uniquely different wartime experience” from that of ordinary soldiers. Even the name given to the guerrillas, “bushwhackers,” carried connotations of a different kind of fighting — attacks from ambush. Indeed, Hulbert argues that Quantrill’s biographer “concocted” the exchange between his subject and Seddon in part “to legitimize the brutality” of the Missouri guerrillas.

Proslavery Missourians had been fighting with territorial Kansas’ free-state settlers since the 1850s. Missouri, a border state, was deeply divided between Unionists and Confederates, a factor that historians generally dwell on in explaining the irregular war that erupted there. But there may have been a more quotidian motivation for many of the bushwhackers: money.

The historian Mark Geiger links the rise of bushwhacking to a failed scheme by Missouri Confederates to finance their rebellion against the state’s Unionist government; when the rebellion collapsed, many of its members – drawn largely from Missouri’s well-off, slave-owning class – were left with enormous debts. The core of Quantrill’s band, for example, was made up of young Missourians from Jackson County, which had both a large number of slave plantations and a large number of debtors. These youths may have found themselves in economically threatened families with little to lose by taking to the bush.

Geiger’s research gives substance to the observation that the guerrillas came from good families and had been peaceful, law-abiding citizens before the war. Mark Twain remembered his astonishment when a boyhood friend who was an “uncommonly sweet and gentle boy” became a “remorseless” bushwhacker during the war.

This did not, however, characterize Quantrill himself. Although he later told Missourians that he was a Southerner, he was actually born in Ohio and did not migrate to Kansas Territory until he was 19. After periods teaching school and doing farm work, Quantrill went to Utah as a teamster during the Mormon War, and even prospected for gold in Colorado. It was perhaps as a teamster during the trek to Utah, working alongside Southerners, that he became pro-Southern.

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Upon returning to the border region, he stole cattle and horses as part of a small band of Kansas men. At the end of 1860, Quantrill proposed that they liberate slaves on the Missouri farm of Morgan Walker. But Quantrill tipped off the Walker family about the planned attack and led his own men into an ambush. He explained this double cross to Walker and other Missourians by inventing the story of a brother who had been murdered by Kansas free-staters.

After the firing on Fort Sumter, Quantrill fell in with a band of Cherokee in Missouri who served under the Confederate general Benjamin McCulloch. When McCulloch retreated into Arkansas after the Battle of Wilson’s Creek in August 1861, Quantrill stayed with the Confederate force in Missouri under Gen. Sterling Price. When Price, too, began a retreat, Quantrill left the army and returned to Jackson County.

But he didn’t stay away from the fighting for long. During the following winter, Quantrill became the leader of a group of Jackson County men resisting the incursions of Kansas troops. One of his biographers, Edward E. Leslie, believes that Quantrill saw himself as a regular Confederate soldier, one who “kept promises he made to the enemy, accepted surrender, granted paroles, tried to exchange prisoners, and made certain that none of his men ever raped or assaulted a woman.” Federal authorities, however, disagreed. They viewed Quantrill and his men as irregulars who robbed the mail, stole horses and committed other “outrages.” This was an important distinction: the punishments for irregulars were, perforce, much more severe than for regular soldiers.

In March 1862, Quantrill’s band attacked Aubry, Kan., looting the town and killing five men. The killing of civilians caused Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck, commander of the Department of the Missouri, to issue a proclamation that guerrillas would not be treated as prisoners of war “but will be hung as robbers and murderers.”

Unaware of Halleck’s proclamation, Quantrill and his band attacked the federal garrison at Liberty, Mo. The bushwhackers mounted further attacks, including the capture of a steamboat, the Little Blue. In August, Quantrill’s forces even raided Independence, Mo., inflicting significant casualties on the Union troops stationed there and panicking the entire border region.

Less than a month later, the guerrillas rounded up all the men in Olathe, Kan. — soldiers and civilians — and put them in a corral. The bushwhackers looted the town, but Quantrill had agreed not to harm the people if they surrendered.

Although many Confederates disdained guerrilla warfare as un-Christian and savage, guerrillas aided the Confederate war effort by pinning down large numbers of Union troops and disrupting Union transportation and supplies. The government in Richmond clearly saw their advantage: on April 28, 1862, the Confederate Congress passed the Partisan Ranger Act, which regulated the guerrilla bands that had sprung up in areas between Confederate and Union territory. (The guerrillas preferred the term partisan, which harked back to revolutionary era militias; bushwhacker was a more derogatory term, connoting a sneak attack.) The Partisan Ranger Act allowed guerrilla bands to be commissioned and brought under the official aegis of the Confederate Army. In return, the partisan bands were to abide by the rules that applied to the regular army.

The act wasn’t without its critics, even inside the Confederacy. Some felt that the partisan rangers hurt recruiting, as Southern men preferred such bands’ looser discipline and greater independence. In addition, partisans were seen as more likely to commit depredations than were regular troops. Secretary of War Seddon would have preferred to incorporate the partisans as troops in the regular army. But he also recognized that the Partisan Ranger Act was a way to harness the irregular forces already in existence to the service of the Confederacy. Others did, too: in Missouri, Gen. Thomas C. Hindman issued orders allowing the enrollment of guerrillas into his forces. Although frightened civilians sometimes reported Quantrill’s band as having 1,000 members, on Aug. 15, 1862, Hindman mustered Quantrill and 120 men into the Confederate service as Partisan Rangers.

For the Union, the distinction between partisan and guerrilla was irrelevant. From the earliest days of the war, Union commanders in Missouri had struggled to suppress the guerrillas, assessing financial penalties on civilians for any damage done. During his controversial tenure in command in Missouri, Gen. John C. Frémont ordered the execution, after court-martial, of persons in arms against the United States.

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Of course, the guerrillas naturally vowed retaliation. When Union forces executed one of Quantrill’s men, Perry Hoy, Quantrill responded by ordering his men to shoot one of their captives, Levi Copeland, a lieutenant in the Missouri State Militia, whom Quantrill had hoped to exchange for Hoy.

The winter of 1863, which denuded the foliage that provided concealment to the bushwhackers, did more to disperse the guerrillas than did the Union troops, prompting Quantrill to lead his men to Arkansas. There they served as scouts for Confederate cavalry under Joseph O. Shelby. Quantrill himself set out for Richmond, where he had his interview with the secretary of war. He did not receive a colonelcy; when he returned to Missouri in the spring, he signed his name with the rank of captain.

His men also had begun drifting back from Arkansas. The spring foliage provided cover in their familiar haunts and grazing for their horses. By the time Quantrill returned, he had become a legend, and was even celebrated in songs that threatened: “We’ll ride through their ranks and bathe in their gore/Smite down the oppressor and humble the proud/Few shall escape us and few shall be spared/for keen is our saber, in vengeance ’tis bared;/For none are so strong, so might in fight/As the warrior who battles for our Southern right.” His biographer Edwards has a captured Union soldier exclaim, “Why Quantrell is but another name for death.”

Edwards’s narrative is one of ingenious disguises, pitched battles fought with deadly aim and hair-breadth escapes by men who knew that they fought under the “black flag.” The guerrillas may have indeed begun with the intent of protecting their homes, which explained their particular animosity toward Kansas, as the first Unionist incursions into Missouri came from that state – Quantrill supposedly recommended to Seddon that “Kansas should be laid waste at once” – but a cycle of revenge and retaliation was soon established. The historian Michael Fellman writes that the guerrillas saw themselves as “blood avengers for their brothers and comrades and civilian supporters killed by the Federals.” The 22-year-old guerrilla leader Willard Francis Hadly said, when he was executed in May 1864, “I went into the war to be a terror to the Feds. … I thought the South had her rights trampled upon. I am now sentenced to be shot. But I feel that I have been fully revenged.”

Civilians, too, were caught up in the terror of guerrilla war. Friendly farmers provided food and supplies. Women also helped supply their male relatives in the bush, including stitching the elaborate guerrilla shirts some of them wore. When Union commanders retaliated against civilians for aiding the guerrillas, they did not exclude women, whom they recognized as crucial to the guerrillas’ supply network.

Unionist civilians likewise frequently found themselves a partisan target. Bushwhackers might shoot an unarmed farmer despite his wife’s pleadings, or they might show mercy. Neighbors might settle a grudge by telling the guerrillas that someone was a Union sympathizer. Victims often refused even to identify guerrillas they recognized, for fear of savage reprisals. Brig. Gen. Clinton B. Fisk created his own version of the Golden Rule for Missouri: “There is scarcely a citizen in the county but wants to kill someone of his neighbors for fear that said neighbor may kill him.”

By the spring of 1863, however, Quantrill and his men wanted revenge, not just against Federal troops or Unionist civilians in Missouri, but against the free-staters in Kansas. Quantrill’s fictional vendetta had been to revenge his mythical brother’s death by Kansans. But his men had more tangible reasons to hate Kansas: it was to Kansas that Missouri slaves escaped, and it was from Kansas that jayhawkers had invaded Missouri at the war’s outset. Edwards captured this rage when he wrote that “to spare a Kansas man was to offend the God of a Guerrilla.” In his supposed interview with Seddon, Quantrill recommended, “Kansas should be laid waste at once.” Edwards may have invented the words, but not the intent. When Quantrill returned to the border in the spring of 1863, his bloodiest days lay ahead.

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Nicole Etcheson is a professor of history at Ball State University and the author of the prize-winning “A Generation at War: The Civil War Era in a Northern Community.”