Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

On April 20, 1866, a letter addressed to James Knox arrived in Chesterfield, S.C. Robert E. Lee had surrendered his once-mighty Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant more than a year prior — but the blood of R. H. Miller, the man who had sent the letter from his home in Lawrence, Kans., was still up. Miller outlined a general list of grievances against the ex-Confederacy and then quickly turned to the real subject of his letter: the Lawrence Massacre of Aug. 21, 1863.

Miller’s story began early on the day of the assault when William C. Quantrill — undoubtedly the best-known of Missouri’s guerrilla chieftains — and a “set of robber and murders called bushwhackers of who 3 or 400 run all on horses came to my house about sunrise.” A bushwhacker approached Miller’s daughter, Susie, and asked if any federal soldiers had come to Lawrence during the night. The guerrilla threatened to “blow her brains out if she told him a lie.”

At this, Miller’s wife, Margaret, opened the door and the guerrilla barged past her into the house. The would-be interrogator demanded to speak with Miller’s son, William, who offered little more information than his sister. The Millers were warned to stay inside and to keep quiet; in exchange, the guerrillas vowed not to execute the family and set their home ablaze. Six of Quantrill’s men rode ahead to check the nearby Snyder house. There they found Mr. Snyder milking a cow and inexplicably shot him down on the spot.

The Miller homestead was located about one-and-one-quarter miles southeast of the business district in Lawrence, and the family’s morning encounter with Quantrill foreshadowed the bloodiest day in the sleeping town’s history.

According to Miller, Quantrill and his men, each “armed with a gun and 4 revolvers,” killed 18 of the 22 new federal recruits camped in Lawrence. They set the Eldridge Hotel on fire and held its many patrons hostage. Because the town had been taken by surprise, “no resistance” was offered from its startled residents. Much of Miller’s description of the blitz came in the form of this angry, nearly punctuation-less outburst

Quantrill sent his men in squads all over the town killing, robbing, and burning the houses they would order the men to give them a drink of water and as soon as they got the water they would shoot the man down they killed a great many after promising to use them as prisoners of war to get them out of their houses, then shot them down in the street they took the rings and jewelry and all the sink and finery they could carry all the money watches and good horses and then burn the house they killed 180 men that made no resistance and burned 182 houses in Lawrence and burned all the good houses on the road they went.

When all was said and done, at least by Miller’s estimation, “that mornings work” had cost him $500 in cash (lost in the charred vault of the town bank) and $400 in lumber and other building materials. When also accounting for lost rent and stolen horses, Miller tallied his total loss at $1,600. But Miller also thanked God that his family had not been counted among the dead – and he still had $800 hidden at home. His neighbor, a man named Josiah, had not been so lucky. His losses amounted to $2,400 and a “new brick house” left in ashes.

Photo

But aside from the physical damage wrought by Quantrill and his men, Miller’s letter underlines how such violence had become business-as-usual in the Border West, in both Kansas and Missouri. Miller noted that Union men all over Missouri “were tormented and the women maltreated by the bushwhacker the descendants of the old Virginia slave holder and mulatoe maker.” He added that “hundreds of Union men had to flee for their lives” to escape the “awful loss of life and destruction of property that was done in Missouri.” Miller even described the torture tactics of Missouri guerrillas and underscored that “although men did not die on the spot [as a result of the torture] they never got over it until they did die.” “If Sherman’s men were worse,” he quipped about the guerrillas, “hell in its hottest part is too good for them.”

Many Missourians adhered to a radically different version of the Lawrence Massacre. In 1877, popular pro-Confederate accounts of Quantrill’s great raid were amalgamated by an ex-Confederate newspaper editor and Democratic fire-eater named John Newman Edwards in “Noted Guerrillas, Or, The Warfare of the Border.” According to Edwards’ narrative, Quantrill’s men “went for revenge and they took it.” And by Edwards’ logic, after years of theft, plunder, arson and murder suffered by innocent Missourians at the hands of Kansas Jayhawkers, they took it justifiably. Just for good measure, Edwards fabricated a dialogue — a council of war between Quantrill and his top subordinates — that outlined in detail why such an audacious raid was both warranted and necessary. Asked whether or not they supported the plan to strike Lawrence, Quantrill’s men replied in turn: “Lawrence or hell, but with one proviso, that we kill every male thing”; “Lawrence, if I knew that not a man would get back alive”; “Lawrence; it is the home of Jim Lane; the foster mother of the Red Legs; the nurse of the Jayhawkers”; “Lawrence; I know it of old; niggers and white people are just the same there; it’s a Boston colony and it should be wiped out”; “Where my house once stood there is a heap of ashes. I haven’t a neighbor that’s got a house — Lawrence and the torch.”

On one hand, Edwards’ account of the massacre was strikingly similar to Miller’s, despite their ideological and geographical differences. “It was a day of darkness and woe,” wrote Edwards. “Distracted women ran about the streets. Fathers were killed with infants in their arms. Husbands in the embrace of their wives were shot down.” In cellars and parlors, down alleyways and streets, on porches, beds, and wagons, the corpses of dead men were strewn everywhere in Lawrence. Even as the killing wound down, the “air was filled with cries for mercy; on every breeze came the wailing of women and the screams of children.” Edwards did not offer an official tally of the dead, but he conceded that it was probably well over 100.

On the other hand, despite the aforementioned horrors, Edwards’ rendition of the massacre also included several acts of mercy and charity from some of Quantrill’s most notorious killers. “The true story of the day’s terrible work,” he offered, “will never be told.” Edwards wrote that on numerous occasions the Missourians had let husbands, fathers and sons go free on the wishes of their heroic and dedicated women. In “Noted Guerrillas,” even a rough and ready Jesse James — whom modern historians concur was not even present at the Lawrence Massacre — fell victim to these feminine charms. Just as James was “in the act of shooting a soldier” who had been “smoked out of a cellar,” an attractive young girl came to him. As James held his pistol against the man’s head, the girl pleaded, “Don’t kill him, for my sake.” Blushing at the girl, James allegedly said, “Take him, he is yours. I would not harm a hair on his head for the State of Kansas.”

Related Civil War Timeline An unfolding history of the Civil War with photos and articles from the Times archive and ongoing commentary from Disunion contributors. Visit the Timeline »

Miller and Edwards each offered a version of the Lawrence Massacre designed to make legitimate or illegitimate the most controversial and best-publicized guerrilla battle of the entire Civil War: Miller presented innocent Kansans slaughtered by bloodthirsty Missourians while Edwards depicted Missourians pushed to massacre by the atrocities of Kansans. So what do we actually know about the morning of Aug. 21, 1863?

We know that the ambush Quantrill sprang in Lawrence claimed the lives of about 200 townspeople and federal soldiers. And we know that the motivating factors behind the massacre have changed very little since the 1860s and ’70s: to this day, many Missourians blame Jayhawker atrocities and the collapse of a Union prison building in Kansas City that killed several Confederate prisoners, while many Kansans still contend that Quantrill was a common criminal who used the war as a convenient backdrop for plunder, arson, rape and murder.

But in terms of how we have remembered the Civil War, what can the Lawrence Massacre still tell us as we recognize, perhaps sheepishly, its 150th birthday? For starters, it tells us that the reminiscences of Miller and Edwards, like myriad others from Civil War Missouri and Kansas, point to a radically different wartime experience. Unlike Unionists or Confederates back east, the dominant wartime experience of these Missourians and Kansans revolved around an irregular “war within a war” — a guerrilla war. Instead of massive armies colliding at Manassas, Fredericksburg, Antietam or Chickamauga, the guerrilla war was a hyper-local, hyper-personal affair. It unfolded in countless individual fields, yards and homes. Men, women and children suffered, died and survived together; murder, torture, theft, arson and rape were all familiar calling cards of Civil War guerrillas. Even the Lawrence Massacre itself was something of an anomaly. Very rarely were so many guerrillas in the same place at the same time, let alone operating within such a well-organized and hierarchical command structure.

Coming immediately on the heels of the sesquicentennial events planned to celebrate the Battle of Gettysburg, the Lawrence Massacre will serve as more of a sideshow for most Civil War enthusiasts. But in large part because of this arrangement, the accounts of R. H. Miller and John Newman Edwards remind us to be conscious of both what is remembered and what is forgotten. As spokesmen for a Civil War experience that had nothing to do with Little Round Top or Pickett’s Charge, Miller and Edwards beg us to continue asking how the conventional narratives of Blue against Gray might look if the Lawrence Massacre and the guerrilla war that sparked it were not just a blip on the commemorative radar.

Follow Disunion at twitter.com/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook.

Matthew C. Hulbert is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Georgia. His articles on guerrilla warfare and Civil War memory have appeared in The Journal of the Civil War Era, Civil War History and The Journal of the West.