Then and now

Anyone who believes hatreds and violence aren't ineradicably ingrained in human nature, and are destined to lessen and disappear, or can be encouraged to do so simply by efforts of good will, needn't look far to be disillusioned.

One need fare no farther than the former Yugoslavia, where group hatreds had so long been damped down by Communist tyranny it was imagined they'd disappeared. Lo, no more had the lid of tyranny blown off than the old animosities burst out anew, all-the-worse for their long repression. Peoples of differing races and religions who, nevertheless, had lived peaceably as neighbors for generations suddenly were at each other's throats.

Or one can look at the history of our own country, back at a time when people who weren't merely lifelong peaceable neighbors but even of identical race and religion, when order broke down, suddenly set about plundering and murdering each other.

That's the importance of history. It's a cautionary tale, not only reminding us what once happened but warning us it might well happen again. And it's the value of a new book, "Quantrill of Missouri," by Paul R. Petersen (Cumberland House, 2003).

As lately noted of Jesse James, one's first thought might be that the last thing the world needs is another book about his Bushwhacker mentor. Yet, as did the James book, the Quantrill one brings to the old subject new information and above all new insights.

No professional historian, Petersen rather is "a highly decorated master sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps" and "a combat infantry veteran of Vietnam and Desert Storm," "uniquely qualified to interpret the nature of guerrilla warfare that characterized the Civil War along the Missouri-Kansas border." And he's a lifelong resident of Jackson County, Mo., Quantrill's home base. His familiarity with guerrilla warfare, as well as with the terrain where Quantrill's guerrillas fought, Petersen says, gives him a perspective on the Quantrill story denied to academics, who typically spend their lives at their desks, in large part merely copying the works of other academics who preceded them. The reader's inclined to agree. Petersen's prose often is roughhewn; his argument is persuasive.

He's hardly the first to argue (the present writer's done it, among others) that Quantrill's gotten a bad rap. His worst enemies totally controlled the press during his lifetime, and among them was his first biographer. Kansan William E. Connelley's "Quantrill and the Border Wars," however "scholarly," first and foremost was a hatchet-job. Yet, in default of other sources, it's been the basis of nearly all Quantrill study and writing ever since. Quantrill's only defenders of his own generation, including some of his own guerrillas, were the "losers," easily scorned by the war's winners, the "establishment" scholars, a breed never famed for courage.

Petersen boldly takes on each of the most controversial episodes in Quantrill's life, and goes far toward proving the "received wisdom," in each case, utterly wrong.

Connelley and his followers painted young Quantrill as a fiend who delighted in torturing animals, improbably pulling wings off flies, etc. Petersen quotes people who really knew him, and who had only good things to say of him. In his first years as a schoolteacher in Kansas he was universally seen as a likeable, intelligent, educated, decent young man.

As Quantrill himself told it, he became disillusioned with his original Abolitionism after Jayhawkers slew his "brother" and left himself for dead. His enemies have gleefully pounced on the fact that Quantrill had no brother. But Quantrill's words, Petersen shows, can be interpreted to mean not a literal brother but merely a companion, a comrade. There's no more reason, he concludes, for disbelieving the essence of the story than for believing it.

The crux of the book, for this reader, is Petersen's meticulous cataloging of the outrages and atrocities committed by Kansas Jayhawkers, even by regular Union troops, against western Missourians, beginning long before the war, certainly long before Quantrill and other Bushwhackers took to the saddle.

"They started it!" Quantrill can truly say from the grave.

It's incontrovertible: Kansans and Northerners in general not only set the seesaw of hatred and violence going, they were the first to carry it to extremes. The Union, not the Bushwhackers, first "raised the black flag." Repeatedly Quantrill tried to negotiate prisoner exchanges, like those between the regular Union and Confederate forces; repeatedly he was rebuffed. Union troops were the first to scalp and mutilate the dead, practices then adopted by Bloody Bill Anderson and others, and popularly associated only with them.

And Unionists alone, for the first time since the Dark Ages, perfected what the Nazis would call sippenhaft, avenging the deeds of combatants against their unoffending, unarmed relatives. Union troops routinely raped and otherwise abused women, something the roughest guerrillas never, ever stooped to, not even under great provocation.

At best, the Union's war record in western Missouri is one of atrociously hamfisted blunderings and incredible injustices against civilians, in utter disregard of traditional morality and Constitutional niceties.

As for the sensational collapse of the Kansas City building where women kin of Bushwhackers were imprisoned, without charge, killing and maiming many of the women (the proximate cause of the Bushwhacker attack on Lawrence, Kan.), Petersen quotes verbatim affidavits of workmen and others, who deposed under oath that the soldiers guarding the building (who themselves managed to be absent on the fatal night!) deliberately, maliciously, most likely under orders, undermined the building so it would collapse. Ground-floor merchant tenants were so aware of the mischief they began moving out. And all suggestions of an official investigation were quashed. George Caleb Bingham, the building's pro-Union owner, in trying to pin blame and so get compensation, ran up against a bureaucratic stone wall.

This big, meaty book defies summation. One can only recommend it to anyone interested in the truth of events along the Missouri-Kansas Border in Civil War times. Or, indeed, in what "civil war" may mean at any moment when law and order break down and, invariably it seems, people turn on their lifelong neighbors with the ferocity of wild beasts.

One has truly chilling visions of a future in which law and order break down, yet again, and everybody looks about for someone to blame. If people of the same race and faith could descend into unrelieved savagery as did our ancestors in the 1850s-60s, what might we and the unassimilated, very alien immigrant groups we're welcoming into our midst be capable of doing to each other at some perhaps not too distant date?

"Quantrill of Missouri" (500 pages, hardbound, $26.95) is available at the Bushwhacker Museum, or from booksellers.