Mystery of Quantrill examined by author

After dozens of books and movies since he was mortally wounded near the end of the Civil War, Missouri guerilla leader William Clarke Quantrill remains a mystery that will probably never be solved.

He no doubt rode the trails of Vernon County at times and Nevada's Col. John D. Holt was with him during his controversial 1863 raid on Lawrence, Kan., and when he was paralyzed by gunshot in May 1865.

A native Ohioan, Quantrill was a relatively well-educated man and a former schoolteacher, and people who knew him said he was a modest man who became ferocious in battle.

According to Paul Petersen of Raytown, who has written three books about him, "He was a slender, 5-foot-9 rider with blue eyes, sandy brown hair, an aquiline nose and an imperial mustache.

"Riding a beautiful bay gelding, he wore a broad-brimmed black slouch hat with a red Canna blossom in the band, gold tassels along the brim, a gold neck cord, black high-topped cavalry boots and a highly decorated brown guerilla shirt."

Petersen said Quantrill typically "had four .36 caliber Navy revolvers in his belt, two more in saddle holsters, a large dirk in his belt and a rifle and other weapons in his saddlebow.

"He was quiet, modest, gentlemanly and cultivated but jaunty and desperate. He never drank, gambled or dissipated in any way. His men were for the most part like himself, strictly temperate and quiet."

Admittedly from a partisan Missouri viewpoint, Petersen says the Raid on Lawrence was justified because federal troops and Redlegs from Kansas had indiscriminantly robbed and murdered Missourians for years before Quantrill's 450 "bushwhackers" killed some 150 men and boys in Lawrence.

Union Gen. Jim Lane's burning of Osceola, Mo., in 1861 was one motivation, Petersen says, but the main one was a Kansas City jail collapse in which four young women related to the guerillas were killed and six seriously injured.

It happened a week before the Lawrence Raid on Aug. 21, 1863, and the Missourians believed soldiers in Kansas' Ninth Jawhawker Regiment had deliberately undermined the jail structure.

However, the author asserted that Quantrill "didn't kill anybody" himself at Lawrence. "He declared everyone's safety at the Eldridge House hotel when wanted men were there," said Petersen in the book published by Pelican Publishing of Gretna, La.

"He saved a lot more lives than people give him credit for. In fact, there were only two or three times when he rode up and shot someone. One was in Wellington, Mo., where he saw a horse a federal soldier had stolen from him and he waited across the street until the man came out of a store."

Petersen, a decorated former master sergeant who served in Vietnam, Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom with the Marine Corps, said Quantrill proved an excellent officer despite having no military experience before the Civil War.

"He weighed everything beforehand --what to do if he won and which direction to withdraw in if he lost," the author said in an Aug. 16 telephone interview. "He was a brilliant commander, not a coldblooded psychopathic killer like people said he was."

Contrary to Northern accounts, Petersen said, Lawrence "was a viable military target" with five forts, 1,000 soldiers and a well-armed citizenry that was only taken because the raiders hit fast and with great precision, though under strict orders not to harm any women or children.

Petersen said many of Quantrill's men had been afraid to attack when they reached the outskirts of town, convinced they would be wiped out; but they all followed when the leader spurred his horse and rode away, asserting, "You may do as you please, I'm going to Lawrence."

A different view is held by Missouri State History Professor William Garret Piston, who said Quantrill might be remembered more favorably if he had survived the war to write his own account. "The actual amount of information we have on him is very scant," Piston said.

"There is nothing from Quantrill himself and what we do have comes from people who are biased one way or the other. I don't think anyone will ever be able seriously to discuss what Quantrill's personal motives were or what his personality was really like.

"We only have his deeds to judge him by and seeing those, he was a coldblooded, cutthroat murderer."

Piston said Union partisans like Lane, John Brown and Charles Jennison "were just as bad, but that doesn't excuse anything Quantrill did.

"He went far beyond anything justified by military operations. Human beings are complex. They all claimed motives of patriotism, but they murdered people, stole a lot of horses and made a great deal of money."

Having documented 1,000 men and boys, a few as young as 12, who rode with Quantrill between 1861 and '65, Petersen said many had lost their homes and families and had nowhere else to go. "Quantrill had leadership qualities," he said.

"At 15, he was taking college courses in trigonometry and surveying. All his men respected and loved him. They rode into battle next to him, trying to shield him."

Early in the war, Quantrill married Sarah Katherine King of Blue Springs, who was 17 when he died in Louisville at age 27 after being shot in the back near Smiley, Ky. Buried at Louisville, his remains were exhumed in 1887 and subsequently divided among graves there and in Higginsville and his hometown of Dover, Ohio.

Petersen said Quantrill explained what was happening in Lawrence during a conversation with people at the Eldridge House. "He talked freely about himself and the present expedition, receiving with marked complacency some compliments on the completeness of his success but not hesitating to express his consciousness that it was by far the greatest of his exploits," the author wrote, quoting a witness.

Referring to his pre-war alias "Charlie Hart," one asked, "Charlie, how could you do such a thing to a town where you have so many acquaintances and some friends?"

He replied, "My men came here for revenge and I can't stop them from what they are doing."