Lawrence

During the American Civil War (1861-65), Confederate guerrillas under William Quantrill descended on the Unionist town of Lawrence, Kansas, in what became known as both the Lawrence Massacre and Quantrill's Raid. Roughly 150 men and boys died in the assault. Early on Friday, August 21, 1863, Quantrill's Raiders struck the town, choosing it because of its longstanding ties to abolition and its standing as a hub for the Jayhawkers. These free-state militia and vigilante bands had built a reputation for raiding plantations across the pro-slavery western counties of Missouri.

Background

Long before 1863, Kansas found itself caught in bitter conflict over whether new states would permit slavery or forbid it. That struggle turned violent in the summer of 1856, when the first sacking of Lawrence set off years of guerrilla fighting across the territory. Among those who took part on the abolitionist or Jayhawker side, John Brown stands out as perhaps the most familiar name, though many other bands and factions clashed on both sides throughout the "Bleeding Kansas" years.

When the Civil War began, Lawrence already drew the anger of pro-slavery forces. The town had a reputation as the state's anti-slavery stronghold, and it also served as a launching point for Unionist and Jayhawker raids into Missouri. In the war's early days, residents there and in the surrounding countryside stayed on high alert, responding forcefully whenever word spread that hostile troops might be approaching. But none of those alarms ever proved true, and as the summer of 1863 arrived, the sense of danger had faded along with the town's readiness to defend itself.

Motivations

Lawrence served as the base of operations for a group of Jayhawkers, at times known as "Red Legs," who launched an effort in late March 1863 aimed, at least officially, at cutting off civilian aid to Confederate guerrilla fighters. General Blunt of the U.S. Army described their conduct this way: a reign of terror had taken hold, and neither property nor life remained secure for anyone who resisted their plundering schemes. Figures among the

Attack

Nothing about this assault came together by chance. Quantrill had spent time winning over the trust of several Bushwhacker chieftains and settled on the timing well ahead of the event. Separate bands of Missouri riders moved toward Lawrence from the east along independent paths, converging with remarkable timing in the last miles before town during the hours just before sunrise on the appointed morning. Some men had spent more than a day in the saddle to reach the meeting point, tying themselves to their mounts so they would keep moving even if exhaustion overtook them. Nearly every rider carried more than one six-shot revolver.

A black servant named Henry Thompson, living in Hesper, tried sprinting on foot toward Lawrence to alert the town that hundreds of horsemen were closing in. He collapsed from fatigue once he reached Eudora, Kansas. A stranger passing nearby in a chaise stopped to see if he needed assistance, and Thompson explained that he had fled Hesper and needed word to reach Lawrence. The pair managed to persuade some Eudora residents to ride west and sound the alarm, but nobody arrived soon enough to make a difference.

Roughly 450 guerrillas reached the edges of Lawrence just past five in the morning. A handful were sent up to the top of Mount Oread to watch for trouble while the rest pushed into the streets. Among the earliest to die was Samuel S. Snyder, a pastor who also held a lieutenant's commission in the 2nd Kansas Colored Regiment. He was milking his cows outdoors when riders passing toward town shot him down, an act witnessed by his old friend Reverend Hugh Fisher. The raiders' first target was the Eldridge House, a sizable brick hotel at the center of town, which Quantrill claimed as his headquarters once it fell under his control. From there his force splintered into smaller bands that spread out across Lawrence. Across roughly four hours, these men set fire to and looted a quarter of the town's structures, sparing only two businesses, emptied most of its banks and shops, and killed more than 150 men and boys, no women among them. One account from 1897 claims that eighteen of twenty three army recruits who had not yet been mustered in were among the slain. By nine that morning the guerrillas were pulling out, slipping past the few units that tried to chase them, and later scattering into separate groups so no single Union force could follow them all back into Missouri. Some families made a desperate dash toward Mount Oread hoping to find safety there.

What unfolded resembled a mass execution far more than any kind of battle. Just two weeks earlier, a local paper had bragged that Lawrence could field more than five hundred armed men eager to face down Quantrill's men. Yet a detachment of soldiers stationed there had already gone back to Fort Leavenworth, and the sheer speed and ferocity of the assault caught the militia off guard, leaving no time to organize resistance. The vast majority of those killed carried no weapons at all. This defenselessness traced back partly to an earlier incident known as the Sacking of Lawrence, when pro-slavery raiders under Samuel J. Jones, the Douglas County sheriff at the time, had forced residents to surrender their firearms. Though many refused at first, by the time that earlier episode ended, a great many Lawrence residents had lost their weapons entirely, leaving the town poorly equipped to resist when the later massacre struck with such speed.

Revenge stood as a major driving force behind the attack, and Quantrill's men rode into Lawrence carrying names of men marked for death along with buildings marked for burning. Senator James H. Lane topped that list. As both a military commander and the leading political voice behind the jayhawking raids, Lane had overseen killing, looting, and arson across western Missouri earlier in the war, including the destruction of Osceola. He avoided being killed by fleeing through a cornfield still dressed in his nightshirt. John Speer, a man whose newspaper career Lane had helped launch and one of his most important political allies, also appeared on the list. Speer survived, but two of his sons did not. One of these sons might have been the same John L. Speer named earlier on a Union military list of Red Legs. Speer's fifteen year old son Billy may have also been marked for death, yet the raiders let him go after he gave a false name. Billy later shot one of the guerrillas as they were leaving town, making him responsible for one of the few casualties the raiders suffered while inside Lawrence. Charles L. Robinson, the first governor of Kansas and a well known abolitionist, might

Aftermath

When the raiders pulled back toward the southeast, Lane gathered a handful of men who had survived the killing and set off after Quantrill's band. Along the way about 200 U.S. Army cavalrymen under Major Preston B. Plumb joined the chase. South of Brooklyn, Kansas, the pursuers caught up with the raiders, touching off the first in a series of clashes that opened with the Skirmish near Brooklyn, Kansas.

Few episodes in Kansas history matched the bloodshed of what happened at Lawrence. The Plymouth Congregational Church came through the assault standing, though several of its congregants were killed and its records lost to the flames. Speaking to his flock days later, the pastor Cordley told them that Lawrence might look dead but would rise again in a grander resurrection, that although death had thinned their ranks they must close up and hold Kansas ground, that the fight was not over but victory belonged to them, and that even if they perished, the principles they fought for would endure.

The morning after the massacre, townspeople who had lived through it seized one of Quantrill's men found lingering in Lawrence and lynched him. On August 25, General Ewing issued General Order No. 11, a directive distinct from the order of the same number later associated with General Ulysses S. Grant. It forced thousands of Missouri residents from their homes across four counties near the Kansas line, and nearly every structure in that territory was afterward burned to ashes. Charles "Doc" Jennison, a Jayhawker, carried out this campaign, sweeping through with raids so thorough and indiscriminate that western Missouri's four counties were left in ruin, with nothing standing but the brick chimneys of once two-story houses, structures locals still call "Jennison Monuments."

George Miller, an abolitionist preacher from Missouri, reflected on how the Lawrence killings pushed the region toward total war against civilians on both sides of the border. He called the Lawrence Raid the most infamous act of that uncivil war, however one judged it. The destruction did not end there, he noted, and the cruelty of this vengeful cycle lay in how each side understood, yet ignored, that their violence would land hardest on their own defenseless people. He recalled how Jennison had charged into Missouri back in 1861 when no resistance stood against him, plundering and killing before slipping away, leaving Missouri's Union sympathizers to absorb the retaliation for his crimes. Quantrill, he wrote, did the same in 1863, riding into Lawrence when no danger threatened him, killing and stealing before vanishing, abandoning the helpless women and children of his own cause to suffer the terrible vengeance that followed. According to Miller, swift and brutal retribution came after the Lawrence raid, falling as border warfare usually dictated on the innocent rather than the guilty. Quantrill had lost only one man leaving Kansas, yet the Kansas troops trailing him at a cautious distance unleashed devastating punishment across all of western Missouri. Unarmed elderly men and boys were shot on mere accusation, homes were set ablaze along with what little comfort remained in them, and women and children were left without shelter as winter approached. Miller observed that no one ever tallied how many died, since the victims were scattered throughout western Missouri.

Following the attack, Quantrill moved his men south into Texas to wait out the winter. By the following year, though, his force had broken apart and could no longer mount the kind of raid that had destroyed Lawrence. Quantrill himself died in 1865 from wounds suffered in Kentucky, with only a small circle of loyal men still at his side, among them Frank James and his younger brother Jesse James.

In the aftermath, the Army built a handful of military posts atop Mount Oread, among them Camp Ewing, Camp Lookout, and Fort Ulysses, meant to watch over the city as it rebuilt. Lawrence was never struck again, and once the war ended these posts were abandoned and taken apart.