William Clark Quantrill

William Clark Quantrill

William Clark Quantrill (born July 31, 1837 in Canal Dover , Ohio , † June 6, 1865 in Louisville , Kentucky ) was a notorious partisan leader in the Civil War .

Quantrill's early years

Quantrill was born on July 31, 1837, the oldest of eight siblings in Canal Dover (now Dover), Ohio. His father was Thomas Quantrill, who was from Hagerstown , Maryland . His mother, Caroline Cornelia Quantrill, née Clark, was from Chambersburg , Pennsylvania . The parents married on October 11, 1836. They moved to Canal Dover in December of that year. Thomas Quantrill died on December 7, 1854, most likely of tuberculosis. At the time of death, he was the principal of the local Canal Dover Union School .

Upbringing and early political conviction

Little is known about Quantrill's early years in Canal Dover. What is certain is that he grew up in a family close to the Unionists and that his mother was raised accordingly even after his father's death. His original political conviction was therefore also against the spread, but by no means for an end to slavery , which is also clear in his temporary support of the Free Soil party . The Free Soil Party was a short-lived and soon absorbed by the Republicans splinter group of the Democratic Party, which appeared essentially in the presidential elections of 1848 and 1852 in appearance; however, without any notable success.

Activities up to the Civil War 1861

At the age of 16, Quantrill began to work as a school teacher and mostly earned his living that way until he joined the US Army in 1858 . His service took him temporarily to Utah . He mainly served as a team leader (group leader, non-commissioned officer). However, he soon quit his job to try his hand at becoming a professional gambler. In 1859 he moved to Lawrence , Kansas , where he returned to teaching. However, he soon had to leave the city and state after he was accused of cattle theft and murder. He fled to Missouri .

Quantrill's Raiders in the Civil War

Before William Clark Quantrill founded the guerrilla group Quantrill’s Raiders in 1861 as a consistent opponent of every government , whose actions were originally directed against the abolitionists and which displayed particular brutality and ruthlessness in the process, at the beginning of the war he first considered whether he should not come from Maryland join the US Army or the Missouri State Guard . His negative attitude towards the army's discipline made him refrain from doing so. Instead, he founded the Quantrill's Raiders as an irregular unit of initially only about a dozen fighters, which were later recognized by the government of the Confederate States of America ( Southern States ) as the official auxiliary force of the Confederate Army . Quantrill was promoted to the rank of non-commissioned officer.

At times, Quantrill's Raiders also dealt with the Jayhawkern , a guerrilla unit of the Union Army fighting for the northern states, who invaded Missouri from Kansas . Quantrill and his followers blamed them for the collapse of a Kansas City prison where some family members, friends, and sympathizers of the Quantrill's Raiders were held. The collapse, which Quantrill believes to have been intentional, led to retaliation. In this attack on August 21, 1863, the Quantrill's Raiders pillaged and looted the city of Lawrence, killing around 200 men and boys. This Lawrence massacre counts as his notorious crime.

This and other brutal railroad raids, patrols, couriers and Union settlements gave Quantrill the reputation of being "The bloodiest man in American history." Union soldiers were hunted again and again, but attacks were also made on civilians who were close to the Union or whose support was suspected.

The commanders of the Union troops declared Quantrill an outlaw, although Quantrill was listed as a captain of a group of Partisan Rangers and thus actually belonged to the Confederate army. When the Union troops ordered that all captured guerrilla fighters should be shot, Quantrill decided in return to execute prisoners as well. He soon gained some notoriety among his opponents as a feared rebel leader, while his followers described him more as a straightforward free spirit and viewed him as a hero.

During the winter stay in Texas, the unit disintegrated as a result of disputes, but some dispersed groups continued to fight against Union troops for some time, some long after the end of the war. These included famous outlaws like Jesse James and Cole Younger . Like many others, they participated in their first raids at Quantrill, which also included railroad robberies during guerrilla warfare, which they then specialized in after the war.

Quantrill joined one of these groups for some time in the fall / winter of 1863. It was led by Lieutenant William T. Anderson , who was described as vicious and was nicknamed Bloody Bill . They parted ways after a few weeks.

William Clark Quantrill died on June 6, 1865 from the serious injuries he had suffered four weeks earlier on May 10, 1865 in a shooting with a unit of the Northern States. They ambushed Quantrill and a dozen remaining henchmen after Quantrill and his gang had previously committed a number of raids in Kentucky . He had received a shot in the chest.

marriage

During the war, Quantrill met fourteen-year-old Sarah Katherine King on her parents' farm in Missouri. They fell in love, got married and from then on lived together at Camp Quantrills and his husbands. She was 17 years old when her husband died.

aftermath

Although his atrocities were known throughout the country, the people of the defeated southern states dedicated the folk song Quantrill, a gallantly bravehearted boy , to him, in which his war deeds are glorified. There is a Missouri-based William Clarke Quantrill Society that still boasts of its work to this day. Quantrill is viewed by some historians as an opportunistic, bloodthirsty criminal. Historian James M. McPherson called him a "pathological killer who murdered Union soldiers".

filming

In the 1968 film Bandolero! Dean Martin plays the veteran Dee Bishop, who is said to have been a former Quantrills raider and claims to have participated in the attack on Lawrence. His brother Mace, represented by James Stewart , was a member of the Union Army under General William T. Sherman . In the 1940 film Dark Command , starring John Wayne , Walter Pidgeon plays the guerrilla fighter William Cantrell, who became a rebel as a former schoolteacher. The protagonist William Cantrell orients himself superficially on the historical person of William Quantrill. The 1946 film Renegade Girl is about the tensions between unionists on the one hand and confederates on the other in the US state of Missouri. Four years later, in the 1950s movie Kansas Raiders , in which Jesse James (played by World War II veteran Audie Murphy ) is the main character, references to Quantrill's actions can be found. The infamous Jesse James himself was one of the fighters who served under Quantrill. In 1952 the western The Hell of the Red Mountains ( Red Mountains ) was released, in which Quantrill was played by John Ireland . The film focuses on a period shortly before the end of the Civil War.

In the movie Am Tode über (1953) ( Woman They Almost Lynched ), Quantrill's wife Kate was shown as a shotgun woman. The young wife lived for three years at the side of her husband under the guerrillas. 1953's The Stranger Wore a Gun depicts the fate of a former Quantrill Raider who became a bank robber and is later hunted down by some of his old comrades. The 1958 movie Quantrills Raiders was mainly trying to portray the attack on Lawrence.

In 1959, an episode of the TV show The Rough Riders was titled The Plot to Assassinate President Johnson . As the title reveals, a connection between Quantrill and the plot to assassinate President Andrew Johnson is made. Young Jesse James (1960) deals with Quantrill's influence on the young henchman and later bandit Jesse James.

In 1965 the film Arizona Raiders appeared , in which Audie Murphy played a former Quantrill Raider who was obliged to track down his former comrades-in-arms. In another 1979 film, The Legend of the Golden Gun , Quantrill is hunted down and eventually tracked down by two former henchmen. The attack on the city of Lawrence and the massacre of about 200 male civilians there is the focus of the 1998 film Lawrence: Free State Fortress .

With the actor Tobey Maguire a film was made under the title Ride with the Devil the following year (1999) . This also deals with, among other things, Quantrill's attack on Lawrence and his fighting in Kansas. The life of the Bushwhackers , as the Confederate groups comparable to Quantrill's Raiders were called, served the director Ang Lee as a template for this film. In 2000, an episode of the television series subtitled The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne with the words The Ballad of Joe Steeley . Reference is made to both Jesse James and William Quantrill. The American TV show Psych was a repetition of the Civil War in an episode called Weekend Warriors . It also went to William Quantrill. The actions in and around Lawrence are described, but Quantrill is left here in the arms of the fictional nun Jenny Winslow, whose family is said to have perished in Lawrence.

Quantrill's Lawrence Massacre of 1863 is also filmed in Steven Spielberg's short series Into the West from 2005.

In the 2010 film “True Grit”, a remake of the John Wayne classic “The Marshal”, the protagonist Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn explains that he served under Quantrill in the Civil War, thus solving a discussion with Texas Ranger LaBoeuf about Quantrill and his gang out. This is the last film and television production to date about Quantrill, his followers and their deeds.

Comic translations

The series Leutnant Blueberry , or The Youth of Blueberry here by Charlier (scenario) & Colin Wilson (drawings) deals with the events before and during the Lawrence massacre in two albums: No. 4: The Devils of Missouri (Les demons du Missouri), No. 5: Riots in Kansas (Terreur sur le Kansas).

The series The Blue Boys by Willy Lambil and Raoul Cauvin is devoted to Quantrill in Volume 36 of the French edition Quantrill and in Volume 18 of the German edition Quantrill's Bande without reference to historical events.

Individual evidence

1. ^ William G. Cutler's History of the State of Kansas, Miami County Part 2
2. ↑ Area History and Features ( Memento from July 23, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
3. ↑ see Wood, Larry (2003). The Civil War story of Bloody Bill Anderson pp. 59-60
4. ↑ cf. Kentucky Historical Society ( February 5, 2008 memento on the Internet Archive )
5. ↑ cf. Profile of Sarah King Head at Find a Grave
6. ^ William Clarke Quantrill Society
7. ↑ James M. McPherson: Was It More Restrained Than You Think? , The New York Review of Books , Feb. 14, 2008

Web links

• Contemporary illustration from 1862 ( Harper's Weekly ), with numerous illustrations
• The campaigns of Quantrills Guerrillas ( Quantrills Raiders ) in the American Civil War

literature

• James M. McPherson: Die for Freedom. The history of the American Civil War . 6th edition. List, Munich 1996, pp. 772-775, ISBN 3-471-78178-1 .