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Product Description
Brilliantly weaving together eyewitness accounts, letters, memories, newspaper articles, and military reports into a riveting narrative, this definitive biography reveals the personality of William Clarke Quantrill (1837–1865) and the events that transformed a quiet Ohio schoolteacher from a staunchly Unionist family into a virulent pro-slavery Confederate soldier and the most feared and despised guerrilla chieftain of the Civil War. This groundbreaking work includes the most accurate account ever written of the 1863 Lawrence, Kansas massacre (the greatest atrocity of the Civil War), when Quantrill and 450 raiders torched the Unionist town and executed roughly 200 unarmed, unresisting men and teenage boys. It also details the postwar outlaw careers of those who rode with him—Frank and Jesse James, and Cole Younger. No other history so fully penetrates the myth of a cardboard-cutout psychopath to expose Quantrill in all his brutality and human complexity.
Amazon.com Review
William Clarke Quantrill was quite possibly the most dangerous man to fight in the Civil War. The leader of an almost psychopathic band of guerrilla warriors, Quantrill participated as a Confederate in a deadly border war between Southern sympathizers in Missouri and the Unionist Jayhawks of Kansas. He was largely responsible for the 1863 massacre of nearly 200 unresisting men and boys in Lawrence, Kansas, as well as dozens of other brutal acts that today would be called terrorism. Among the notorious men who rode with him were Frank and Jesse James, whose postwar crime careers are briefly reviewed. Edward E. Leslie provides an objective treatment of his controversial subject, and readers will appreciate his ability to tell a good story--including the one about why Quantrill's bones currently rest in three different states and why a forensically correct wax reconstruction of his head can be found in the refrigerator of an Ohio historical society. --John J. Miller
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