In early 1910 William Elsey Connelley (1855–1930), a Kentuckian who found inspiration in the nineteenth-century conflicts centering around the Great Plains, published Quantrill and the Border Wars. Based on the campaigns of Confederate guerrilla William Clarke Quantrill (1837–1865), Connelley’s work highlighted both the internecine pre-Civil War violence of the Bleeding Kansas (1854–61) era, as well as the Civil War (1861–65) struggle in the West. In many ways, through the life and experiences of Quantrill – a schoolteacher-turned insurgent with partisan allies such as the outlaws Frank and Jesse James – Connelley demonstrated that the Civil War was underway for years in the Kansas-Missouri region before officially beginning at the Battle of Fort Sumter in April of 1861. In the preface of his work, Connelly explained how historians had (thereinto) directed limited attention towards the violence over slavery in Kansas and Missouri in the 1850s: “The story of the border is the history of preliminary forays and the shock of army upon army in the national contest. It covers ten years. In wealth of romantic incidents, stirring adventures, hair-breadth escapes, sanguinary ambuscades, deadly encounters, individual vengeance, relentless desolation of towns and communities, and bloody murder, no other part of America can compare with it. Some future Scott will make himself immortal by telling this wonderful story.”[1]

Connelley also noted that people living in the region were still bitter about the violence. “The time has not yet come when a dispassionate study of the conditions which existed in Missouri will be acceptable. But the position that the Missourian suffered most from his brother Missourian is founded on facts and will be sustained by future writers.” Connelley claimed that his account eschewed the “sensational” nature of the conflict, but that “the old idea that truth is stranger than fiction is demonstrated.” In reviewing advanced proofs of the book, the Kansas City Star was impressed with how Connelley dispelled certain myths surrounding one of the most controversial (and loathed) figures in the region’s history. Out of Quantrill’s litany of unethical acts, the massacre of two hundred men and boys in the abolitionist town of Lawrence, Kansas, on August 21, 1863, made Quantrill a household name. “Even in Lawrence,” the editors wrote, “among  the ‘old residenters,’ there is much doubt expressed that Quantrill lived there before he organized the Lawence raid. Mr. Connelley shows conclusively that Quantrill lived in Lawrence for some time, and was part of the rowdy, murderous element of that and other Kansas and Missouri towns of that time.”[2]

Indeed, anti-slavery Jayhawkers were equally capable of violence against their neighbors, but the mid-Civil War massacre brought considerable national attention to ‘Quantrill’s Raiders.’ “We invite the attention of our readers to the account,” Pennsylvania’s Lancaster Gazette reported, “of the horrible massacre at Lawrence, by Quantrell’s [sic] guerrillas. It is the most cold-blooded and horrible massacre in modern times.” The massacre, which included the burning of homes and buildings, caught the immediate attention of the U.S. government. “We would faint hope,” St. Louis’s Daily Missouri Democrat report from the Washington DC’s Chronicle, “even ‘against hope,’ that the reports of Quantrill’s massacre at Lawrence, Kansas, which reached us just as we were going to press yesterday morning, is to some extent exaggerated. But even if we allow for this, the whole affair is deplorable in the extreme, and we cannot doubt that the War Department will institute vigorous inquiries respecting it.” Quantrill evaded authorities for two more years, but in the spring of 1865, after General Robert E. Lee surrendered, he was shot in Kentucky when a US Army counterinsurgency unit caught up with him. Quantrill was twenty-seven years old.[3]

Even in 1909 writers at the Kansas City Star were still aggrieved regarding Quantrill’s wartime conduct, and generally appreciated Connelley’s work on a difficult and obscure period in American history. “Mr. Connelley gives many instances of this kind to show the generally treacherous character of Quantrill, his aim in life being to do anything from murder to treason to his friends for money.” Connelley explained that his work was “not designed to be a ‘Life’ of Quantrill, but an account of those incidents of the Border Wars in which he and his men were the leading characters.” However, when violence becomes the main actor in a drama, it is always natural to wonder what drove the protagonist to extremes. Connelley wrote, “Little of the story has ever been told. There has been no definite information. All has been myth, doubt, assertion, beautiful generalization, conjecture.” Because relatively little was known about Quantrill, his unleashing of fury upon those that had once been his neighbors made him a fixture of macabre fascination, and the personification of how war and conflict can change people – even a man who was once considered a good teacher. The historian wrote:

Except the men at the heads of the respective governments, and some of the leading generals, Quantrill is the most widely-known man connected with the Civil War. His place in the public estimation of the South was based upon a misapprehension of his life and motives. He voluntarily imposed himself on the South. He told little of his prior life, and that which he did tell was wholly untrue. It is due to the South that his life be revealed as it actually was. That done, his character and his motives stand clearly outlined. Heretofore there has been nothing on which to base a reason for many incidents in the warfare of the border. It is one of the strange decrees of fate that the normal man is rarely mentioned in history or literature. The citizen who labors diligently to support his family, to build up his city, to sustain his state, gets little or no notice in the annals of his time. It is the abnormal man, the man in desperate extremity, who is portrayed for the amusement or instruction of mankind… In a general way it has been known that banditti infested the border, that ruthless hands were red with blood, that many a night flared red with burning homes and sacked towns. But of the family and parentage of Quantrill, his life in Illinois, Indiana, Kansas – of his trip to Utah and Pike’s Peak, his school, his life at Lawrence, and the Morgan Walker raid – of the organization of his band of guerrillas, its operations in Missouri, Kansas, Texas, and what is now Oklahoma, of his expulsion therefrom and the disintegration thereof – of his life with Kate Clarke, his expedition to Kentucky and his operations there – of his death, burial, and exhumation – of these things no man has been able to speak with confidence, for knowledge of them was not at hand. And the importance of this information is realized when we remember that it embraces much of the history of four states in the Civil War and portrays the bloodiest man known to the annals of America.[4]

[1] William Elsey Connelley, Quantrill and the Border Wars (Cedar Rapids, Iowa: The Torch Press, 1910), 5.  

[2] Connelley, Quantrill and the Border Wars, 5–6; “New Light on Quantrill” Kansas City Star (Kansas City), 7 Nov. 1909; Edward E Leslie, The Devil Knows how to Ride: The True Story of William Clarke Quantrill and His Confederate Raiders (New York: Random House, 1996), 16–17.   

[3] Lancaster Gazette (Lancaster, PA) 27 Aug. 1863; “Quantrill’s Massacre.” Daily Missouri Democrat (St. Louis) 28 Aug. 1863.

[4] “New Light on Quantrill” Kansas City Star (Kansas City), 7 Nov. 1909;  Connelley, Quantrill and the Border Wars, 6–7.