A summary

Posted on: August 21, 2025 at 12:19:25 CT

cut and pasted from another site

Quantrill had been seriously contemplating a raid on Lawrence since mid-July of 1863, and on August 10 he called together his officers and the chieftains of allied bands to share his plan to do so. By August 18, guerilla bands led by Bill Anderson and Andy Blount had joined up with Quantrill and his group. Quantrill led the assembled force of about 350 guerilla fighters westward on the 19th, and that is when he told the rank and file for the first time their target was Lawrence, 50 miles inside the Kansas border. He gave his men the option to leave if they found the mission too dangerous. Many considered the raid a suicide mission, for in addition to the various Union army garrisons the raiders would have to try to wind their way past both going to and returning from the distant target, Lawrence itself was reported to be heavily armed. Earlier that very month, a Lawrence newspaper had reported “Lawrence had ready for any emergency over 500 fighting men, every one of whom would like to see [some Rebels]”. However, with the collapse of the Kansas City jail less than a week earlier, the opportunity for revenge trumped concern over risk for most of the men, and only about a dozen declined to go. Quantrill’s force started the ride to Lawrence on the afternoon of August 20 and arrived on the outskirts of Lawrence at around 5 AM the next morning.

The mindset of Quantrill’s men as they rode for Lawrence was described by Bruce Nichols in his second volume of Guerilla Warfare in Civil War Missouri: “A common thread on the ride to Lawrence even in the guerilla memoirs years later is the bushwhackers’ penchant for murder. In two years of constant warfare, these men had grown to regard Kansans as the men who had burned their homes, murdered their fathers and neighbors, and carted off their belongings to Kansas without the U.S. government doing anything to stop it. Further, it was the raiders’ strong belief that the center of all the hate directed to west-central Missouri could be found in the town of Lawrence. By August of 1863 the bushwhackers, rightly or wrongly, regarded the entire population of Lawrence as operating a vast fencing operation for horses, slaves, and household belongings stolen on jayhawker raids in Missouri. If that wasn’t enough to hate Lawrence residents, they felt that the town was quarters of part of the hated, criminal “Red Leg” raiders, and they knew it was the home of Senator Jim Lane who had led many of the jayhawking raids on Missouri earlier and who had orchestrated the sacking and burning of Osceola, Missouri in 1861. In other words, the guerillas riding toward Lawrence regarded every Lawrence resident capable of holding a gun to be their mortal enemy and a constant danger to Missouri homes and families. This was not the whole reality, but the guerillas had no way of knowing that. They had agreed among themselves there would be no quarter asked or given, and almost no mercy granted.”

Quantrill failed in a primary objective of the Lawrence raid, the capture of Senator Jim Lane. Furthermore, most of the red legs headquartered in Lawrence were gone that day. However, Quantrill and his men were not to be denied their revenge. The gloves had come off in September of 1861 with Lane’s plundering and burning of Osceola, and the civilian population of western Missouri had been subjected to the lawlessness and brutality of the jayhawkers and red legs for nearly two years. The retribution administered by Quantrill would be compressed into a single day. Quantrill’s men and boys gunned down and killed somewhere between 150 and 200 men and boys (from a total Lawrence population of slightly over 2,000). Approximately one-quarter of the buildings in Lawrence were put to the torch.

The retaliatory nature of the attack on Lawrence was confirmed by the survivors. “The universal testimony of all the ladies and others who talked with the butchers of the 21st ult. Is that these demons claimed there were here to revenge the wrongs done their families by our men under Lane, Jennison, Anthony and Co.”

The raid on Lawrence was not only a predictable response to the Kansan jayhawking, it had actually been predicted. At the outset of the Civil War, Kansas Governor Robinson had issued a prophetic warning: “…what we do have to fear…is that Lane’s brigade [of jayhawkers] will get up a war by going over the line, committing depredations, and then returning into our State.” That warning had gone unheeded, and on August 21, 1863, the people of Lawrence paid the price.