On May 10, 1865, William Quantrill was shot by Union troops in Kentucky in one of the last engagements of the Civil War. Infamous members of Quantrill’s raiders included Bloody Bill Anderson, outlaw Jesse James, and his older brother Frank James. Quantrill led his men south towards Texas and continued to wreak havoc. Ewing intended to cut off supplies and support to the guerillas, and under his orders, Jayhawkers burned everything remaining to the ground.Īlthough Quantrill was a field-commissioned officer under the Partisan Ranger Act, Confederate leadership was outraged by his tactics and withdrew official support for his Bushwhackers.

11, ordering all citizens of four counties on the Missouri side of the border to relocate to Kansas City. The Lawrence Massacre was one of the bloodiest events of the Kansas-Missouri border war. For over four hours, Quantrill’s raiders pillaged and burned the town, killing at least 150 men and boys. Panicked residents tried to hide in cornfields or along the Kansas and Wakarusa rivers, though some surrendered only to be shot later. They surprised the town’s sleeping residents and began to execute civilians and loot valuables. In the predawn hours on August 21, Quantrill led a group of about 450 Confederate guerillas, also called “Bushwhackers,” into Lawrence. A week before the Lawrence Massacre, the prison collapsed, killing four and leaving others with severe injuries. A number of women and girls, most of them relatives of the guerillas, were arrested and incarcerated in squalid conditions in a women’s prison in Kansas City. 10, which called for the arrest of anyone “giving aid or comfort” to Confederate guerillas. In April 1863, Union General Thomas Ewing, Jr.

When Kansas was admitted to the Union at the start of the Civil War, the town became a gathering place for pro-Unionists and Jayhawkers, Free-State militiamen known for attacking plantations, freeing enslaved Black people, and confiscating Confederate supplies in nearby Missouri. Considered the anti-slavery capital, Lawrence was well-known as a stronghold for abolitionists and the Free-State movement. Beginning in 1855, pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers engaged in a series of violent confrontations and political killings over whether Kansas would be a free state or a slave state, leading to a border war known as “Bleeding Kansas.” Lawrence was founded along the Oregon Trail on the homelands of the Kaw, Lakota, Osage, and Kikapoo by New Englanders. These border tensions had been brewing for some time.

Bloody Bill Anderson by Thomas Goodrich