Bloody Dawn

by Thomas Goodrich

  With rousing cheers and notes of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” filling the crisp autumn air, the Lawrence militia crossed the new bridge looking every inch the conquering heroes. And for their role in routing Price they received a welcome befitting such. Grown men ran to the bridge “like a lot of school boys let loose.” There were speeches, toasts, and tears, much thanksgiving, and much pride in a common effort.

  Hardly had the sounds of victory faded when a new reason to shout spread through the city. On November 26, workmen drove the last spike at Lawrence of the long-awaited Pacific Railroad. “Today we bid farewell to the past,” announced a local speaker, “today we emerge into a new life.”19

  Although he held minor positions and was active locally, the flame for high office never quite died in Charles Robinson. More than a decade after the bond scandal and his impeachment, Robinson again sought the public eye. And for the moment it seemed as if healing time had wiped much of the stain from his name for, and probably much to his surprise, the former governor was elected to a term in the state senate. Later, however, the sand castle crumbled when he was denied a seat in Congress. No one had really forgotten his earlier disgrace, and when the real test came Robinson was soundly defeated in a race for the governorship. Once more, broken and alone, the Father of Kansas retired to his new home across the river while the sweep of events moved on without him.20

  To his dying day, Charles Robinson, the only Lawrence man to view the massacre from beginning to end, felt that his archenemy James Lane was in some satanic way connected with it. Of course it was just a feeling. There existed no hard evidence to support such a claim and thus the governor kept his beliefs largely to himself. In his blinding hatred, however, Robinson firmly believed that Lane was willing and able to engineer such a scheme. And that the senator would stop at nothing to attain a goal, alas, the former governor knew all too well.21

  But whether Charles Robinson was right or whether he was wrong the world would never know. Depressed over his waning support among the radicals of Kansas, discouraged at his inability to stay atop the tiger, one year after war’s end Jim Lane stuck a pistol in his mouth, then squeezed the trigger. “His suicide,” wrote a friend to Robinson, “was his own verdict on his life & actions.”22

  On April 10, 1865, Lawrence was “electrified” by word of Lee’s surrender. Instantly, despite the rain and mud, people ran to the telegraph office to learn more. “Soon crowds gathered in the streets, and cheer after cheer went up in every direction. All was hilarity and excitement.” There were parades and music and singing into the evening, and that night bonfires and rockets painted the sky.23 The celebration really didn’t stop for the entire week when the war was ending everywhere. There was peace and then there was much more to be happy about, for Lawrence was well along the road to recovery.

  To anyone returning since the raid—and there were many coming back now that it was safe to do so—the town was a far cry from the blackened shell they had fled. Proud citizens were forever counting their achievements: “Fourteen places where groceries and provisions are sold, five livery stables, two milliner shops, two daguerrian artists, two lumber yards, two banks, two jewelers, two harness shops, eight saloons, one foundry and machine shop, four flour mills, one brewery, three hotels,” and on and on. Then there were the tireless sawmills whirring day and night, devouring whole forests to keep pace with demand. Over three hundred and fifty homes stood in Lawrence, and across the river a hundred more had risen since the raid. But even these impressive figures were not enough. More homes were needed, homes for new arrivals.

  They came by the hundreds after the war. The flow was so swift, in fact, that almost overnight the old-time residents became a minority. And with each new face the collective memory of Lawrence unavoidably grew a little fainter. Most latecomers actually knew little about the town’s history; except for the blockhouses and maze of trenches, vestiges of the famous raid were fast disappearing. Few would have guessed when talking to him over the counter of his store that at one time Harlow Baker had been so riddled with bullet holes that he was twice passed over for dead. Or that the quiet lady librarian had been widowed one morning before she had cleared the sleep from her eyes. Or that the church where they now heard the Reverend Cordley’s sermons was once littered with bodies and used as a morgue. Or that the same brushy ravine where little boys played and chased frogs had once been crowded with scores of terrified men whose sole hope for survival lay in choking back tears and clinging to its steep banksides.

  With each day that passed, there was less to remind. Soon tall rows of buildings, larger and sturdier than before, again walled Massachusetts Street, creating one unbroken line of business and trade. The limits of the city expanded and reached out along the old California Road, sprawled around and over Mount Oread, and edged up to the new state university that crowned its top. And shortly, the crumbling blockhouses were torn down and the trenches covered over with lawns and gardens.

  William Quantrill never attempted another raid into Kansas. He really didn’t need to. By the summer of 1864 his giant, dark shadow crossed and recrossed the border as surely as if he cast it himself, and in his or her mind some Kansan somewhere saw him each and every hour of each and every day. He was said to have been almost everywhere and yet he was nowhere. It was only when frightened, running people finally slowed to a walk and began looking about that they discovered to their amazement he existed in these places through the mind alone. “We hear nothing of Quantrill,” was the last word when hysteria had crested. And that was the story for the remainder of the war. “We hear nothing of Quantrill.”24

  There are a number of possible reasons why the enigmatic Ohioan left the war when he did. Certainly, William Quantrill’s purpose for war lay west of the state line. And undoubtedly, he above all saw the madness of attempting another raid into Kansas. Before 1863 the risks had been great enough; after the raid on Lawrence, however, although Kansans refused to believe it, to get into the state and out again had become an impossibility, and any force attempting it would have certainly faced destruction. There is also the likelihood that Quantrill, the refined former schoolteacher, had no stomach for the brutal savagery that later shamed the fighting in Missouri and the ugly games played with fervor by both sides.

  But perhaps the best reason for his sudden departure from the war was given by Quantrill himself. After his triumphant return to Lawrence, his “greatest exploit,” he mentioned to someone that morning that for him there was no more aim in life. His goal was reached; he was now “ready to die.”25 He had destroyed Lawrence and by so doing accomplished that which others had threatened but been unable to do for almost a decade.

  “And not one of us has ever regretted that we were in it,” announced one raider long after the war. “We are proud that we were able to revenge our fathers and mothers and sisters.”26

  And so it was. On one side of the border he was a hero, a cavalier, an avenging angel.

  Hurrah for Quantrell …

  And all [his] bravest men.

  God may they save our country yet

  From those foes they do offend.27

  Yet a few yards west of that same line, his memory burned like white iron: “Butcher”; “Monster”; “He comes from the dregs of a degraded population. He cannot write his name. … He seldom washes his hands or changes his shirt. He … lives in wretchedness, squalor and crime.”28 Whatever the mood, Kansas had quaffed from the cup of war, and for that state, William Quantrill had proven the bitter red wine. On May 10, 1865, near Bloomfield, Kentucky, one of the last skirmishes of the Civil War took place. Several weeks later, at a military hospital in Louisville, the quiet, mysterious man with the strange-sounding name closed his eyes forever. He was twenty-seven.

  Not long after the massacre, the Reverend Richard Cordley had written how time would soon erase “the real marks of Quantrell’s steps.” And in a sense this was true. With an energy and determination that seemed to defy the purely materia
listic, the people reconstructed their town, laboring day and night, lending more than a willing hand to one another when their own task was complete, working to the point of exhaustion as if fleeing from a moment in history they chose to forget. Their success was remarkable. Several years afterward the visitor to Lawrence would be hard pressed to discover an outward trace of the raid. These “marks,” as the Reverend Cordley once knew them, were gone forever.

  But long after the raid, when Lawrence was transformed into a city of paved streets lined with gas lamps, a hive of trade and learning in the state, a garden spot of spreading Dutch elm and sweet-smelling lilac, even then, the invisible marks lingered. The afflictions of the mind, the mysterious ailments that the Reverend Cordley hardly understood and the likes of which words had not yet come to describe; the psychosis, the paranoia, the recurring visions of a peaceful morning shattered by fire and death; the nightmares on sultry summer nights when the moon waxed and waned and the air was as still as a hush—these marks remained and continued to linger until the last aged survivor was laid to rest.

  And as for Quantrill’s “steps,” unwittingly, unavoidably, the kindly, white-haired minister, his fellow townsmen, and others along the border enshrined these for generations to come. They exist today and they exist in many places; in a forgotten, shady grove of western Missouri; on a treeless, sunbaked Kansas plain; by the quiet banks of a meandering river; wherever his enemies were unsuspecting, rash, or bold, there the path of Quantrill winds. But always in the end the paths join and lead to the same spot, to the grassy hill overlooking the beautiful valley, to the graveyard where the victims of the Lawrence Massacre were laid, down to the bone-white and wind-smoothed headstones, down to Quantrill’s footsteps.

  NOTES

  KHC Kansas Historical Collections, 1887–1933

  KHQ Kansas Historical Quarterly, 1933–78

  LKSHS Library of the Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka

  MHR Missouri Historical Review

  OR War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. 128 vols. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901.

  WHQ Westport (Missouri) Historical Quarterly

  1. Old Scores

  1. OR, 22, 1:587–88; William Elsey Connelley, Quantrill and the Border Wars, 2d ed. (1909; reprint, New York: Pageant, 1956), 313–15.

  2. George W. Martin, “The First Two Years of Kansas,” KHC 10 (1907–8): 138.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Lawrence Herald of Freedom, Mar. 10, 1855.

  5. Sara T. D. Robinson, Kansas: Its Interior and Exterior Life (Boston: Crosby, Nichols and Co., 1857), 221.

  6. Lawrence Herald of Freedom, Jan. 12, 1856.

  7. Leavenworth Daily Times, Jan. 30, 1861.

  8. Joseph G. Gambone, “Economic Relief in Territorial Kansas, 1860–1861,” KHQ 36 (Summer 1970): 149–50.

  9. Hildegarde Rose Herklotz, “Jayhawkers in Missouri, 1858–1863,” MHR 18 (Oct. 1923): 71–72, 74; Atchison Freedom’s Champion, Jan. 25, 1862; Stephen Z. Starr, Jennison’s Jayhawkers (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1973), 94–113.

  10. W. A. Mitchell, “Historic Linn,” KHC 16 (1926): 654; Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), 188.

  11. Lew Larkin, Bingham: Fighting Artist (St. Louis: State, 1955), 144.

  12. Albert Castel, A Frontier State at War: Kansas, 1861–1865 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1958), 45; Lawrence Kansas State Journal, Jan. 30, 1862 (hereafter cited as Lawrence Journal); Edgar Langsdorf, ed., “The Letters of Joseph H. Trego, 1857–1864,” KHQ 19 (Aug. 1951): 299.

  13. Atchison Freedom’s Champion, Jan. 25, 1862.

  14. Ibid., Oct. 12, 1861.

  15. A. T. Andreas, History of the State of Kansas (Chicago: A. T. Andreas, 1883), 2:669; OR, 3:468–69.

  16. Lawrence Republican, Jan. 23, 1862.

  17. Darrell Garwood, Crossroads of America: The Story of Kansas City (New York: W. W. Norton, 1948), 51—55; William Elsey Connelley, History of Kansas, State and People (Chicago: American Historical Society, 1928), 2:632–34; William Elsey Connelley, The Life of Preston B. Plumb, 1837–1891 (Chicago: Brown and Howell, 1913), 146–49.

  18. Kansas City (Mo.) Daily Western Journal of Commerce, Aug. 15, 1863 (hereafter cited as Kansas City Daily Journal).

  2. The Dead Men

  1. Kansas City Daily Journal, July 17, 1863.

  2. Oskaloosa Independent, Aug. 15, 1863.

  3. OR, 22, 1:580, 589.

  4. Council Grove Press, June 22, 1861.

  5. Leavenworth Daily Times, May 31, 1862; Kansas City Daily Journal, July 11, 1862; Emporia News, May 17, 1862; William Elsey Connelley Papers, box 13, LKSHS, interview with B. F. Munkers, July 7, 1910.

  6. Kansas City Daily Journal, Aug. 2, 7, 1863; Connelley, Kansas, 2:636–37; Garwood, Crossroads, 54.

  7. Lela Barnes, ed., “An Editor Looks at Early-Day Kansas: The Letters of Charles Monroe Chase,” KHQ 26 (Summer 1960): 118, 124–25; George Walton, Sentinel of the Plains: Port Leavenworth (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 129.

  8. Kansas City Daily Journal, Mar. 31, 1863; Lawrence Journal, Apr. 2, 1863.

  9. Kansas City Daily Journal, June 19, July 9, 1863; Oskaloosa Independent, June 27, 1863; W. S. Burke, Military History of Kansas Regiments (Leavenworth: W. S. Burke, 1870), 276–77.

  10. Cole Younger, The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself (1903; reprint, Provo, Utah: Triton, 1988), 7–8; A. Birdsall, History of Jackson County, Missouri, 2d ed. (1881; reprint, Kansas City, Mo.: Ramfre, 1966), 272; Larkin, Bingham, 143; Richard S. Brownlee, Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1958), 61.

  11. Kansas City Daily Journal, Aug. 15, 1863.

  12. Ethylene Ballard Thruston, “Captain Dick Yeager—Quantrill Man,” WHQ 4, no. 1 (June 1968): 3; Albert N. Doerschuk, “Extracts from War-Time Letters, 1861–1864,” MHR 23 (Oct. 1928): 100.

  13. Ed Blair, History of Johnson County, Kansas (Lawrence: Standard, 1915), 140–44; David Hubbard, “Reminiscences of the Yeager Raid,” KHC 8 (1903–4): 168–71.

  14. Thruston, “Yeager,” 3.

  15. Connelley, Quantrill, 315, 323; Quantrill Scrapbook, LKSHS, 2:130–31.

  16. OR, 22, 1:585, 589.

  17. Oskaloosa Independent, Aug. 15, 1863; Quantrill Scrapbook, LKSHS, 2:130–31.

  18. “Statement of J. A. Pike,” KHC 14 (1915–18): 313–14; OR, 22, 1:589.

  3. The “Live” Man

  1. OR, 22, 1:585–86.

  2. Ibid., 589–90.

  3. Ibid., 825.

  4. Lawrence Journal, May 1, 1862; Olathe Mirror, Mar. 20, 1862.

  5. Dictionary of American Biography (hereafter DAB), s.v. “Ewing, Thomas.”

  6. Thomas Ewing, Jr., Private Papers, 1856–1908, LKSHS.

  7. Don W. Wilson, Governor Charles Robinson of Kansas (Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 1975), 73; Larkin, Bingham, 207–8.

  8. DAB, s.v. “Ewing, Thomas”; Elvid Hunt, History of Fort Leavenworth, 1827–1927 (Fort Leavenworth, Kans.: The General Service Schools Press, 1926), 120.

  9. Kansas City Daily Journal, June 17, 1863; Kansas City Weekly Western Journal of Commerce, June 20, 1863 (hereafter cited as Kansas City Weekly Journal).

  10. Oskaloosa Independent, June 27, 1863.

  11. Kansas City Daily Journal, June 30, 1863.

  12. Ann Davis Niepman, “General Orders No. 11 and Border Warfare,” MHR 66, no. 2 (Jan. 1972):

  13. OR, 22, 1:581, 584.

  14. Ibid., 579.

  15. Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union (New York: Scribner’s, 1971), 7:170.

  16. OR, 22, 2:428–29.

  17. James L. McDonough, “And All for Nothing—Early Experiences of John M. Schofield,” MHR 64, no. 3 (Apr. 1970): 306–7.

  18. John M. Schofield, Forty-six Years in the Army (New York: Century, 1897), 69.

  19. James L. McDonough, Schofield: Union General in t
he Civil War and Reconstruction (Tallahassee: Florida State Univ. Press, 1972), 44; Schofield, Forty-six Years, 70–71.

  20. Schofield, Forty-six Years, 78; McDonough, Schofield, 54.

  21. OR, 22, 1:579, 584.

  22. Oskaloosa Independent, Aug. 15, 1863.

  23. Kansas City Daily Journal, June 25, 1863.

  24. Kansas City Weekly Journal, July 4, 1863; Oskaloosa Independent, July 4, 1863.

  25. Kansas City Daily Journal, Aug. 2, 5, 1863.

  26. OR, 22, 1:580, 585–87, 589–90.

  27. Ibid., 580–81.

  4. The Darkest Hour

  1. OR, 22, 1:583.

  2. Ibid., 580–82; Connelley, Kansas, 2:642.

  3. Richard Cordley, History of Lawrence, Kansas (Lawrence: E. F. Caldwell, 1895), 182.

  4. Lawrence Journal, May 9, 1861.

  5. Ibid., May 16, 1861.

  6. Lawrence Republican, May 23, 1861.

  7. Ibid., Mar. 7, June 27, 1861.

  8. Lawrence Republican, Jan. 31, 1861; Lawrence Journal, Aug. 8, Dec. 5, 1861.

  9. Ibid., Apr. 17, 1862.

  10. Ibid., Apr. 3, 10, 1862; Theodore Gardner, “The First Kansas Battery,” KHC 14 (1915–18): 259.

  11. Lawrence Journal, Jan. 9, 1862.

  12. Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, 6:371; Lawrence Republican, Sept. 19, 1861; Cordley, Lawrence, 182, 184.

  13. Lawrence Journal, June 13, 1861, Dec. 11, 1862.

  14. Lawrence Republican, Sept. 18, 1862.

  15. Lawrence Journal, Sept. 18, 1862.

  16. Atchison Freedom’s Champion, Oct. 25, 1862.

  17. Lawrence Republican, Oct. 23, Nov. 6, 1862.

  18. Ibid., Oct. 23, 1862.

  19. Lawrence Journal, Nov. 6, 1862; Lawrence Republican, Nov. 6, 1862.

  20. Lawrence Journal May 7, 1863.