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Third Annual Memorial Service

Captain William Clarke Quantrill, CSA

4th Street Cemetery, Dover, Ohio

July 26, 2008

Scott Morris

Camp Commander

Quantrill’s Raiders Camp #2087

Sons of Confederate Veterans

REMARKS

Today we are going to take a look at a moment in time in American history; a time leading up to, and during and then after what we know as the Civil War.

It is widely held that the Civil War began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate artillery opened fire on a Federal fort in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina.

Or, did it begin earlier, somewhere else?

Scholars and historians now argue it actually began in what was then America’s frontier; our wild-wild west, in the territories west of the Mississippi River. Some say it began in Kansas around the time of John Brown’s raid in 1856 where he and others hacked to death with broadswords five settlers at Pottawatomie Creek in a violent retaliation for violent acts committed in Lawrence and Sumner, Kansas earlier.

I don’t believe anyone here today, as we stand near one of three graves of William Clarke Quantrill, who is not aware of his actions in the border war.

What I would like to explore today is perhaps an unknown history of the Civil War and Dover’s native son.

Let’s take a few minutes and take a short trip back into time. Let’s go back in time 144 years. To another era: very unlike today in 2008.

Imagine the scene if you will.

It is early morning – day break.

The quiet of the morning is broken with the sound of horses and men shouting in the street outside your window. Your stomach turns cold as you look outside and see soldiers racing about going from house to house - dozens of them. They are ransacking, looting, and setting houses and businesses on fire. Your worse fears are happening. It’s worse than you dreamed.

You heard they would be coming, but hoped they wouldn’t.

In the noise you hear officers barking orders. You hear gunshots, people screaming.

There’s no place to run. No place to hide.

Time seems to stop.

Finally, it’s over.

The enemy has left.

They are moving on to the next town.

The destruction and devastation they left behind is unbelievable.

Neighbors talk about men who begged for their lives. Numbness and anger sets in. You hear the stories of men who were shot or hung and left to die. Some you heard died in the flames of their homes and businesses set by the soldiers.

Slowly people from outlying farms and towns ride in. They said they could see and smell the smoke for miles. As they settle from their shock, they look around.

Across the South hundreds lie dead and wounded in yards and fields and streets and in the homes not destroyed. Widows and orphans are left behind. Property losses are in the millions of dollars. Food supplies destroyed. Animals slaughtered and left to rot where they lie. Clothing and medicine burned, stolen or made useless. With their men dead or off at war families are left to bury the victims, care for the wounded, find food and shelter, and to grieve. Winter is approaching

The leader of these horrific events is an Ohioan many of us know. He is noted to have said, "War is the remedy our enemies have chosen, and I say give them all they want.”

No, this is not a description of that hot August day in 1863 when Captain Quantrill and his men laid waste to Lawrence, Kansas. Everyone here I am certain is familiar with that raid. No, I’m speaking of another Ohioan; a man born and raised less than 2 hours from here, in Lancaster, Ohio.

It is understandable if my introduction led you to believe I was describing the “infamous” raid by William Quantrill and his men at Lawrence, Kansas. After all, isn’t that pretty much all of what Americans know about him? That he was responsible for the death of 150 civilians in that raid?

What I have described is a composite, if you will, of hundreds of raids committed by Union forces under the command of General William Tecumseh Sherman in his so-called "famous" 300 mile raid through Georgia and the Carolinas, his “March to the Sea", where total and complete destruction of civilian property was the objective. The family farms of men in my camp, men here today, and throughout the SCV were personally afflicted by this type of warfare, tactics hailed by federal forces as necessary to end the war they started.

General Sherman under orders from President Lincoln and with the knowledge of General Grant led an army of 62,000 men – 55,000 infantrymen, 5,000 cavalry troops and 2,000 artillerymen - who laid waste to hundreds of farms and towns and businesses across Georgia and South Carolina, where only two years after Quantrill went down in history as a murderer, a villain, the devil himself for his 2 hour raid with 200 men at Lawrence, Kansas.

What is the difference between “infamous” and “famous”? I offer it is nothing more than one’s viewpoint or understanding.

The recorded history of the American Civil War, as most of us were taught was written by the victor. Is it therefore any surprise that what we have been told about these men and their actions seem so different? But, were they that different when studied in their entirety and without bias?

“No Quarter” also known as “Black Flag” tactics has been used throughout the history of warfare. Consider the Crusades in Europe that went on for 200 years beginning in the 11th century, and the Spanish conquest for Central America, and the Egyptian domination of Israel and the western expansion of the United States in the early 1800s just to name a few we might be familiar with. We were so self-righteous in our taking of lands across North American that this act of domination was coined “our manifest destiny”. I am sure Native Americans and Mexicans have other colorful phrases for what happened.

Union General Henry Halleck wrote to General Sherman saying, “We are not only fighting armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies.” Two days after receiving Halleck’s correspondence General Sherman telegraphed President Lincoln and said of his destruction of the South, “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won."

Won! Won at what expense?

Why do we consider Quantrill’s aggressive tactics wrong when this type of black flag, take no prisoners, total war concept was normal operations for centuries?

Listen closely to Sherman’s thoughts in this he said, “War is cruelty. There’s no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”

Why is he considered heroic and his men’s actions against innocent civilians patriotic?

This Union hero didn’t stop with innocent Southerners. National Public Radio, although not particularly friendly towards the Confederate Cause, has this to say about General Sherman, “Most famous for his scorched-earth tactics in the Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman brought that same military philosophy to the West, where he shaped a policy and strategy that would finally subjugate all the native peoples of the plains.”

His black flag tactics were so popular during the war that after the war the federal government ordered him to carry them out against the Native Americans occupying lands the government wanted. Well armed and well trained federal troops against bows and arrows and lances. It was no contest. Perhaps this strategy of using military might against a weaker opponent for sovereign gain was foreshadowed by the federal army’s first Commander, General Winfield Scott when in 1838, under orders from President Andrew Jackson, led 7000 men in an invasion against the Cherokee Nation, which we know today as the “Trail of Tears”. That politically motivated, military action displaced thousands of Native Americans to the west, and left many on the trail dead, frozen to death.

General Sherman said, “War is Hell”, he ought to know. The tactics he and Quantrill and others employed in combat were hellish, to soldier and civilian alike.

The often used phrase, “Kill them all. God knows his own,” came from an edict of the church in the 13th century during a time of religious expansion.

Are we seeing a pattern yet?

Let’s take a quick look at another famous Ohioan whom history records in rather good light.

This Federal officer graduated at the bottom of his class at West Point. He was also born close to here, in New Rumley, Ohio.

Quickly making field officer despite his poor record at West Point, history records he ordered summary executions of Confederate prisoners of war for reasons of retribution and convenience.

After the Civil War and after being court-martialed at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas for being AWOL, the officer, Lt Col George Armstrong Custer was ordered by General Philip Sheridan to lead an attack against a Cheyenne encampment. Lt Col Custer and his men of the 7th U. S. Cavalry killed more than 100 Cheyenne warriors, including women and children. As if that were not enough, he ordered his men to slaughter almost 900 captured Indian ponies. These were familiar tactics used by his senior officers in war; tactics approved by the federal government at the time.

Why are these little known grisly facts of history important?

It’s important because these familiar stories and hundreds of others like them help us put into perspective, if we are willing to do so, the stories of Captain Quantrill and others who served in the border wars of Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas and Texas.

Remember John Brown’s 1856 massacre I mentioned earlier, his “famous” Pottawatomie Creek Massacre? Innocent blood shed at the hands of a violent man, yet history casts no shadow on his actions. Why?

If you are having a little bit of trouble digesting these facts and this viewpoint, I can understand. I also grew up learning the same old bias history in school, accepting it as gospel.

None of this is certainly pleasant, but I feel it does need to be discussed so we can put the events of the Civil War and American history into some perspective and to allow us to gain a better understanding of what happened in the past.

It’s all about understanding the full picture.

I made a point here last year in my remarks about the Underground Railroad. I questioned why, if the purpose and intent of President Lincoln in inaugurating war on states that legally seceded from the Union was, as we are so often told, to free slaves and to end slavery, why then were runaway slaves not welcomed in the North? Why did they have to travel via an “underground railroad” through northern states? Why was it that these people had to ultimately find their freedom in Canada, a foreign country, and not with the states and the people that supported abolition? If you examine the Emancipation Proclamation closely, you will note Lincoln specifies only slaves in the South are to be emancipated. If there were no slaves in the North, as we are led to believe, why did he only specify slaves in the South to be set free?

“The more I learn, the less I know.”

Why do we accept the black flag tactics used by the federal army but consider the same type of tactics used by Confederate guerrilla fighters as heinous?

“It’s what you learn AFTER you know it all, that counts.”

Why does the strategy voiced by general officers like William Tecumseh Sherman who said, “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children. The Sioux must feel the superior power of the Government.” And, “during an assault, the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female or even discriminate as to age.” Why do these statements of philosophy and actions not receive the same outrage as the one attack on Lawrence, Kansas?

If it’s because more innocent civilians were killed at one time by Confederate forces making the act more offensive to our moral senses than all the atrocities inflicted by Federal forces, how, then, can we as Americans reconcile the devastation our nuclear weapons caused at Hiroshima and Nagasaki 90 years after the end of the Civil War? Could it be that we also won that war and wrote our own history again?

Please don’t think I am judging General Sherman, Lt Col Custer or the actions of President Truman in 1945, or trying to justify their actions during war time. I am not. Nor am I applauding Captain Quantrill’s actions at Lawrence, Kansas.

I am using events involving these men to cast a larger perspective on mankind’s willingness to use extreme measures in war.

Who was William Clarke Quantrill?

William Clarke Quantrill was born just five blocks from here in 1837, at the corner of Tuscawarus and 4th Street. He attended Union School and then taught there upon graduation. Union School was across the street from his parent’s home. He walked and played in and around where we stand today. His family is buried here alongside him, while others are buried at Maple Grove Cemetery here in Dover.

His intellect and physical abilities were well known. He was a revered leader and a feared warrior. Did you know that he also taught school in Lawrence, Kansas just before the war?

He was 25 years old when he was commissioned a Captain in the Confederate army by Colonel Gideon Thompson on August 15, 1862 under the authority of the Confederate Partisan Ranger Act of 1862 and the Confederate Partisan Act of Missouri of 1862.

He was 27 years old when he was mortally wounded in a sneak attack after the war by federal bounty hunters on a farm in Wakefield, Kentucky on May 10, 1865.

The Civil War was started by one man who chose war over diplomacy. It was fought by men, women and boys, some of whom were trained in military academies, but mostly by those who learned how to shoot and survive in woods near their home, like William Quantrill.

Many of the men in Camp 2087 and the SCV are U. S. Military veterans. We are no stranger to the business. One thing it has taught us, and we talk about this at our camp meetings quite often, is the need to understand the whole picture.

I encourage everyone to read the research done on William Quantrill. There are some well researched books on the market and perhaps in your local libraries: “The Devil Knows How to Ride – The True Story of William Clarke Quantrill and His Confederate Raiders” by Edward E. Leslie. Author and retired U. S. Marine, Paul R. Petersen wrote two very good books: “Quantrill of Missouri – The Making of a Guerrilla Warrior” and “Quantrill in Texas – The Forgotten Campaign”. And if you are interested in Quantrill’s letters he wrote home to his mother, Caroline Clarke Quantrill, I recommend William Esley Connelly’s book: “Quantrill & the Border Wars”.

William Clarke Quantrill was a man like his fellow Ohioans, William Tecumseh Sherman and George Armstrong Custer, in that he learned from history and those around him – only with Quantrill, history was unkind to his legacy.

Perhaps a time machine will be invented one day and those living will be able to see what actually happened in the past. Only then will anyone who rode with Captain Quantrill and his Raiders know the unvarnished truth.

I will close with a poem written by Quantrill three months before the ambush that took his short life.

Edward Leslie in his book wrote, “On February 26, 1865, Quantrill was staying at Jim Dawson’s place, near Taylorsville [Kentucky]. Dawson’s daughter, Nannie, asked him to write something in her autograph album. He had looted a great many things during his military career and now, to please a girl, he filched some lines from Lord Byron and mixed a few of his own:

My horse is at the door,

And the enemy I soon may see

But before I go Miss Nannie

Here’s a double health to thee.

Here’s a sigh to those who love me

And a smile to those who hate

And whatever sky’s above me

Here’s a heart for every fate.

Though the cannon’s roar around me

Yet it shall still bear me on

Though dark clouds are above me

It hath springs which may be won.