One hundred fifty years ago yesterday (August 21, 1863), William Quantrill and "Bloody" Bill Anderson led their Missouri Bushwhackers (or Ruffians) on a raid of Lawrence, Kansas, which to this day remains one of the most defining events of this region. At dawn that morning, the Missourians swooped down into town from Mount Oread (pronounced OR ee ad), murdered 183 boys and men (they killed no women or children), robbed the banks and taverns, and left the town in flames then beat a hasty retreat back to Missouri. All this was done by 9am.
During the Civil War, Lawrence was known as the base of operations for a group of anti-slavery guerillas known as Jayhawkers. The Jayhawkers instigated some of the fiercest fighting along the Kansas-Missouri border, most notably the burning of the town of Osceola, Missouri. The Jayhawkers were notably led by Senator Charles Lane, who was very vocal in his anti-slavery sentiments. It was Lane who ordered relatives of "Bloody" Bill Anderson to be jailed in 1863. On August 14, 1863, the jail in Kansas City, Missouri that housed three of Anderson's relatives collapsed, killing one of his sisters and permanently paralyzing another. Many believe this is what led the raid on Lawrence. There was no doubt that Senator Lane was the primary target of the Missouri raiders. Lane escaped, wearing his nightshirt, into the cornfields that surrounded Lawrence at the time. As a result of the raid on Lawrence, General Ewing issued an edict ordering a depopulation of three and a half counties in Missouri, along the Kansas border. Once the citizens had been removed from their homes, Union troops came through and torched their houses and cornfields and shot the livestock.
The legacy that came through this raid, and the general fighting along the Kansas-Missouri border remains very much a part of the landscape today, particularly in Kansas City. People in Missouri still regard Quantrill as a hero while those in Kansas still regard him as nothing more than a bloodthirsty murderer. As the saying goes, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Anderson was ultimately killed a year later while Quantrill died in June 1865 in Kentucky. Even former Missouri Tiger basketball coach Norm Stewart once quipped that Quantrill "did good work" in Lawrence. Three years after this raid, a small college was founded on Mount Oread in Lawrence, which we now know as the University of Kansas. Appropriately enough, they took on the nickname, "Jayhawks".
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