The Probert Encyclopaedia of People

WILLIAM QUANTRILL

William Clarke Quantrill was an American Confederate guerrilla commander. He was born in 1837 at Canal Dover (now Dover), Ohio and died in 1865. Before the American Civil War he was a gambler and, occasionally, a schoolteacher in the West and Midwest. Warrants for his arrest were issued several times on charges of murder, theft, and horse thievery. When the Civil War began in 1861, Quantrill, aided by the notorious outlaw Jesse James, headed a band of Confederate guerrillas in Missouri and Kansas, raiding farms and communities sympathetic to the Union. In 1862 he was commissioned a captain in the Confederate army; that same year he was declared an outlaw by Union authorities. On August the 21st 1863, he led his guerrillas on their most infamous exploit when they burned and pillaged the town of Lawrence, Kansas, killing more than 150 unarmed men, women, and children. In October, they killed about 100 Union soldiers at Baxter Springs, Kansas. Two years later the guerrillas were looting in Kentucky when a small force of Union soldiers
surprised them and fatally wounded Quantrill.
Research William Quantrill