Overview
For career criminal William Clarke Quantrill, the American Civil War was an opportunity to practice legitimately what he loved most: theft, destruction, and murder. He rampaged freely as a military hero, slaughtering hundreds, fighting under the flag of the Confederate Army. Few people realized that Quantrill had no personal convictions. He stood for no principles and believed no more in the Southern ideal than in the Union. He simply lived to kill. Quantrill's War recounts the guerrilla raids William Quantrill carried out with dash and daring - the lightning ambushes he led on horseback, reins in his teeth, Navy Colt revolvers blazing in each hand. Union forces struggled to track him, without success. Eventually, Quantrill attracted a following of more than three hundred men, including Frank James (whose younger brother Jesse later joined them), Cole Younger, and Bloody Bill Anderson. The climax of this disturbing book deals with Quantrill's bloodiest battle, the four-hour sacking of Lawrence, Kansas, where he ordered the massacre of 185 men and boys, killing "every man big enough to carry a gun!"Editorials
Kirkus Reviews
A vivid account of the life and times of a Confederate guerrilla.The second life of Quantrill to appear this season (the other being Edward E. Leslie's The Devil Knows How to Ride, p. TKTK), Schultz's is distinguished by the author's determination to show that Quantrill, the bloody ruffian who savaged the Kansas frontier, took part in the Civil War to suit his own agenda. "He was a cold-blooded killer," writes Schultz (Over the Earth I Come, 1992, etc.), "gunning down Union soldiers and civilians, showing no mercy or remorse . . . waging his personal war under the protection of the Confederate flag. It was a war against the world, driven by hatred and a desire to avenge himself against everyone he imagined had maligned him." Schultz, however, does not plunge deeply into psychobiography, apart from noting that as a youth Quantrill seemed to show a marked, ingenious cruelty toward animals. Instead, the author unfolds a shoot-'em-up narrative long on action and short on speculative analysis, one of the virtues of which is to show that some of the men Quantrill hated most (including Missouri's senator Jim Lane, who championed the Union only because it offered more lucrative possibilities and seemed likeliest to win) were no prizes themselves. Schultz is especially good on examining the internal divisions within Quantrill's mixed group of soldiers and on the power struggles to which these divisions led, especially toward the end of the war, when the guerrillas began one by one to abandon their leader, some because "they were appalled and ashamed at what they had done at Lawrence, gunning down unarmed men and boys, terrorizing women and children, looting and destroying homes," others simply because they knew that defeat lay near.
Schultz extends his catalog of richly detailed, well-written histories with this life of Quantrill, who emerges less as a psychopath than as a soldier bent on bringing total destruction to his enemy.