The Lawrence Massacre: Quantrill's Raid, August Twenty-First, Eighteen Sixty-Three

Before dawn on August twenty-first, eighteen sixty-three, a force of approximately four hundred fifty Confederate guerrillas under the command of William Clarke Quantrill rode into Lawrence, Kansas. They had traveled through the night from Missouri, selecting Lawrence because it was the symbolic heart of the Kansas Free-State movement and the home of United States Senator James Lane, one of the guerrillas' most hated enemies. They arrived at five in the morning and immediately began killing.

Quantrill had given his men a list of targets, but the attack quickly became indiscriminate. The raiders moved through the streets of Lawrence for about four hours, shooting men and boys on sight, burning houses and businesses, and systematically destroying the town. When they finally rode out that morning, they left behind somewhere between one hundred sixty and one hundred ninety dead, all of them male, some as young as fourteen years old. Eighty women were widowed. Two hundred fifty children were left without fathers. One hundred eighty-five buildings had been burned. About twenty percent of Lawrence's male population had been killed in a single morning.

Historian Albert Castel described the Lawrence Massacre as the most atrocious single event of the Civil War.

The massacre had causes that stretched back years. Lawrence had been a target of proslavery violence since the eighteen fifties, when it was sacked once before during the Bleeding Kansas era. The proximate trigger in eighteen sixty-three was the collapse of a women's prison in Kansas City just eight days earlier, which had killed female relatives of several of the guerrillas, including sisters and cousins of raiders Bloody Bill Anderson and Cole Younger. The Union response was swift and sweeping: General Thomas Ewing issued Order Number Eleven on August twenty-fifth, forcibly depopulating four Missouri border counties to drain the guerrilla support base.

Lawrence rebuilt. Residents gathered donations from across the country, reburied their dead in a new Oak Hill Cemetery established in eighteen sixty-five, and erected a monument to the victims there in eighteen ninety-five. The town grew larger and more prosperous than it had been before August twenty-first. But the massacre left a permanent mark on the Kansas identity, and on the particular fury with which Kansans had already come to regard the border war.