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Cavaliers of the BrushQuantrill and His MenEdited by Michael Banasik
256 pages, illustrated, maps, roster, appendices, notes, bibliography,
index, paperback. Order online using our secure Shopping Cart:
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Volume V of “...an essential volume, containing much primary source material, for those with a keen interest in Quantrill and his men.” —The Civil War News |
Volume V of our series covers a very familiar topic, but in a way you probably have not seen before: war dated accounts of the activities of William C. Quantrill’s guerrillas from a Southern perspective. During the Civil War Northern newspapers were filled with shocking reports of the special brand of warfare the Border had known long before cannon were ever trained on Fort Sumter. William Quantrill’s infamous Lawrence Raid in 1863 and Bloody Bill Anderson’s massacre at Centralia, Missouri, a year later gained nationwide attention, and, at least as the Northern press saw things, all of it bad. Editor Michael Banasik, while doing research for another project, had the opportunity to review thousands of Southern newspapers, and he found that very little original writing had ever been published during the war on the Missouri guerrilla. A notable exception was a series of articles published in three Houston, Texas, newspapers during 1864 and 1865. Twelve letters written by someone known only as “Wau-Cas-Sie” were published in the Tri-Weekly Telegraph and its successor the Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph, and the Houston Daily Telegraph. While the reporting is not as dispassionate as we might have wished, we find confirmation of accounts of Quantrill’s activities as told postwar by such writers as John Edwards and the guerrilla veterans themselves, which have often been dismissed as fiction. Editor Banasik rounds out the story of Quantrill’s guerrillas in Part 2 of the book by republishing the Columbia, Missouri, newspaper report of Frank James’s visit to Centralia in 1897 and a 1918 article by Allen Parmer, probably the youngest of Quantrill’s guerrillas, on Quantrill’s ride to Kentucky in 1865. Cavaliers of the Brush is thoroughly annotated and indexed, with seven appendices containing resource material from official reports, period newspapers, and secondary studies of William Quantrill’s guerrillas included.
