LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) - Jetta Dix was awakened by what sounded like yelling and gunfire at 5 a.m. Aug. 21, 1863. Her husband, Ralph, who operated a blacksmith and carriage shop near downtown Lawrence, lay asleep at her side.
It was first light - the sun had yet to rise above the horizon.
Was Jetta hearing revelry left over from the prior night’s celebration of plans to build a new bridge over the Kansas River and the arrival of the railroad and telegraph lines? Was it Union cavalry troops returning to the free-state stronghold?
The answer came when Tom Pardee, a black man who worked for the Dixes, ran into their home, yelling they must hide from William Clarke Quantrill and his band of nearly 400 Missouri bushwhackers who were attacking the city of 2,500.
Jetta, mother of a 3-year-old son and twin 18-month-old daughters and operator of a boarding house on the third floor of their home, looked out the windows and saw Gov. Charles Robinson’s office on fire and the owner of the Eldridge House fall to the ground after being shot in the hotel’s backyard, The Topeka Capital-Journal (https://bit.ly/1JHusaL ) reported.
She saw men on horseback riding up and down the streets, yelling and shooting their pistols and rifles.
“Quantrill told his men to kill any man or boy old enough to carry a gun,” said Jeremy Neely, an American history instructor at Missouri State University in Springfield, Missouri.
Although Jetta pleaded with her husband to run away and hide, Ralph, who was in his mid-30s, wanted to wait, believing citizens could get to the arsenal about a block from their home, arm themselves and resist the marauders. The arsenal, however, was locked, and the townspeople were left defenseless.
As the raiders surrounded the Johnson House, a stone hotel south of the Dix property that Quantrill believed to be an abolitionist hotbed, Jetta wandered outside.
“I saw men jumping from windows and fleeing for their lives. Several were killed as they ran,” Jetta wrote 50 years later in her account of the raid. “I realized the terrible situation and ran back to our home to urge Mr. Dix and the others not to attempt to leave the house.”
She was too late. Her brother-in-law, Frank Dix, had been shot as he tried to get to their paint shop. Another man was shot as he went down the back stairs.
“I ran to him and as I tried to hold him, he was shot again by a passing guerrilla. The bullet just missed my face. I entered the house covered with powder and blood,” she wrote.
Realizing their wooden home was an easy target for the fire-setters among Quantrill’s raiders, Ralph and some other men decided to escape to the Johnson House by crawling over the roof of a barber shop. Jetta left her children in a coal shed with their black nurse and re-entered the street.
“Mr. Dix and several others had just been taken prisoners out the front door of the hotel, after having been promised protection if they would turn over their money and valuables,” she wrote.
The raiders ordered Ralph and other captives to walk east toward Massachusetts Street. Along the way, Jetta pleaded with Quantrill’s men to spare her husband. As they crossed an alley, Jetta stumbled over a rock pile, and one of the marauders shot all of the captives.
“I stood, completely dazed and rigid as I saw men falling to the right and left. I could not get to my husband at once, as the guerrillas were coming in every direction, riding through the alley, right over the dead bodies, between the buildings and the street,” she wrote.
The chaos lasted nearly four hours - enough time for Quantrill, 26, to order breakfast at the City Hotel and when finished shoot the proprietor in the head; enough time to burn nearly all of the businesses; enough time to kill 180 men and boys and create 85 widows and 250 fatherless children.
“It’s the single worst abomination against civilians during the Civil War,” Neely said.
The Lawrence massacre wasn’t a random act of violence. Quantrill and his men had targeted the city and planned the attack for several months.
“Lawrence was a symbol of everything Quantrill was fighting against at that moment,” said historian Christopher Phillips, author of “The Civil War in the Border South” and the soon-to-be-released “The River Ran Backward: The Civil War on the Middle Border and the Making of American Regionalism.”
Quantrill wasn’t a typical pro-Southern Missouri guerrilla. He grew up in anti-slavery northern Ohio and espoused abolitionist leanings in the late 1850s while teaching school in Stanton, south of Lawrence. However, by 1860, his ideology had turned on its head. He became a proponent of slavery and states’ rights.
According to the Kansas Historical Society, Quantrill started stealing slaves and horses and selling them to the highest bidders. He rode with bushwhackers in Missouri, and by December 1861 had formed his own guerrilla band that eventually included Cole Younger, brothers Frank and Jesse James and William “Bloody Bill” Anderson, known for wearing a necklace of Yankee scalps.
Seen as a leader by the Confederacy, Quantrill was commissioned as an officer under the Partisan Ranger Act, which authorized the formation of guerrilla bands for the “effectual annoyance of the enemy.”
“At that point, he becomes a notorious guerrilla,” Phillips said.
And what better way to show his commitment to the Confederacy than to ransack Lawrence, the abolitionist capital of Kansas and home of James Lane, a U.S. senator and commander of the regiments that burned and looted Osceola and other Missouri towns.
Lawrence represented “misused democracy” to Quantrill because the town was founded by “interlopers” from the New England Emigrant Aid Society with the sole purpose of stopping the westward advancement of slavery, Phillips said. Moreover, the city welcomed fugitive and freed slaves and was the site of the enlistment of black troops.
Some of Quantrill’s raiders reportedly carried lists of prominent men to kill during the raid on Lawrence. A prime target was Lane, who survived by running from his house in his nightshirt and hiding in a cornfield.
The Lawrence massacre also may have been escalated by an order issued by Union Gen. Thomas Ewing Jr. shortly before the raid, Neely said. The order called for detention of any civilian giving aid to Quantrill or his men. Several female relatives of the marauders were rounded up and imprisoned in a makeshift jail in Kansas City, Missouri. On Aug. 13, 1863, the jail collapsed, killing four young women and injuring others. Among those killed was the teenage sister of “Bloody Bill” Anderson.
Phillips believes the jail collapse was a “convenient pretext” for the raid.
“I don’t believe the collapse in Kansas City triggered this rush of rage,” he said.
Neely agreed: “(Quantrill) was seizing the opportunity to plunder.”
Pat Kehde, great-granddaughter of the Dixes and author of “High Hopes and Great Loss: The Story of Ralph and Jetta Dix,” said many of the raid’s victims weren’t politically active or abolitionists - certainly not her ancestors.
Jetta and her father had immigrated to the U.S. from Ireland when she was 6 years old. She came to Lawrence in 1858, at age 17 or 18, to start a new life. Ralph had arrived in the city three years earlier, coming from Connecticut to take advantage of the economic opportunities in the undeveloped Kansas Territory. They married in 1859, two years before Kansas entered the Union as a free state.
“Neither was politically aware,” Kehde said. “They were an adventurous couple who got caught up in the political struggles.”
Four days after the Lawrence massacre, Ewing authorized Order No. 11, calling for the de-population of four Missouri counties along the Kansas border, forcing thousands of civilians to flee. Union forces burned buildings and crops and stole livestock in the area to deprive Missouri guerrillas of food and support.
As Union troops pushed Confederate forces into mid-Missouri, Quantrill and his marauders escaped to Texas. His following began to fracture, and Quantrill fell out of favor. By spring 1865, Quantrill assembled a few dozen men and took his guerrilla tactics to western Kentucky.
“Quantrill has a new band of desperate men, but the war had changed and he had changed, too,” Phillips said.
On May 10, 1865, Quantrill’s raiders rode into a Union ambush. The guerrilla leader was shot in the back, paralyzing him from the chest down. He was transported by wagon to a military prison hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, where he died on June 6, 1865, at the age of 27.
Quantrill was buried in Louisville, but he didn’t rest in peace.
In 1877, William Scott, Quantrill’s childhood friend and newspaper reporter, claimed to have dug up a skull, a few large bones and a lock of hair at Quantrill’s gravesite at the request of the marauder’s mother so they could be buried in Dover, Ohio.
However, only the skull was buried in Ohio. Blair Tarr, museum curator at the Kansas Historical Society, said the bones and lock of hair ended up at the Topeka museum.
“They were on display for a while,” Tarr said, adding the items eventually were placed in storage.
In the 1980s, a member of the Missouri Division of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans contacted the museum to reclaim Quantrill’s remains under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
“We were trying to get rid of human remains in the collection and saw this as an opportunity to remove them,” Tarr said. “In reality, there was no proof they were Quantrill’s bones.”
The Sons of the Confederate Veterans buried the remains in 1992 during an elaborate ceremony with a full-size casket and Confederate honor guard at the Old Confederate Veteran’s Home Cemetery in Higginsville, Missouri.
In contrast, the victims of Quantrill’s raid were buried in a mass grave in Oread Cemetery in Lawrence, later named Pioneer Cemetery, said Katie Armitage, Lawrence historian and author of “Lawrence: Survivors of Quantrill’s Raid.” In 1865, Oak Hill Cemetery was created as a memorial to the victims, and eventually the victims’ remains were re-interred there in a mass grave. Thirty-two years later, enough money had been raised for a permanent Citizens Monument at the gravesite.
Lawrence began rebuilding shortly after the smoke of the burned buildings had dissipated. Leavenworth citizens delivered food and clothing; local farmers helped out, too.
“The big boost came from relief funds from Boston and St. Louis Mercantile Bank,” Armitage said.
With the help of a bank loan and income from the sale of her husband’s tools and other equipment, Jetta Dix was able to rebuild her burned home. She re-established her boarding house, remarried twice and raised her children.
Although some of the citizens moved to escape the charred cinders and smell of burning flesh, many stayed.
“Most of the people just dug in their heels,” Kehde said. “They were just not going to be defeated.”
On Aug. 21, 1913, about 200 survivors of Quantrill’s raid gathered in Lawrence for a reunion during a 50-year commemoration of the tragedy, Armitage said. No other reunions were held until 1925, when a University of Kansas journalism class brought the survivors together again.
The victims weren’t the only ones remembering the raid. The men who rode with Quantrill also reunited from 1898 until 1929 on or near the anniversary of the raid.
“It was like throwing scalding water into the face of Kansans,” Phillips said.
“They were unrepentant figures,” Neely said. “The border war never really ends for them.”
While Quantrill has become mythological in some Confederate commemorative circles, John Bradbury, assistant director at the State Historical Society of Missouri Research Center in Rolla, Missouri, questions his historical staying power.
“I wonder in the long run if one of these days anyone will remember Quantrill,” he said, pointing out he already has been overshadowed by his bushwhacker subordinate Jesse James.
The memory of the devastation wrought by Quantrill’s raid lives on in Lawrence. Each August, near the anniversary date, the names of the victims are read during a solemn public gathering.
“When a terrible, tragic event happens, we tend to memorialize the events in some way,” Armitage said. “The feeling is, it should not be forgotten.”
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Information from: The Topeka (Kan.) Capital-Journal, https://www.cjonline.com
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