WilliamQuantrill

    He was the most notorious of the Confederate "bushwackers." He terrorized Union troops and pro-North civilians alike in Kansas and Misouri. Before the war he was a school teacher in Ohio, he headed west in 1857, where he started gambling and robbing. At the start of the Civil War he joined the Southern cause and fought with the Confederate Army at Wilson's Creek in August 1861.
     After Wilson's Creek he abandoned regular military service; he took command of a loosely knit guerrilla band. The members of his force were motivated more by personal animosities, expectations of booty, and a taste for mayhem. His followers included future Wild West desperados like the Younger brothers, Frank James, and later Jesse James.
     Attached to a formal cavalry unit, Quantrill captured Independence, Missouri, in August 1862 and was promoted to captain in the Confederate Army. In August 1863 Quantrill led an attack on Lawrence, Kansas. His 400 raiders pillaged and burned the town and killed over 150 unarmed civilian men and boys before fleeing into the Missouri woods.
     Expressing the North's outrage, a Union general resoponded by banishing over 10,000 civilians from four counties believed to harbor Quantrill supporters. The guerrillas, however, proved hard to pin down. The bunch often split up into separate raiding parties. One offshoot, led by the psychotic William "Bloody Bill" Anderson, committed acts even more shocking than Quantrill chanced, such as a train ambush in which 24 unarmed Union soldiers on leave were murdered, along with over 120 members of the posse that went in pursuit of the band.
     In the fall of 1864, Union forces managed to curtail much of the guerrilla activity in Kansas and Missouri, and Quantrill went east intending to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. He was cut off by Federal troops in Kentucky and was mortally wounded in May 1865. He died a prisoner 20 days later.