The devil knows how to ride

Description

Brilliantly weaving together eyewitness accounts, letters, memories, newspaper articles, and military reports into a riveting narrative, this definitive biography reveals the personality of William Clarke Quantrill (1837–1865) and the events that transformed a quiet Ohio schoolteacher from a staunchly Unionist family into a virulent pro-slavery Confederate soldier and the most feared and despised guerrilla chieftain of the Civil War. This groundbreaking work includes the most accurate account ever written of the 1863 Lawrence, Kansas massacre (the greatest atrocity of the Civil War), when Quantrill and 450 raiders torched the Unionist town and executed roughly 200 unarmed, unresisting men and teenage boys. It also details the postwar outlaw careers of those who rode with him—Frank and Jesse James, and Cole Younger. No other history so fully penetrates the myth of a cardboard-cutout psychopath to expose Quantrill in all his brutality and human complexity

Description

William Clarke Quantrill was a quiet Ohio schoolteacher and Confederate soldier who became the most feared and notorious guerrilla of the Civil War. A brilliant tactician, Quantrill was a brave and charismatic man who, throughout the war, attracted hundreds to his side - notably the teenaged Frank James, Jesse James, and Cole Younger. While Quantrill fought dozens of skirmishes and battles, the peak of his career came on August 21, 1863, when he led 450 men in a dawn raid on the staunchly Unionist town of Lawrence, Kansas. During the next four hours, Quantrill's followers killed approximately two hundred men and teenaged boys - nearly all of them unarmed and unresisting - and burned the entire business district and over one hundred houses, resulting in damages totaling $1.5 million in Civil War dollars. The Lawrence massacre is still considered by historians to be the greatest atrocity of the Civil War. The Devil Knows How to Ride contains the most accurate and complete account of the Lawrence massacre ever written, as well as of the Centralia massacre, which was perpetrated by some of Quantrill's followers and in which Jesse and Frank James took conspicuous part. It sheds new light on the cause of the collapse of the Grand Avenue building, one of the great tragedies of the Civil War in the West, in which a number of girls who were relatives of Quantrill's followers were killed or seriously injured. Here, too, is the true story - told for the first time - of the blood-drenched last years and pathetic death of Edwin Terrell, the Yankee guerrilla and outlaw who captured Quantrill. The outlaw careers and later lives of the Jameses and Cole Younger are set forth in vivid detail. Leslie's groundbreaking research has enabled him to tell the story of Sue Mundy, the legendary "wild girl guerrilla of Kentucky," with whom Quantrill rode in 1865, and the bizarre, sometimes quite comic history of Quantrill's bones, which were stolen from his grave by his boyhood best friend and then bartered, sold, used in fraternity initiation rituals, and displayed in glass museum cases, and which have come to be buried in three graves in three different states.

Subjects

Other Editions

• The devil knows how to ride: the true story of William Clarke Quantrill and his Confederate raidersRandom House1996-01-01
• The devil knows how to rideDa Capo Press1998-01-01
• Devil Knows How to RideHachette Books2009-01-01