I Was a Revolutionary (3 page)

When the flames consume them, the heat is so intense that their bodies dissolve, later to scatter in the wind and disappear. For this reason, Kasper's mother will, for the rest of her
life, believe he is still alive, setting a place for him every night at the dinner table.

Mayor George Washington Collamore, he of the infamous and untimely gun seizure that leaves his town unarmed, wakes to find his house surrounded by raiders. With his hired hand, Patrick, he dashes out of the kitchen, through the swaths of wheat, and into his well house. Patrick lowers the mayor down the shaft first before joining him at the bottom of the stone well. There, the proximity of quarters forces them to press close together, from which vantage they look up at the circle of light above them, waiting either for the mayor's wife to appear and tell them it is okay to come out or for a man in a slouch hat to fire his Colt blindly into their hiding spot.

But history has something else in store. The raiders press the mayor's wife, but she won't give up her husband. Somehow the men at the top of the death list—Governor Robinson, Senator Lane, and Mayor Collamore—have all managed to escape. Frustrated and drunk, the bushwhackers loot the place of all its worth and then set it on fire. They wait out front, figuring that if the mayor is hiding in the house he will come running. There's the transfixing beauty of the fire, too. They've been lighting them all morning, yet none like this. Something inside, perhaps the canisters of furniture wax and shoe polish, feeds the blaze, a tongue of fire shooting dragon-like out the chimney top. The smells of burning linens and flowers in the garden mix in the air and the conflagration roars until the walls come crashing down and finally the house collapses. Only then does this audience disperse.

As the mayor's wife rushes to the well house, she doesn't realize that smoke from the fire has funneled all the oxygen out
of the shaft like a whirring gust of wind on the open prairie, leaving the mayor and Patrick to a much slower and more horrifying death than if a gun had just been put to their heads and unloaded into their brains. Inherent in those last moments, in the groping push and pull of their hands as they slowly run out of air, is nothing amorous, but a simple prayer of human touch, an instinctive hope:
You can get me out of here, can't you?

Date: 08/21/2003

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: re: Inquiries?

Thank you for your interest in the State Historical Society here at MU. Excuse the formality, but I'll answer your questions in turn:

[*]Yes, we have a good deal of material on Quantrill, specifically, and rooms full of general Civil War–era Kansas/Missouri material: letters, newspapers, books, pictures, paintings, etc. You should come visit—Columbia's only a three-hour drive from Lawrence.

[*]There is certainly a small but avid group of enthusiasts interested in—some would say obsessed with—that Border War period. There are a number of Civil War battle reenactments across Missouri that attract good-size crowds. More than the reenactments, however, there is a culture that goes along with it, some of it truly bizarre. I've heard of small-town bars where patrons dress as Confederate soldiers or bushwhackers. I once even came across a woman-seeking-man ad in the
Weekly
in which a woman was looking to marry anyone who could prove a family connection to Quantrill.

[*]I don't know if I can offer a definitive answer on how people here today look back on those times or how they feel about men like Quantrill and George Todd. I think a lot of people in Missouri feel that even though we look at what these men were trying to preserve—the institution of slavery—as abhorrent, they were not simply bloodthirsty monsters. I think some people feel, as the historian Donald Gilmore writes, that “the Missouri guerrillas were legitimate partisan warriors who fought bravely for their cause against insurmountable odds.” When you're on the wrong moral side of history and constantly reminded of it, you get defensive. I'm not saying that's how I feel. It's complicated.

[*]I mean, can anyone in Kansas or Missouri understand the horrors of the past any better than they can what's happening in Afghanistan or Iraq? Distance, temporal or otherwise, is a leveling force. There have been countless books written about awful events like the raid on Lawrence, but they're at best approximations, in my opinion. We'll never truly understand. That's the thing about history, right? It's not graven—it's points of view.

Thank you for your interest and please don't hesitate to contact me again. I hope you do decide to come visit, even if you are a KU alum . . . just kidding.

Best,

Janice Stallings

As the raid wears on, the bushwhackers anticipate the out-the-back-door-and-into-the-potato-vines escape, and now they simply set the fields aflame and wait for the men to stream out. The raiders make sport of it, a lively sort of target practice.

But as the hours pass, the guerrillas also get sloppy. Drinking and looting take priority, and this affords a few hard-won victories for the townsfolk. There is the incident in which an elderly man quickly shaves and dresses as a sickly old woman. When the raiders arrive, they carry him out of the house in his bed, Cleopatra-style, before torching the place. Some townsfolk, emboldened by the imminence of their own deaths, start fighting back. Lacking guns, a few men challenge the bushwhackers with pitchforks and knives. Surprisingly, many of Quantrill's men simply leave when confronted, seeming to respect the suicidal gumption of the defenseless.

When the raiders open fire on a crowd of local men gathered on Massachusetts Street, Josiah Simeon falls to the ground, feigning death, and pulls the bodies of the dead atop him. The blood trickles down, the pleas for help worm through the pile, through crevices and openings between skin, until all is still, dead. Sometime later he hears a noise, footsteps nearby, bodies being turned over, rummaged through. When the body above him is removed, he opens his eyes reluctantly, expecting to be staring straight into the barrel of a Colt. But what he sees instead are the vacant, soul-deadened eyes of a woman trying to find her son. And at last, here, she has found him, this body that has thus far saved Josiah's life. Josiah looks at her, into those eyes, and says, “Leave him be—he's my only chance,” pulling the woman's son out of her hands to cover himself.

Lauretta Louise Fox Fisk depicts nearly all of Lawrence aflame in her painting
The Lawrence Massacre
. You likely wouldn't recognize the subject on initial viewing, however, which is one of the painting's interesting effects. In the foreground, raiders ride their horses down the main thoroughfare, Massachusetts
Street, toward the viewer. Their guns are drawn, but their numbers are not great, nor do they seem particularly menacing. The tone of the scene is oddly calm. In the background, the burning town is easily mistakable for a tawny sunrise to the casual eye. This contrasts greatly with the pencil drawing that ran a month after the raid in
Harper's Weekly
titled
The Ruins of Lawrence
, which today looks anachronistic, more like a postwar bombed-out Berlin than a torched Old West prairie town.

A curious thing about the burning of Lawrence is the lack of a definitive death count. Most references cite “nearly 150,” while other estimates range from 132 to more than 200. The August 23, 1863, edition of the
New York Times
reported “about 180 murdered” under the heading “The Invasion of Kansas.” The granite monument in the cemetery abides by the general estimate of 150 victims, but the surrounding gravestones all etched with the same date make estimates inadequate.

His grave is in another cemetery, far from the monument. The wars didn't mean anything to him. He'd never voted, didn't know Sunni from Shia. He was in debt and depressed, having banked everything on a music career that hadn't panned out. He enlisted for the money, for the experience. He enlisted, he said, because he needed to fucking grow up.

After four hours Quantrill's men leave town, and the people of Lawrence abandon their hiding spots to survey the destruction and to search for husbands and fathers, sons and lovers, usually to sadness and horror. At first it seems the majority of the dead are colored, but they're mostly charred white men. All over town, long wailing cries trouble the air like the caterwauling of animals in the rut. A makeshift hospital is raised in the only church that survived the onslaught, but the remaining doctor
is little more than mortician and bartender, dispensing whiskey to the newly amputated or slowly dying.

Massachusetts Street is completely devastated. People hurry pails of water from nearby wells and the Kaw River to the burning buildings, continuing on that first morning, mostly in silence now, mostly in vain, to salvage what they can of Lawrence. And then a strange thing happens: one of Quantrill's men appears. Slowly he makes his way up the thoroughfare. People turn to watch him, wondering why he is still here. Having drawn from hiding the few surviving men, perhaps the raiders' exit was a trick and a second attack is imminent. But in actuality this raider, Larkin Skaggs, has been left behind, separated from the group while indulging in drunken plunder. Why he doesn't hurry to catch up with the others is part of the mystery of this moment. Full daylight now, he seems appreciative, pensive in his appraisal of the destruction, a prince surveying his grounds. No trot, no canter, no gallop—the dapple colt simply walks the street, dragging the Union flag tied to its tail in the dirt.

No one sees where it comes from, but the first shot hits Skaggs in the shoulder and knocks him off his horse. For a few moments everyone just watches him squirm around, silently clutching his shoulder, before White Turkey, a Delaware Indian, approaches and fires a single shot directly into his heart. If Skaggs, a former Baptist minister, desires a martyr's death, the survivors of the raid are prepared to grant it. They descend on Skaggs, still alive, and tie a rope around his neck. The father of one of the young black soldiers who died at the raid's start climbs into the saddle of Skaggs's horse and starts to sing “John Brown's Body” as the colt continues its leisurely walk, dragging not only the Union flag but also its owner's body, tethered to a lug on the horse's saddle. The grief-shocked crowd follows the sable rider, joining in song
and pelting the body with rocks. They need this: the battle hymn, the funereal march, the failed attempts to set the body aflame, the ritual stripping of clothes and removal of limbs and fingers, and at last the calloused boredom of rolling what remains of Skaggs into a ravine to tan and rot, to be picked apart by scavenger animals. Tomorrow they will hang a man who arrives in town and seems a little suspicious.

Shortly before he shipped out, we were walking along Massachusetts Street, stopping at our favorite haunts—listening to records at Love Garden, having an afternoon drink at the Eldridge Hotel, combing stacks at the Dusty Bookshelf—strolling in the early fall with a beautiful ennui. I suggested we drop by the city's historical museum. He'd never been. I told him of the most abject statue of Langston Hughes on display in a hall honoring notable Lawrencians.

A volunteer near the entranceway, an old woman revealing bits of corn chip in her teeth when she smiled, informed us we were the only ones there. We walked through the building, so dark and dusty, lit solely by shafts of sun penetrating the high windows. They had added something new since I'd last been: a multimedia program of significant moments in state history. We skipped around the timeline, stopping on Quantrill's Raid. We were quiet a long time. I wanted to tell him how I felt, to unburden myself, to ask him not to leave. But I knew he didn't feel the same way about me, never had. How impossible it seemed then that any two people ever connected. He controlled the mouse, advancing to the next screen, saying, “Man, that must have been crazy. Can you imagine shit like that ever happened here?” I murmured agreement and asked if he would miss playing guitar while he was over there, but he didn't answer.
He simply clicked the S
TOP
button, rose, and continued down the hall.

By the time Quantrill's raiders leave Lawrence, Union leaders in Kansas City have finally mobilized forces to intercept the guerrillas before they cross into Missouri, where they'll disappear into the brush and thicket, gully and wood, into the very soil, and become ghosts. The Union forces stage two dramatic attempts to stop the rebels but ultimately fail.

Now it is almost twenty-four hours after the ambush began, and with a clutch of Union troops shrinking behind him in the distance, Quantrill feels as though he could sleep for a year, maybe two. He is weary. He knows they'll be safe if they can just make it to Missouri, and he's oppressed by the desire to ride straight to Kate's home and see her face. Amidst all the death has been her memory, the longing to touch her again. Despite this pull, he will take his men to Texas to hide out and let things settle, but as they race for the border there is so much Quantrill doesn't know.

He doesn't know that he'll never receive the recognition he so covets from the Confederate army—no legitimization of him or his men, no General Quantrill; he doesn't know that months from now his men will abandon him, either taking up with George Todd or so racked with guilt over their hand in the burning of Lawrence that they can no longer fight, that only a handful of them will follow him to Kentucky with the intention of continuing on to Washington to assassinate Lincoln; he doesn't know that he'll never get the chance; ambushed by federals, he'll die in Taylorsville, Kentucky, dumped in an idler's grave, farther away from Kate than ever; he doesn't know that his skull will be stolen and that his eye sockets are destined to
garage the limp pricks of awkward freshman pledges in a generational fraternity ritual; he doesn't know that it'll be more than a hundred years before his body is exhumed and returned to the loam of Missouri, the people there split on whether to celebrate the occasion or to protest. What he knows now is only a word containing a desire, a wish of coming home, really:
Kate
.