Lawrence Massacre
After General Ewing ordered the imprisonment of women and children relatives of known Missouri guerrillas in a Missouri jail, the jail's roof tragically collapsed and killed a number of prisoners. These deaths enraged Missourians. On August 21, 1863, William Quantrill led Quantrill's Raid into Lawrence destroying much of the city and murdering over 150 unarmed men and boys. The Confederate partisans in Missouri rode to Lawrence (a town long hated by Quantrill and many Southerners) in response to the deaths of women and children. Quantrill also rationalized, an attack on this citadel of abolition would bring revenge for any wrongs, real or imagined that the Southerners had suffered. By the time the raid was over, Quantrill and his men had killed approximately 150-200 men, both young and old.
Read more about this topic: Kansas In The American Civil War
Famous quotes containing the words lawrence and/or massacre:
“It’s a thing of violence, to whom death would be a merciful release.”
—Edward T. Lowe. Erle C. Kenton. Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney)
“It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)