William Quantrill - Early Life

Early Life

Quantrill was the oldest of twelve children, four of whom died in infancy. He was born at Canal Dover (now just Dover), Ohio, on July 31, 1837. His father was Thomas Henry Quantrill, formerly of Hagerstown, Maryland. His mother, Caroline Cornelia Clark, was a native of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. They were married on October 11, 1836, and moved to Canal Dover the following December.

Quantrill was well educated and followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a school teacher at the age of sixteen. In 1854, his abusive father died of tuberculosis, leaving the family with a huge financial debt. Quantrill's mother had to turn her home into a boarding house in order to survive. He helped support the family working as a school teacher, but left home a year later and headed to Mendota, Illinois. In Illinois, Quantrill continued his career as a teacher but soon moved again to Fort Wayne, Indiana. He worked as a bookkeeper for a lumberyard, along with teaching, all in the interest of supporting his family; however, he was unable to earn a decent wage. He quickly took up gambling and moved to Salt Lake City, Utah. During this time, he learned how to use the Bowie knife, Sharps rifle and the Colt revolver. At the age of 19 he moved to Missouri at the urging of his friends and his mother. She was able to find a family friend that would take Quantrill with him to Missouri.

Henry Torrey and Harmon Beeson were traveling to Missouri to become farmers and offered to pay for Quantrill's land if he would work for them until the age of twenty-one. They settled at Marais des Cygnes, but things did not go as well as planned. After about a year, Quantrill became restless and wanted to sell his claim. A dispute arose over the claim, and he went to court with Torrey and Beeson. The court awarded the men what was owed to them, but Quantrill only paid half of what the court had mandated. His relationship with Beeson was never the same, but he remained friends with Torrey.

Quantrill then joined a group of Missouri ruffians and became somewhat of a drifter. The group helped protect Missouri farmers from the Jayhawkers for pay and slept wherever they could find lodging. Quantrill traveled back to Utah and then to Colorado but returned in less than a year to Lawrence, Kansas, in 1859. It was at this time that his political views started to take shape, and his attitude towards the slavery issue began to form.

Before 1860, Quantrill’s political view appeared to be in support of the anti-slavery side. He wrote to his good friend W.W. Scott in January 1858 that the Lecompton Constitution was a “swindle” and that James H. Lane; a Northern sympathizer, was “as good a man as we have here.” He also called the Democrats “the worst men we have for they are all rascals, for no one can be a democrat here without being one.”. One year later, in 1859, he was back in Lawrence, Kansas where he taught school until it closed in 1860. He then took up with brigands and turned to cattle rustling and anything else that could earn him a dollar. He also learned the profitability of capturing runaway slaves and devised treacherous plans to use free black men as bait for runaway slaves, whom he captured and returned to their masters in exchange for reward money. His new lifestyle may have been the reason for his change of political views. In February 1860, Quantrill wrote a letter to his mother expressing his views on the anti-slavery supporters. He told her that the pro-slavery movement was right and that he now detested Jim Lane. He said that the hanging of John Brown had been too good for him and that, “the devil has got unlimited sway over this territory, and will hold it until we have a better set of man and society generally.