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A question and answer with Tony R. Mullis, an associate professor of military
history at the Command and Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. This month
is the 150th anniversary of William Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence,
Kansas.
Quantrill is seen as a great villain in Lawrence and something of a folk hero in Missouri. How do you appraise Quantrill, as a historian?
Your question pretty much sets the parameters of Quantrill.
When you read the literature he is either romanticized as a great Southern patriot or demonized. The reality is probably somewhere in between. With a lot of historical figures, it is as much how they are remembered as what actually happened. And if you live in Lawrence or you live in Columbia, there is a world of difference in how you interpret things as they relate to Quantrill.
For your presentation at the library you prepared an “8/21 Commission Report,” an allusion to 9/11. Was Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence an act of terror?
That is a critical question. Normally, an act of terror has a political purpose behind it. That is a debate with Quantrill. Was he out to achieve Confederate independence, or was it a crime?
Most of his supporters — and there is some justification for this — see him as a partisan taking the war to the enemy in Kansas, Lawrence being a symbol of abolitionism and a symbol of Jayhawker nation, if you will.
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