This painting by Lauretta Louise Fox Fiske depicts Quantrill's Raid on Lawrence.

On Aug. 21, 1863, the rumbling of equine feet accompanied the dawn in Lawrence, Kansas. Before a swarming mass of pro-Confederate bushwhackers rode William Clarke Quantrill, once a resident of Lawrence himself. The guerrilla chieftain let his Missourians loose — hundreds of them — on the unsuspecting abolitionist stronghold. Quantrill watched approvingly from atop Mount Oread as women sobbed and pled for the lives of their husbands, as homes and businesses went up in smoke, and as the men of Lawrence — young and old, white and black — met all manner of ghastly ends. Senator James Lane, himself no stranger to guerrilla raids, fled to safety in a nearby cornfield. Many weren’t so fortunate. By the raid’s end, some 180 buildings had been reduced to rubble and ash. Nearly 200 men and boys lay dead, some charred beyond recognition.

The blitzing of Lawrence afforded Quantrill and his men national notoriety. And, in the form of General Thomas Ewing’s equally notorious Order No. 11, it also triggered a drastic change in Union counter-guerrilla operations in the Trans-Mississippi. So how is it that so many Americans (especially those who don’t live in Missouri or Kansas) with an interest in Civil War history can tell you that Pickett’s Charge failed or that the Confederate’s riverine stronghold at Vicksburg fell earlier in the summer of ’63, but know next to nothing about the Lawrence Massacre?

The answer might surprise you: It’s because historians, dating back to the war generation, had a vested interest in keeping guerrilla warfare out of mainstream Civil War memory. The answer to the next question — why? — requires a bit more backstory.

From backroads and isolated fields to smokehouses and front porches, guerrilla warfare thrived on the Missouri-Kansas homefront. Far from the war departments in Richmond and Washington — and apart from the traditional battlefields they strove to control — entire families stood in for regular armies. Men and women alike, along with their children and the elderly, were dragged into a vicious domestic struggle. In a conflict such as this, waged from and upon the household, rules were understandably few and far between. Ambush, arson, rape, murder, torture, and even massacres replaced Lieber’s Code, echelon formations and interior lines. For many residents of Missouri and Kansas, irregular war was the regular wartime experience. Here there were no “civilians.” And to nearly everyone else, this was the epitome of “frontier” savagery.

These characteristics were precisely what prompted the first architects of Civil War history and memory — the two notions being far less differentiated in the 1870s than today — to sanitize the Lawrence Massacre from renditions of the conflict. They had two motives in mind. On the one hand, when the war ended, for the sake of a quicker process of national reunion, a story was established that trumpeted the mutual valor, sacrifice, and honor of soldiers from both sides; it touted the chivalry and courage of Johnny Reb and Billy Yank alike and swept the root cause of the war, slavery, under the proverbial rug. Guerrillas, men like Quantrill, and their massacres, such as the raid on Lawrence, were anything but chivalrous or courageous to the Victorian eyes of easterners in the 1870s. The war of bushwhackers and jayhawkers had been intensely

personal and localized; too much so to simply put aside in favor of collective backslapping. Nor could the more gruesome of their exploits be displayed on neatly-manicured battlefields, let alone recounted in respectable company.

On the other hand, the war, however chivalrous and honorable, had claimed 750,000 lives; it was a bloodletting unprecedented in American history. Never before had so many American men been lined up and marched into increasingly efficient rifle fire; never before had so many been exposed to diseases; and never before had so many died far from home, alone on battlefields, bodies shattered and marred by slow-moving pieces of .50 caliber lead. But by painting the guerrilla war as uniquely barbaric and uncivilized, defenders of the regular war could preserve its glory by washing away some of its own true awfulness. That is, how bad was three-quarters-of-a-million honorably killed when you had maniacs like Quantrill, Jim Lane, Bloody Bill Anderson, or Charles Jennison running around doing the really, really bad stuff?

This process of “constructing” the way most Americans remembered, and continue to remember, the Civil War should not surprise us. Neither should the idea that early historians actively participated in molding how we interact with and remember our national past. Collective memories are, after all, manmade affairs, as are our standards when it comes to acceptable forms of violence. And it’s no secret that we like to remember things — battles, commanders, entire wars — collectively. Our memories find strength in numbers, they become powerful agents of patriotism, unity and civic belonging. There’s nothing wrong with this as long as we don’t lose sight of what was intentionally left out to make it all possible. Namely, we ought not to forget that to form a collective memory, the ugliness and inconsistencies must be smoothed over and the fringes cut away.

Matthew C. Hulbert teaches history at Texas A&M University at Kingsville.

This becomes problematic for Missourians and Kansans because the story of the Civil War in the Missouri-Kansas borderlands hasn’t just been on the fringe — it is the fringe. And you can’t get uglier than the Lawrence Massacre. But until we understand fully how and why the likes of Quantrill and Lane, and the events of Aug. 21, 1863, have been cleansed from the mainstream, we won’t be able to see how borderland guerrillas not only helped decide the outcome of the Civil War, but also how it should and would be remembered by millions of Americans for more than 150 years. Until we do that, the ghosts of guerrilla memory will have no rest.

— Matthew C. Hulbert teaches history at Texas A&M University at Kingsville. For the full story of how the Missouri-Kansas guerrilla war has been whitewashed from mainstream history and memory, see his new book, “The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West.”