Goodrich Thomas - Bloody Bill Anderson: the short, savage life of a Civil War guerrilla

Copyright 1998 by Stackpole Books

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FIRST EDITION

Library of Congres Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Castel, Albert E. and Thomas Goodrich

Bloody Bill Anderson : the short, savage life of a Civil War guerrilla / Albert Castel and Thomas Goodrich.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and .

ISBN 0-8117-1506-X

1. Anderson, William T. 2. United StatesHistoryCivil War, 18611865Underground movements. 3. West (U.S.)HistoryCivil War, 18611865Underground movements. 4. Quantrill, William Clarke, 18371865. 5. GuerrillasMissouriBiography. 6. SoldiersMissouriBiography. I. Title.

E470.45.A53C37 1998

973.7'37'092dc21

[b] 98-34144

CIP

eBook ISBN: 9780811745383

Contents

Preface

Why a book about William Bloody Bill Anderson? Let us answer that question with another question: Why not a book about him? His career was, to say the least, an eventful one, and for a brief but spectacular period he played the leading role in the most viciously violent arena of the entire Civil War, with the result that even before he died he had passed from life into legendwhere he remains.

My name is Anderson. They call me Bloody Bill.

So says an actor at the outset of the film, The Outlaw Josey Wales. Viewers know what these words signify. They understand immediately why Josey Wales, a Missouri farmer whose wife has been murdered by Kansas raiders, joins Andersons guerrilla gang. He wants revenge. With Bloody Bill he will get it.

Much has been written about Bill Anderson. With one exception, though, all of these writings have taken the form of either short articles or somewhat longer accounts of Anderson and his doings in biographies of William Clarke Quantrill and general histories of the guerrilla conflict in Missouri during the Civil War. The exception is Donald R. Hales They Called Him Bloody Bill: The Missouri Badman Who Taught Jesse James Outlawry, a slender paperbound volume published in 1975. It contains much useful information and has been of assistance in the writing of this book. But it is not, nor was it intended to be, a full-fledged account of Andersons career. Instead it devotes 70 of its 118 pages, many of which consist of illustrations, to Andersons activities during the summer and fall of 1864 and only 12 to what he did prior to then, with the remaining 30 pages dealing mainly with what happened to Andersons grave and to the postwar escapades of some of his followers. Thus this book represents the first attempt to present a complete account, insofar as available sources allow, of Bloody Bills prewar life, of how he became a guerrilla, and of the war that he and his men wageda war that for some of them never ended until they died.

In making this attempt, we encountered two major problems, both common to all serious historical endeavors but especially difficult given the nature of our subject. One was obtaining an adequate supply of authentic and reliable sources. But this is a matter best discussed in the bibliographic essay at the end of this book, and the interested reader is referred to it.

The second major problem had to do with achieving objectivity in dealing with matters that remain controversial and about which people still have strong feelings. Compounding this problem was that one of the authors tends to be more critical than the other of the Missouri guerrillas and what they did. As it turned out, our conflicting attitudes proved beneficial rather than harmful in that they compelled us to try to reconcile them by compromise and thereby attain a greater balance in what we wrote.

Aiding us in compromise was our agreement with what B. James George Sr., the son of a Missouri guerrilla, wrote in a 1958 letter to Dr. Richard S. Brownlee, author of the then newly published Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy: Guerrilla Warfare in the West, 18611865 Many, many of the guerrillas were neither neurotic nor psychotic, nor did they come out of the war with any such tendencies.... It was my pleasure and pride for many years to have known a large number [of them] and very few were mentally sick. They were just human beings, I would say.

Yet in the same letter George also admitted that the guerrilla war in Missouri attracted men of unsavory nature and reputation, and he gave as his example Bill Anderson, whose deeds he described with the words bitter bloodshed.

What follows is the story of that bitter bloodshed. It is often an ugly story, sometimes a tragic one, but at all times it is dramatic, for nowhere was the Civil War so savage as it was in Missouri, and nowhere did it produce a protagonist more savage than Bloody Bill Anderson.

Acknowledgments

First and foremost we wish to record our gratitude to full-time lawyer and part-time historian Charles F. Harris of Wichita, Kansas, for providing us with valuable source materials pertaining to the Kansas phase of Bill Andersons career; for his excellent article in the Missouri Historical Review on the collapse of the Kansas City military prison, in which one of Andersons sisters was killed and the other two injured; for his astute and persuasive critique of a new but flawed contention as to the cause of that collapse; and for obtaining what we had concluded would be impossible for him to obtainphotographs of a tintype of Bush Smith Anderson and (assuming that in fact it existed) of the silk cord with which Anderson kept count of the Union soldiers killed by him. His assistance was given willingly out of a love for history, and he has every right to say that he played a key role in the preparation of this book. We hope that he finds it to be of such a nature that he will wish to say this and say it proudly.

We also wish to convey our thanks to Betty Pierce and Lorlei Metke for the data and other materials relating to Thomas Goodman and Maj. Ave Johnston that they provided. They made it possible to provide a much fuller portrait of both of these men, especially Goodman.

Larry and Priscilla Massie of Allegan Forest, Michigan, gladly helped with illustrations. So, once again, thank you, Larry and Priscilla. Thanks, too, to Donald R. Hale of Lees Summit, Missouri, who unselfishly shared information about Bill and Jim Anderson and also allowed us to lift the photo of Bill Andersons gravestone.

Finally, Albert Castel most sincerely thanks Linda Moore, Judy Leising, and Squeaky Barnett of the Hillsdale College Library for their highly professional and always courteous help, and the same to Richard Wunsch and his associates at the Volume I Used Bookstore in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the photocopier (temperamental though it may be) and the close proximity of the post office greatly facilitated his historical endeavors.

Prologue

This is the Way We Do Business

Fayette, Missouri: Morning, September 24, 1864

Pvt. Tom Benton of the Ninth Missouri State Militia Cavalry stood beside the road leading to the garrisons camp on the northern outskirts of Fayette, Missouri. The morning sounds were gone now. On nearby farms the cocks no longer crowed and in neighboring pastures cows had ceased their lowing. Even the chirping music of songbirds had faded as the sun began to bear down. It was going to be a hot day.