Download Bloody Dawn: The Story of the Lawrence Massacre by Thomas

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Indiana Magazine of History
Bloody Dawn: The Story of the Lawrence Massacre. By Thomas
Goodrich. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991.
Pp. 207. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index.
$26.00.)
“Bloody Dawn” for the three thousand residents of Lawrence,
Kansas, came on August 21, 1863, when 400 Confederate partisans
led by William Quantrill swooped into the sleeping town and embarked on a n orgy of murder and arson. Within hours more than
150 lay dead, and most of the survivors were left homeless. The
terror and hatred unleashed a decade earlier in “Bleeding Kansas”
reached a frightful climax that summer day.
Thomas Goodrich, a native of Lawrence, convincingly captures
the visceral horror that erupted in the West during the Civil War
era. The fight between ‘Ijayhawkers” and “bushwackers” was truly
“a very personal war, a war among neighbors, . . . a vendetta” (p.
4).The people of Lawrence clearly understood this, of course; but
after numerous false alarms of impending attack and the Union
military victories in July, they dropped their guard. Quantrill’s
raiders achieved complete surprise, and the result was a massacre.
Cowering, unarmed townsmen pleaded for mercy as their wives
and children looked on, only to be shot down in cold blood. In one
grisly episode, two merchants were lashed together and tossed into
their burning store; when the flames finally extinguished their
shrieks, the drunken guerrillas burst into “a new round of applause and laughter” (p. 115).
Goodrich is a fine storyteller, but this work is flawed. The
well-written narrative is jarringly disrupted by frequent leaps in
chronology, and the author’s perspective is likewise disjointed.
Goodrich portrays slaveholders-particularly Missourians-more
as victims than aggressors. Beleaguered southerners viewed the
Kansas-Nebraska Act as “simp!y a question of survival” (p. 2). Fanatical northerners, typified by John Brown, willing to tear down
the Union to keep Kansas free, ultimately pushed the South into a
sectional showdown. The author seemingly cannot comprehend
why northerners were reluctant to accept Nebraska as a free state
and concede Kansas to slaveholders. He ignores the Missouri Compromise (which supposedly settled the controversy in 18201, the
election frauds perpetrated in Kansas Territory by proslavery Missourians, and the decidedly unrepresentative Lecompton Constitution. The historical background to t h e events leading to t h e
Lawrence raid is so simplistic it is misleading.
The author’s treatment of the Civil War years is similarly
skewed. It is unlikely, for example, Kansas was any more “liberally laced with thieves, rogues, and scoundrels” than its eastern
neighbor (p. 210). Granted, some jayhawkers were “evil-looking,
evil-acting men” interested solely in plundering Missouri farmers;
Book Reviews
341
yet, again, the blame was not so one-sided. The most obnoxious
major character in the entire volume is a former Hoosier, James
Lane, who was indeed a grasping politician; but it is too much to
make William Quantrill a semi-heroic figure in comparison. The
“romantic, blue-eyed cavalier,” according to Goodrich, imparted “a
degree of humanity, even gallantry” to the bitter conflict (pp. 74,
76). Quantrill’s bold assault of Lawrence earned him “the eternal
respect and admiration of thousands who . . . felt that though it
had come ever so slowly, justice had after all come ever so surely”
(p. 149). Kansans were amply repaid for their earlier transgressions.
Readers interested in a well-told account of the Lawrence massacre will appreciate this book. Scholars seeking a broader understanding of t h e partisan warfare along t h e Kansas-Missouri
frontier will be better served by the more balanced and thoroughly
researched efforts of Albert Caste1 and Michael Fellman.
WILLARD
CARLKLUNDER
is a n assistant professor at Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas. He teaches antebellum and Civil War courses and recently completed
a biography of Lewis Cass.
Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil
War. By Wendy Hamand Venet. (Charlottesville: University
Press of Virginia, 1991. Pp. xii, 210. Illustrations, table, notes,
essay on sources, index. $25.00.)
Recent scholarship has added greatly to a n understanding of
women in the antebellum period. The antislavery and pro-women’s
rights activism of women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B.
Anthony, Angelina Grimke Weld, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and
Lydia Maria Child are well known. However, all of these women
lived through the Civil War, but their story is often truncated by
that event. Wendy Hamand Venet has chosen to follow these
women through the 1860s, charting their movement from moral
suasion into the political sphere.
Despite stating a Civil War focus in the preface Venet’s first
two chapters review the generally well-known antislavery activities of women before the war. Chapter three follows the lecturing
career of the flamboyant young Anna Dickenson. Chapters four to
six contain the real substance of Venet’s research and her contribution to the literature in discussing the various ways in which
abolitionist women responded to t h e war. Venet argues t h a t
women such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Fanny Kemble Butler
“provided abolitionists with new arguments a n d antislavery
women with additional role models” (p. 92) through their writing
and lecturing in England. Stowe and Butler tried to convince the
English that the war was a conflict between slavery and freedom