Three years with Quantrell

John McCorkle was a scout for the notorious William Quantrill, a man whose group of brigands spent their time kidnapping runaway slaves in exchange for reward money in the years before the civil war. McCorkle served briefly in the Missouri State Guard before being captured, swearing an oath of allegiance to the Unionists, and soon after breaking it to join Quantrill’s men. Fighting along the Missouri-Kansas borderland, preying on Unionist sympathisers, this account provides insight into a western theatre of a very different nature than the usual accounts following the exploits of Ulysses S. Grant and his army. McCorkle attempts to rehabilitate the memory of Quantrill, who he greatly respected, and the actions of the confederate guerrillas more generally. He was at pains to show how federal atrocities led him into this fight and how, by contrast, the confederates operated within a framework of decency and morality. Quantrill was best known for the massacre at Lawrence, Kansas in 1863, in which over 180 civilians were killed. McCorkle recounts this raid and places the blame for it firmly on the federal forces, who provoked retaliation through their murder of a number of women related to the guerrillas. A strict prohibition against the murder of women and children was followed by Quantrill’s bushwhackers at all times and McCorkle recounts numerous incidents where Quantrill punished those who made life a misery for the region’s inhabitants, irrespective of their political allegiance. Nonetheless, McCorkle does not attempt to hide the often brutal and vicious nature of the guerrillas. What emerges is a memoir that shows the bleak realities of war and challenges the heroic narratives of the war that were emerging from the Unionist side. This is the enlightening civil war memoir of John S. McCorkle, a confederate guerrilla operating in the Missouri area. With the help of his friend O.S. Barton, he finally committed his reminiscences on the civil war to paper first in 1914. John S. McCorkle (1838-1918) was a Missouri farmer who fought for the Confederates under Colonel William Quantrill during the American Civil War. At the outbreak of war he joined the pro-Confederate Missouri State Guard. In August 1862 he joined Quantrill’s guerrillas. McCorkle fought at the battles of Baxter Springs, Centralia and Fayette, amongst others, and was present at the raid on Lawrence, Kansas in 1863. He followed Quantrill into Kentucky in 1865 but he was absent for the final battle when Quantrill was killed. When the war ended, he returned to farming in Howard County, Missouri.