The Story of the Lawrence Massacre. by Thomas Goodrich
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340 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 em- barked on an 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 ap- plause 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). Fa- natical 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 Com- promise (which supposedly settled the controversy in 18201, the election frauds perpetrated in Kansas Territory by proslavery Mis- sourians, and the decidedly unrepresentative Lecompton Constitu- tion. The historical background to the events leading to the 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 “liber- ally 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 transgres- sions. Readers interested in a well-told account of the Lawrence mas- sacre will appreciate this book. Scholars seeking a broader under- standing of the partisan warfare along the Kansas-Missouri frontier will be better served by the more balanced and thoroughly researched efforts of Albert Caste1 and Michael Fellman. WILLARDCARL KLUNDER is an assistant professor at Wichita State University, Wich- ita, 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 an 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 activi- ties 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 contri- bution to the literature in discussing the various ways in which abolitionist women responded to the war. Venet argues that women such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Fanny Kemble Butler “provided abolitionists with new arguments and 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 .