I, Quantrill

by Max McCoy

Book Overview

Bloody Bill Quantrill was one of the most notorious and brutal guerrilla fighters for the South in the Civil War, riding with the James brothers and slaughtering his enemies mercilessly. Now, Quantrill tells his side of the story...

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0451223802
• ISBN13: 9780451223807
• Release Date: May 2008
• Publisher: Signet Book
• Length: 244 Pages
• Weight: 0.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 4.1" x 6.8"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 12 and higher

Customer Reviews

Close up and personal

The author brings you one of the most notorious figures in the War of Secession, a/k/a the "Civil War", William Clarke Quantrill. I remember seeing the great actor Walter Pidgeon portray Quantrill in a movie in my long ago youth. For most who know anything about that unhappy period in our nation's history, Quantrill is one of those names which conjure up visions of murderous night riders carrying out burnings and killing of innocent men, women and children before disappearing with the dawn to eventually die in a hail of Union bullets. Certainly, Quantrill spilled his share of blood. He often fought under the "black flag" (no prisoners taken) and, indeed, a flag attributed to him was black with a white capital letter Q in the upper left corner. But Quantrill and those who rode with him were not unrelieved villains, men without hearts or a just cause. They were, in fact, results rather than causes of a period of violence and hatred that led to the nickname for one of the states involved, "Bloody Kansas". Quantrill actually began his wartime career - and the war in the border states started before Sumter and continued after Appomattox - on the other side of the issue before determining that he preferred the bushwhackers of the South to the jayhawkers of the North. Nor was Quantrill an uneducated ruffian but a learned and cultured man. He was very young, dying at twenty-seven. His worth was such that a Confederate officer advised him to abandon "guerrilla warfare" and join the Confederate army where he would be appreciated and protected with a commission in that service. Quantrill chose not to follow that sound advice and paid the ultimate price for his shortsightedness. The author is intelligent enough not to follow his subject for the entire war. Incidents prior to the period in which the narrative picks up are covered with artful "flashbacks". He makes of his subject neither a hero nor a villain, but a man caught up in the circumstances of his time. He does something that frankly, I've never seen done before - and it is all the more powerful for it being so seldom referenced in fact or fiction - he presents intimate (VERY intimate) details of Quantrill's last days in a prison hospital after having his spinal cord injured by a bullet in the back. We are treated (to use an odd word) to the realities of life among men who are often unable to provide the most intimate care necessary for simple hygiene. I was both appalled and delighted to note that the author did not shrink from situations that certainly happened (they still happen today in similar circumstances) when a man may find himself lying in his own excrement for want of humane care. I will say that this particular ending to what had been "a tale of high adventure" made the story and the characters more real than would have been the case had Quantrill's last sad days been covered with a few sanitized phrases. I highly recommend this book. It is rather unique because the author has given us