wachter<\/em> can also mean \u201cguard\u201d or \u201cwatcher.\u201d This possible connection to the Dutch seems more likely given the first known use of the word by Irving in his faux history.<\/p>\nMay 10 is the day that South Carolina, my adopted home state, \u201ccelebrates\u201d Confederate Memorial Day. The state made the day an official state observance, including the closing of some state government offices, in 2000, the same year it officially recognized Martin Luther King, Jr., day. In \u201chonor\u201d of this day, then, here is the story of one of these Confederate \u201cheroes\u201d (though admittedly not one from South Carolina).<\/p>\n
William Clarke Quantrill was born in 1837 in Ohio, the oldest of 12 children (though 4 died in infancy\u2014a common occurrence before the discovery of antibiotics). His somewhat abusive father died of TB when he was a teenager, and the family fell into relative poverty. He tried to help his mother with the family finances by become a school teacher, at 16, but teaching did not pay well, so he tried other kinds of jobs, too.<\/p>\n
Eventually, he went west with a couple of family friends, but this did not go well for William, who didn\u2019t really like manual labor very much. The two men who tried to help him get established sued him when he failed to hold up his part of the bargain. Then he went to Utah with the army, but that didn\u2019t work out well because he lost all he had gambling. Soon he became a drifter.<\/p>\n
Although initially against slavery, by 1860 he wrote to his mother that he was in favor of the \u201cpeculiar institution\u201d and that John Brown\u2019s hanging was too good for the abolitionist. But his teaching career ended when the school he was working at closed. So he joined a band of brigands and engaged in cattle rustling, among other illegal activities. He also learned of a wonderful financial opportunity in hunting down run-away slaves and returning them to their masters.<\/p>\n
In 1861, Quantrill traveled to Texas with a slave holder named Marcus Gill, a part-Cherokee who taught Quantrill guerilla warfare tactics. He and Gill joined the Confederate Army of Sterling Price and fought in the Battle of Wilson\u2019s Creek, but Quantrill left Price\u2019s army to form an \u201carmy\u201d of his own. This group, called Quantrill\u2019s Raiders, fought on the Confederate side using guerilla tactics against the more traditional army of the Union side. Quantrill\u2019s Raiders, eventually over 400 strong, were known particularly for their brutality. And they and other guerilla fighters like them were known as bushwhackers. Finally, the Union Army caught up with Quantrill at a farm in western Kentucky. Quantrill was shot in the back, while trying to flee, and was paralyzed. This event happened on May 10, 1865, a month after the Civil War was officially over. He died less than a month later.<\/p>\n
But his legacy lived on through some of the men who \u201cserved\u201d under him in Quantrill\u2019s Raiders. They included \u201cBloody Bill\u201d Anderson, Cole Younger, and Jesse and Frank James. That\u2019s right\u2014some of the most notorious outlaws of the Old West learned their craft from one of the heroes of the Confederacy.<\/p>\n
I would never celebrate the death of any man, but it was perhaps, at least, appropriate that this ne\u2019er-do-well and brigand was finally captured through a bushwhacking.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The image is a photo of William Clarke Quantrill. Humorously, he is referred to as \u201cCapt.\u201d The source is PBS.org, but the photo is anonymous and over 120 years old, so it is the public domain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Paul Schleifer A bushwhacker is a person who whacks his way through the bushes. Makes sense, right? The word is an Americanism. According to the OED, it first appears in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":3057,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-word-of-the-day","clearfix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3056"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3058,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3056\/revisions\/3058"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}