The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory by Matthew Hulbert Stephen Berry Amy Taylor

Author:Matthew Hulbert, Stephen Berry, Amy Taylor [Matthew Hulbert, Stephen Berry, Amy Taylor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Americas, United States, Civil War Period (1850-1877), Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Cultural Studies, Popular Culture
ISBN: 9780820350004
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2016-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

The Execution of Rev. Larkin M. Skaggs

William E. Connelley, Charles S. Gleed, and Minnie E. Blake each extolled the people of Lawrence, Kansas, as having been God-fearing, peace-loving settlers who desired nothing more than to live in harmony with African Americans and their neighbors across the border. Whatever linkages had existed between Lawrence and bands of Jayhawkers who carried out violent raids in western Missouri—and those linkages appear to have been quite strong—these authors propped the town and its residents up as a collective foil to Quantrill’s evil. If the Lawrence Massacre had not been a justified military strike against a legitimate military target, their logic entailed, then the pinnacle of Quantrill’s career was an illegal atrocity and his reputation ruined. But such a dualism of pure good against pure evil required just that—that one side remains purely good and innocent of all blame or role in precipitating the raid of August 21, 1863.

The death of Larkin M. Skaggs greatly complicated this arrangement for pro-Union polemicists in the borderlands. The actual facts of Skaggs’s demise are few and far between. The first is that he was the only one of Quantrill’s command killed during the Lawrence Massacre. The second is that he died within Lawrence proper (as opposed to the surrounding countryside) after having attempted to retreat from the city on horseback. This invariably means that Skaggs was brought back to Lawrence alive and later killed. The third and perhaps most notable of these facts is that after Skaggs’s death, his corpse was brutally mutilated, paraded through the streets of the town, and then left to decay, unburied, for several months. Even by guerrilla standards, the postmortem abuses were excessive. According to ex-guerrilla William H. Gregg in 1912, no Kansan killed in Lawrence had been “treated with the cruelty of Jim Skaggs was subjected to [when he] was captured by the ‘red legs.’”51

The most pertinent detail of all, however—the true identity of Skaggs’s executioner—remains an unsolved mystery. Three different accounts of the incident are relayed below, each with its own version of events and theory as to who launched the projectile (bullet or arrow) that killed Larkin Skaggs. But while these reminiscences cannot prove who or what ultimately dealt Skaggs’s fatal blow, the manners in which each presents the story of his slaying reveals a great deal about what borderland Unionists stood to lose in the memory debate if their behavior too closely resembled that of the guerrillas they denounced so fervently. Put another way, these accounts form a case study concerning the ways in which the anti-Edwards, anti-Quantrill camp tried to “explain away” the seediest elements of their own wartime experiences for sake of broader public perception and remembrance.

The first widely disseminated account comes from William E. Connelley’s Quantrill and the Border Wars in 1909. According to Connelley, as Quantrill and his command exited Lawrence, Skaggs, alone with two other unnamed guerrillas, “rode back to the City Hotel, called out the landlord Mr. Stone, and shot him dead.” After

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