I Was a Revolutionary Read Free Page A

abolitionists in boxes labeled BIBLES so as to go unsearched.
    Two blocks away, the Second Colored Regiment, a camp of black troops, reach for pistols that aren’t on their hips, rifles that aren’t slung over their shoulders, and must make a tough decision. Twenty or so stay long enough to be slaughtered while others flee for the river, away from Quantrill’s men, wading across, silently cursing their lack of weapons, then themselves, their unwillingness to martyr.
    At five-thirty in the morning, Massachusetts Street is bedlam, horses thundering every which way, raiders making easywork of scurrying storeowners—targets hardly more difficult than lone whiskey bottles atop fence posts. Quantrill watches with an unsettled, pensive look: things are going too well; any minute, surely, the federals will sweep through and send his men hightailing back toward the border. He is supposed to die today. But the army never comes and soon his stony look gives way to amusement as cries of his name, audible over pistol shots and whinnies, sound all around him: Long live Quantrill! Long live Jefferson Davis! Forever the South! Sure that this raid will win him the respect and recognition of the Confederate army, he is already savoring the sweet euphony of: General Quantrill .
    Some years ago, before the war, Quantrill had lived in Lawrence for a time, and now he notes the unexpected pleasures of destroying the familiar. He visits Eldridge House, a hotel, the largest building in town, taking a seat in the lobby after his men have cleared the rooms and rounded up the guests. “How about some breakfast,” Quantrill says to the proprietor, who hurries to the kitchen to prepare the food himself. Upstairs, Quantrill’s men loot the rooms, stuffing into their pockets watches, jewelry, and women’s silken undergarments of amethyst, rouge, and Nile green. Downstairs, the collected guests consider their impending execution, silently mouthing prayers, smatterings of whispered mercies, watching the back of the man who will issue the order, if it is to be. Quantrill sits down at a table by the window, watching the theater in the street, waiting for his biscuits and eggs, listening to the anxious shifting of bodies behind him. Yet his mind is elsewhere, away, thinking of Kate, humming a ballad: “ I don’t know when I’ll see you again, my dear . . .” He closes his eyes and sees her face, beautiful, but then her mouth is asking why he’s left her and gone to Lawrence.
    â€œWhat do you want to do?” George Todd asks. “Leave them or kill them?”
    One of the ladies shifts her weight to the other foot, nudging a chair, which squeaks, as Quantrill thinks, relishing the privilege of mercy. He tells Todd to take them over to City Hall as prisoners of war. As Todd is about to lead the prisoners into the street, he notices one man wearing a Union uniform: Captain Banks, provost marshal of Kansas. He inspects the man’s clothing, examining the pretty blue coloring and careful stitching. He moves over to Banks, hand on his gun, leaning close to his face, and says, “Gimme your clothes,” making the captain undress right there in front of him.
(9) Film
    In Ang Lee’s 1999 film Ride with the Devil , Tobey Maguire plays a Dutch emigrant, now living in Missouri, who takes up the Southern cause, joining the irregulars waging guerrilla warfare on the Kansas-Missouri border. It’s a fictionalized account, based on a novel called Woe to Live On , though, interestingly, the movie’s title is borrowed from an earlier biography of Quantrill. It’s mostly a buddy movie and a love story, but Quantrill does make an appearance, a kind of historical cameo almost no one would recognize. Lee attempts to re-create the raid on Lawrence, devoting roughly ten minutes to it, and most of the sequences carry the bogus verisimilitude of Wild West reenactments at Boot Hill in Dodge City. The