Killing Bloody Bill

Beginning in June 1864, William T. Anderson and his band of Confederate guerrillas had raised hell all over central Missouri, burning and killing with abandon. Finally, on Oct. 26, just outside of Albany, Mo., they ran into the 33rd Infantry, Enrolled Missouri Militia.

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

Anderson’s men had made short work of state militia units before, and they left a steadily growing trail of dead Union men behind them to prove it. But the 33rd Infantry, under the command of Lt. Col. Samuel P. Cox, was no typical state militia, but a group of troopers specifically trained to track down and eliminate the guerrilla captain known as “Bloody Bill.”

The fighting pitted Anderson’s 80 or so battle-hardened men against Cox’s 350 soldiers. The engagement began on horseback but soon spilled into the streets of Albany, as a sizable portion of the 33rd dismounted and took cover in the town. Anderson, undeterred by a fortified Union position, led a determined charge against the dismounted militiamen. The assault failed, and the guerrillas broke away to regroup.

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Then, inexplicably, Anderson, with just one other man in tow, dashed recklessly through the federal line. Two shots rang out; a pair of minié balls burrowed deep into Anderson’s brain. The most dangerous man in Missouri was lifeless by the time he hit the ground.

This wasn’t the first time Union authorities had believed Anderson dead. A month before, on Sept. 30, 1864, First Lt. Thomas Wright of the Fifth Missouri State Cavalry filed a triumphant report claiming to have killed Anderson in the midst of a large skirmish. Wright had even recruited locals in Waynesville, Mo., to identify the body and verify his trophy. Intentionally or otherwise, all involved were mistaken. Two weeks later, Anderson confirmed his liveliness by beating a wealthy Union supporter in Glasgow, Mo., to death for manumitting slaves.

With this in mind, Cox was overly cautious to identify the corpse beyond doubt. Excitement notwithstanding, no one wanted to repeat Wright’s unfortunate performance. On Anderson’s body, Cox found documents and correspondence addressed directly to the guerrilla captain from Sterling Price, a former Missouri governor and now a Confederate general.

A timepiece and six revolvers were taken from Anderson’s corpse and awarded to Cox’s officers as mementos. The body was then transported to Richmond, Mo., and led through the streets by a parade of Union soldiers and sympathetic onlookers. As the celebratory cavalcade wound down, Anderson’s corpse was then photographed, with the image later featured on postcards and other souvenir knickknacks.

When it was finally time to inter Anderson, federal soldiers first removed the rest of his jewelry — cutting off one of his fingers in the process — and then hastily buried the body in a nearby field. Nothing resembling a proper funeral took place until 1908 when a guerrilla-turned-outlaw, Cole Younger, fresh out of prison in Northfield, Minn., organized a belated service for his old commander.

The martial circumstances and public excitement that surrounded Anderson’s demise raise a few obvious questions. Why did the Union brass assemble a special squadron to hunt down a single guerrilla? Why was killing Anderson a trophy-worthy accomplishment for the Union officers present? And why did the transport and burial of Anderson’s corpse elicit so much fanfare? In other words: Why was killing William T. Anderson such a big deal?

In late 1863 the band of guerrillas under William C. Quantrill, who had been terrorizing the region for months, rode to Texas to set up winter quarters. Among them were Anderson, with Frank James, Cole Younger and a host of other well-known Missouri bushwhackers. The group was infamous for massacring more than 150 civilians in Lawrence, Kan., that August. But in the months following the raid, Quantrill’s ability to control his men had deteriorated considerably. As infighting took its toll, rivalries boiled over; the more ambitious of Quantrill’s lieutenants grew frustrated, broke away and took charge of their own splinter companies.

When Bill Anderson returned from Texas in 1864, he rode at the head of his own band of guerrillas. Over the next several months, they tore their own path through the state, plundering the tiny village of Centralia, murdering 25 unarmed Union soldiers returning home on furlough and killing another 125 during an engagement with the 39th Missouri Infantry – all on the same day. Before leaving the site of the day’s second massacre, Anderson and his comrades allegedly collected scalps to commemorate their victory.

In the annals of guerrilla history, it is Quantrill, Anderson’s former superior and chief rival, who gets the lion’s share of attention, both scholarly and popular. Given Quantrill’s track record as a guerrilla commander from 1861 to 1863, this is not particularly surprising. The Lawrence Massacre was an unprecedented event in the history of American warfare, and Quantrill is typically credited as its mastermind. After the war John Newman Edwards, a firebrand Democratic pundit, wrote “Noted Guerrillas, or, The Warfare of the Border,” which is largely responsible for establishing Quantrill as the greatest Confederate guerrilla leader. Quantrill, Edwards wrote, was “unlike them all, just as he was greater than them all.”

Anderson, on the other hand, is often portrayed as a reckless, if not bloodthirsty or psychopathic, enigma. He is well known in the Border West — but more as an oddity of nature than an effective insurgent leader. Nonetheless while Quantrill’s star may have risen after the war, by fall 1864, after Quantrill’s band had splintered and after the ghastly bloodletting at Centralia, it was Anderson whom Missouri Unionists viewed as the most dangerous guerrilla threat in their state.

This is not to say that William Quantrill isn’t the best-known or most emblematic figure of the wider guerrilla war. But beyond that shroud of hindsight and symbolism, as the violence unfolded on a daily basis, he was hardly alone. Indeed, the memory of Quantrill as the “leading” guerrilla obscures the variety and number of guerrilla threats to the region.

A more nuanced understanding of guerrilla warfare as a dynamic, evolving system — one in which relationships among the guerrillas themselves mattered, and in which the impact of irregular activity on the federal war effort is assessed collectively and over time — sheds new light on Anderson’s controversial legacy. To be sure, that legacy will always include the massacres, the scalping and the charges of mental instability. But as we note the 150th anniversary of his death, it should also focus as much on Bloody Bill Anderson’s very real impact on the daily wartime experiences of Missourians and on broader military strategies in a bitterly divided Border State.

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Matthew C. Hulbert, a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Georgia, is the co-editor of the forthcoming book “The Civil War Guerrilla: Unfolding the Black Flag in History, Memory, and Myth.”