William T. Anderson
William T. Anderson was one of the deadliest and most notorious pro-Confederate guerrilla leaders in the American Civil War. Anderson led a band of volunteer partisan raiders who targeted Union loyalists and federal soldiers in the states of Missouri and Kansas. He led a raid on the town of Centralia, Missouri, in September 1864, killing 24 unarmed Union soldiers on the train. Anderson himself was killed a month later in battle.
About William T. Anderson in brief
William T. Anderson was one of the deadliest and most notorious pro-Confederate guerrilla leaders in the American Civil War. Anderson led a band of volunteer partisan raiders who targeted Union loyalists and federal soldiers in the states of Missouri and Kansas. He led a raid on the town of Centralia, Missouri, in September 1864, killing 24 unarmed Union soldiers on the train. Anderson himself was killed a month later in battle. Historians have made disparate appraisals of Anderson; some see him as a sadistic, psychopathic killer, but for others his actions cannot be separated from the general desperation and lawlessness of the time. He was born in 1840 in Hopkins County, Kentucky, to William C. and Martha Anderson. His siblings were Jim, Ellis, Mary Ellen, Josephine and Janie. Anderson’s family moved to the Kansas Territory in 1857, traveling southwest on the Santa Fe Trail and settling 13 miles east of Council Grove. The Anderson family supported slavery, though they did not own slaves. By 1860, the young William T. Anderson was a joint owner of a 320-acre property that was worth USD 500; his family had a total net worth of around USD 1,000. On June 28, 1860, William’s mother, Martha Anderson, died after being struck by lightning. In the late 1850s, Ellis Anderson fled to Iowa after killing a native American. Around the same time, William Anderson joined a member of the Kaw tribe outside Council Grove for a trip to New Mexico. He worked with his brother, Jim Lee Griffith, and several accomplices along theSanta Fe Trail in 1861, strung out as a horse trader.
After the Civil War began in 1861 he began trading, taking horses from Kansas and returning to Missouri and returning with more horses. He eventually transitioned from stealing horses to reselling them as far away as New Mexico and New Mexico, where he worked with Jim Griffith. In 1863 he joined Quantrill’s Raiders and became a skilled bushwhacker, earning the trust of the group’s leaders, William Quantrill and George M. Todd. Anderson, perhaps falsely, implicated Quantrill in a murder, leading to the latter’s arrest by Confederate authorities. Anderson subsequently returned to Missouri as the leader of his own group of raiders and became the most feared guerrilla in the state, robbing and killing a large number of Union soldiers and civilian sympathizers. Although Union supporters viewed him as incorrigibly evil, Confederate supporters in Missouri saw his actions as justified, possibly owing to their mistreatment by Union forces. In late 1863, Anderson and Quantrill spent the winter in Sherman, Texas, during which time animosity developed between Anderson andQuantrill. The two men had a falling-out, which led to the death of Quantrill, who was captured by the Confederates in 1864. Anderson and his men were able to capture a passenger train, the first time Confederate guerrillas had done so. The next day, Anderson’s men killed over a hundred Union militiamen in an ambush.
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This page is based on the article William T. Anderson published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 03, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
