num_pages: 516
description: Brilliantly weaving together eyewitness accounts, letters, memories, newspaper articles, and military reports into a riveting narrative, this definitive biography reveals the personality of William Clarke Quantrill (1837–1865) and the events that transformed a quiet Ohio schoolteacher from a staunchly Unionist family into a virulent pro-slavery Confederate soldier and the most feared and despised guerrilla chieftain of the Civil War. This groundbreaking work includes the most accurate account ever written of the 1863 Lawrence, Kansas massacre (the greatest atrocity of the Civil War), when Quantrill and 450 raiders torched the Unionist town and executed roughly 200 unarmed, unresisting men and teenage boys. It also details the postwar outlaw careers of those who rode with him — Frank and Jesse James, and Cole Younger. No other history so fully penetrates the myth of a cardboard-cutout psychopath to expose Quantrill in all his brutality and human complexity.
language: English
title: The Devil Knows how to Ride: The True Story of William Clarke Quantril and his Confederate Raiders
titlecomplete: The Devil Knows how to Ride: The True Story of William Clarke Quantril and his Confederate Raiders
characters: William Quantrill
genres: Military Fiction, War, Nonfiction, History, 19th Century, Civil War History, Civil War, American Civil War, Biography, American
ratings_count: 150
publisher: Da Capo Press