William T. Anderson

William Thomas "Bloody Bill" Anderson (1840-26 October 1864) was a Confederate States Army captain and notorious bushwhacker during the American Civil War. He was known for his sadism and his many atrocities, chief among them the Centralia Massacre of September 1864. Anderson was ultimately tracked down and killed by the Union Army during a skirmish at Glasgow, Missouri in 1864.

Biography

Anderson in 1863

William Thomas Anderson was born in Hopkins County, Kentucky in 1840, and he was raised in Huntsville, Missouri and Council Grove, Kansas. Anderson became a horse trader, but, with the start of the American Civil War, he instead turned to rustling horses and reselling them as far away as New Mexico.

In May 1862, his father was shot by a constable while attempting to force the local judge to drop the criminal charges against his family and their accomplices, and the younger Anderson and his brothers were forced to relocate to Missouri. Anderson robbed travellers and killed Union soldiers, and, in early 1863, he joined Quantrill's Raiders and became a skilled bushwhacker during guerrilla raids on the Kansas-Missouri border. The Union retaliated by imprisoning his sisters, and, after one of them died when the makeshift jail collapsed and another was permanently maimed, Anderson swore revenge.

Anderson's death

Anderson took a leading role in the Lawrence Massacre and the Battle of Baxter Springs in 1863, and, in late 1863, he fell out with William Quantrill in Sherman, Texas and framed Quantrill for a crime, leading to his arrest by Confederate authorities. He then split off from Quantrill's Raiders with his own gang, becoming the most feared guerrilla in Missouri, where he killed and robbed dozens of Union soldiers and unionist sympathizers. In September 1864, he raided Centralia, capturing a passenger train; they executed 24 captured Union soldiers on the train and later ambushed and killed over 100 Union militiamen. In September 1864, following the Confederate general Joseph O. Shelby's capture of Glasgow, Missouri, Anderson brutally beat the town's most prominent Unionist and raped his 13-year-old black servant girl. On 26 October 1864, Lieutenant Colonel Samuel P. Cox tracked Anderson down shortly after he left Glasgow, and Anderson was shot behind the ear in the ensuing gunfight, killing him.

Gallery:

"Bloody" Bill Anderson on August 27th, 1864 massacring Union Soldiers.