David --

To cite one example, you may have overlooked or forgotten Mr. Gilmore's post on this topic from last July. Jay Monaghan's The Civil War on the Western Border, 1854-1865 was a standard on this subject before the Civil War centinnial. I've had a copy for years, and it's written in a colorful narrative style not unlike Shelby Foote's writing.

As far as Monaghan being biased, let's be fair -- in chapter XXII, "The Bloodstained Kansas Banner", Monaghan doesn't let the Jayhawker "gangs" off too easy. My complaints would run along these lines -- in chapter XXIV, Monaghan tells us that William Clarke Quantrill was disappointed that all he could coax out of Jefferson Davis was a colonel's commission.

Really.

A colonel's commission? What's his source for this? If someone on this board asked for a copy of Quantrill's commission as a Confederate colonel, I couldn't produce it.

Monaghan's style of writing sold lots of books but it doesn't always meet acceptable standards of historiography. The passage Mr. Gilmore cited on Quantrill is a better fit for a historical novel.

If I recall, you mentioned elsewhere that you didn't understand the attention and interest received by characters like Anderson and Quantrill. That's a fair question which can be answered elsewhere.

Here's my question -- if Quantrill and other Southern guerillas can be described as blood-thirsty maniacs and worse, how does John Brown and his Jayhawker comrades rate merely being "bad"? I'm still astonished that contemporary observers in New England like Julia Ward Howe could describe his murderous advertures in Kansas and Virginia as misguided but "heroic".