After the Lone Jack fight, Capt. Quantrell had joined Gen. Shelby at Cane
Hill, Arkansas, but shortly left his command to go to the Confederate
capital at Richmond to ask to be commissioned as a colonel under the
partisan ranger act and to be so recognized by the war department as to
have any protection the Confederate States might be able to afford him.
He knew the service was a furious one, but he believed that to succeed the
South must fight desperately.
Secretary Cooper suggested that war had its amenities and refinements and
that in the nineteenth century it was simply barbarism to talk of a black
flag.
“Barbarism,” rejoined Quantrell, according to Senator Louis T. Wigfall, of
Texas, who was present at the interview, “barbarism, Mr. Secretary, means
war and war means barbarism. You ask an impossible thing, Mr. Secretary.
This secession or revolution, or whatever you call it, cannot conquer
without violence. Your young Confederacy wants victory. Men must be
killed.”
“What would you do, Captain Quantrell, were yours the power and the
opportunity?” inquired the secretary.
“Do, Mr. Secretary? I would wage such a war as to make surrender forever
impossible. I would break up foreign enlistments by indiscriminate
massacre. I would win the independence of my people or I would find them
graves.”
[Illustration: William Clarke Quantrell]