According to the inscription on his headstone,
Louis Carpenter was born December 14th, 1829. The 1860 Federal Census
for Lawrence, Kansas, records his place of birth as New York State.
Little else is known of him prior to his coming to Kansas.
The earliest known record of his being in Kansas is a notice appearing in the February 5th, 1859, issue¹ of the Herald of Freedom
newspaper published in Lawrence. The notice reported that two letters
addressed to a Lewis² Carpenter were still in the Lawrence post
office at the end of January. Three weeks later on February 26th, 1859,
a legal notice appeared in the same newspaper³ for a case filed on
February 21st, 1859, in the United States District Court of Kansas
Territory, 2nd Judicial District for Douglas County, which lists Louis
Carpenter as Deputy Clerk of the Court.
In 1860, he was listed in the Lawrence city directory as an attorney
who was residing at 19 Massachusetts Street. Sometime in late 1860 or
early 1861, he became Probate Judge of Douglas County, the first case
bearing his name as judge being recorded on February 26, 1861. Between
February 27th and September 4th, 1862, Judge Carpenter bought, sold,
traded, and bartered lots in Lawrence, the result being his ownership
of two adjoining lots, no. 89 and 91, on New Hampshire Street, with
sufficient bricks and foundation stone to build a large brick house. On
September 29, 1862, he was chosen by the Union Party as its candidate
for the office of Attorney General of Kansas at the party's convention
in Lawrence.
On the evening of October 10, 1862, Louis married Mary E. Barber at the
home of her sister, Abigail, in Emporia, Kansas. Abigail’s
husband, the Reverend Grosvenor C. Morse, officiated at the ceremony.
Judge Carpenter lost in his bid to be elected Attorney General of
Kansas in the State election on November 4, 1862. He was then appointed
to be the Reporter for the Kansas Supreme Court beginning in 1863, with
the last case bearing his name as probate judge for Douglas County
being dated January 10, 1863. He performed the duties of Kansas Supreme
Court Reporter through the spring and summer of 1863, and began
compiling and editing material for publication as the first report of
the Kansas Supreme Court.
Louis and Mary moved into their new brick house at 943 New Hampshire
Street, probably in late spring or early summer, 1863. They were at
home there with Mary’s sister Abigail, who was in town visiting
the couple, on the morning of August 21, 1863.
At dawn on that day, William Clarke Quantrill, perhaps the most
notorious Confederate guerilla commander in the American Civil War, and
400 of his men attacked Lawrence. They proceeded to pillage and burn
the town, eventually murdering over 150 unarmed men and boys.
As the raiders were preparing to leave town after four hours of
destruction and bloodshed, one of them appeared at Judge
Carpenter’s door and asked him where he was from. Carpenter, who
had earlier talked several groups of the raiders into leaving his
family and home unmolested, answered “New York.” The
intruder yelled that New Yorkers were the ones that they were after and
began firing his pistol at him. Judge Carpenter ran through the house,
down into the cellar, and then out into the yard, trying to avoid the
gunfire. A second gunman joined the first and they continued to fire at
Carpenter. He collapsed in his backyard after sustaining four4
severe gunshot wounds and, despite Mary falling down and covering him
with her body, was killed with a point-blank shot to his head.
The raiders set the house on fire and then left. Abigail was able to put out the fire before it had time to do much damage.
About three hours after Quantrill and his men had left town, a crude
wooden coffin was made by friends who had survived the devastation and
Judge Carpenter was buried in his own yard. A week later, on August 28,
1863, his body was exhumed from his backyard grave and moved to another
temporary burial site. Eventually he was interred in a plot in Oak Hill
Cemetery, near to the final resting place of many other victims of
Quantrill's Raid.
Because of the tragic, lurid nature of his death, one or another story
of it is included in most books written about the raid. They are all
second or third person accounts except for the one written by Mary’s sister, Abigail Morse. Hers is the only account written by someone who actually witnessed the murder.
Louis Carpenter was a rising star in Kansas. He had accomplished much
during the four and a half years that records have been found for him.
He had been Deputy Clerk of the United States District Court, Probate
Judge of Douglas County, and Reporter for the Kansas Supreme Court. He
had run for Statewide office, married, built a fine house, and was
seemingly destined to achieve great things for Kansas when he was cut
down by an anonymous hatred.
Rather than remembering Louis Carpenter as “that judge killed in
Quantrill’s Raid,” he perhaps should be remembered instead
as the Reverend Richard Cordley described him in one of his published accounts of the raid as: “A young man of marked ability.”
¹ Volume 4, Issue 27 (February 5, 1859), page 3.
² In the handwriting style of the time, “Lewis”
and “Louis” were, and are, difficult to distinguish from
one another unless an example of each is available for comparison.
Confusion over the spelling of the name on documents, especially if the
reader were not familiar with the handwriting of the person who wrote
the name, would have been common. Therefore, when dealing with
handwritten documents of the period, the two spellings of the name are
interchangeable for all practical purposes.
³ Volume 4, Issue 30, (February 26, 1859), page 3.
4 From an article published in the September 24, 1863, issue of the Ripley Bee,
Ripley, Ohio, containing extracts of a letter written by “a lady
of Lawrence, Kansas” to a relative in Ripley. The author of the
letter identifies herself as a friend of Mary (e.g. Mary Carpenter,
Louis Carpenter's wife) and, among other things, describes the attack
on Judge Carpenter.
Text © 2003, by Kerry Altenbernd. All rights reserved.
