Bursheba Fristoe Younger knew better than perhaps anyone the thorough devastation wrought by nearly a decade of guerrilla warfare along the Missouri-Kansas border. The Youngers, like many households, traced their hardships back to the partisan violence of the 1850s. A slaveholding family of southern descent, they owned a dry goods store in Cass County, Missouri, which was repeatedly robbed by antislavery bands of Kansas “jayhawkers.” At the outbreak of the national Civil War, Bursheba’s husband, Henry, remained an avowed Union man, but in July 1862, Unionist militia ambushed, robbed, and murdered the family patriarch as he traveled home from Westport.
By Chris Rein, Combat Studies Institute, Army University
On May 19, 1858, proslavery “border ruffians” led by Charles Hamilton rounded up a number of suspected antislavery men near the town of Trading Post in modern Linn County, Kansas, marched 11 men into a secluded ravine, and opened fire on them, killing five and seriously wounding five others before escaping back across the border into Missouri.
By Tony O’ Bryan, University of Missouri—Kansas City
Before the start of the Civil War, the name “jayhawkers” applied to bands of robbers, associated with the Kansas Free-Stater cause, who rustled livestock and stole property on both sides of the state line. During this period, a jayhawker could be a hero or a villain, depending on individual circumstances or one’s opinion on the issue of slavery in Kansas Territory. By the time the war ended, however, the term “jayhawkers” became synonymous with Union troops led by abolitionists from Kansas, and "jayhawking" became the generic term for armies plundering and looting from civilian populations nationwide.
James Montgomery, abolitionist and federal army colonel, was born in Ashtabula County, Ohio, in Ohio’s deeply antislavery Western Reserve, on December 22, 1814. The deeply evangelical Montgomery was soon caught up in the controversy over slavery and popular sovereignty in the newly formed Kansas Territory. An ally of John Brown and Charles Jennison, Montgomery became notorious for antislavery guerrilla warfare along the Missouri-Kansas border.
Border ruffians led by Charles Hamilton, a settler from Georgia, round up known Free-Staters and open fire on them in a ravine northeast of Trading Post, Kansas.
