Articles

In 2013, the Kansas City Public Library commissioned in-depth, thematic articles from eight nationally recognized historians of the Civil War in Missouri and Kansas. Each article provides contextual analysis of major themes surrounding the war, and are linked to related historical documents and other site content.

In 1859, John Brown, a settler from Kansas Territory, invaded the state of Virginia with plans to raid the Harpers Ferry arsenal and incite a slave rebellion. Among his small band of insurgents were several young men who had also carried out vigilante violence in Kansas in hopes of abolishing slavery in that territory. The raid itself failed, and those who did not escape or die in the raid were later executed, including Brown himself.

In a political sense, however, the raid successfully fulfilled Brown's larger goals by igniting national divisions and helping to spark the American Civil War. The start of violence in Kansas Territory thereby led to one of the most important chapters of American history.

In many respects, Kansas" and the question of whether slavery, legal in neighboring Missouri, would be allowed to spread to the territory" was the central issue of the 1860 presidential election, the most significant in U.S. history. Curtailing slavery's expansion and admitting Kansas as a free state was a key plank in the Republican Party's platform that year, just as it was during the party's first presidential election in 1856. The seemingly unanswerable "Kansas Question" and the issue of slavery's expansion split the venerable Democratic Party into Northern and Southern factions, allowing the Republican Abraham Lincoln to win the election without a single Southern electoral vote.

In February 1862, the Missouri provisional government's new state treasurer, George Caleb Bingham, saw a troublesome development in his war-torn state. Garrisoning federal troops, especially in the western portion of Missouri, were subjecting civilians "to a kind of winnowing process by which the 'tares' were to be separated from the wheat " the loyal from the disloyal portion of the inhabitants."

With an artist's eye for detail, Bingham's "winnowing" was in fact a reference to measures implemented by the federal military to accomplish sharp categorizations among a deeply divided populace in an ostensibly loyal state, many of whom claimed themselves neutral in the contest.

Although the conflict in Virginia has commanded the lion's share of attention and scholarship, Missouri and Kansas witnessed a tremendous amount of fighting during the American Civil War. Only two states, Virginia and Tennessee, had more actions fought on their soil during the Civil War than Missouri. Missouri was a strategically vital state for President Abraham Lincoln and the federal government's war effort, and a case can be made that the Civil War started on the Missouri-Kansas border in the 1850s, during "Bleeding Kansas." Missouri was split in its sentiments, and many Missourians fought on both sides of the war. By contrast, Kansans overwhelmingly fought for the Union.

The start of 1862 witnessed the federals in their most precarious position of the war in Missouri. Sterling Price's Missouri State Guard (MSG) controlled the interior of the state - including large sections of the strategically vital Missouri River Valley. Guerrillas ran rampant through the interior as well. It was up to the newly-installed commander of the Department of the Missouri, Major General Henry W. Halleck to restore the Union's fortunes in the states. Halleck was not idle over the holiday season of 1861, as he instructed Brigadier General Samuel R. Curtis, commander of the recently-formed Federal Army of the Southwest, on his plans for the upcoming campaign season.

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.

Less than 40 years after the Civil War, General John G. Haskell, the president of the Kansas Historical Society, described slavery in western Missouri as "a more domestic than commercial institution," in which the "social habits were those of the farm and not the plantation." Many of his white contemporaries remembered slavery in a similar way, arguing that conditions were much more favorable on the farms of western Missouri than in the cotton fields of the Deep South.

With the promise of freedom and new economic and educational opportunities, Kansas attracted many African Americans in its territorial days, through statehood, and into the 20th century. Slavery existed in the Kansas Territory, but slave holdings were small compared to the South. Many black migrants also came to the territory as hired laborers, while some traveled as escaped slaves through the Underground Railroad. In the 1860s, others joined the Union Army, and some moved from the South in large groups during the Kansas Exodus, a mass migration of freedpeople during the 1870s and 1880s. As a territory that had a long and violent history of pre-Civil War contests over slavery, Kansas emerged as the "quintessential free state" and seemed like a promised land for African Americans who searched for what they called a "New Canaan."

If you look at any national map of the Civil War, you will see no contrast between Kansas and Missouri. Both are shaded alike as Union states. Were we to map the memory of the war, on the other hand, the border between them would be bright and stark. Kansas would still be Northern. But much of western Missouri would go with the South.

The war's legacy in Missouri's borderlands presents something of a mystery. Consider the example of Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower. They had a lot in common. They served consecutive terms as president. They grew up only 160 miles apart in the late-19th century - Truman in Independence, Missouri, and Eisenhower in Abilene, Kansas. Local history mattered to both of them. Yet very different versions of the past lived in their imaginations.