Bleeding Kansas and the Border War, Missouri's Civil War Before the Civil War

The war in Missouri did not wait for Fort Sumter. It started earlier and ran uglier. When Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in eighteen fifty-four and threw open the question of slavery in the territories to popular vote, Missouri's western border became a war zone years before the armies formed.

Missouri slaveholders, led in part by Senator David Rice Atchison, organized thousands of men to cross into Kansas Territory and vote illegally in territorial elections, determined to make Kansas a slave state. They became known as Border Ruffians. Free-state settlers in Kansas armed themselves in response, some of them supplied by abolitionist groups in the East.

John Brown arrived in Kansas in eighteen fifty-five with his sons and a crate of swords. The violence that followed was sporadic, vicious, and reciprocal. Towns were burned.

Men were dragged from their homes and killed. The territorial legislature seated by fraudulent elections passed laws making it a felony to question slavery. A rival free-state government formed.

In May of eighteen fifty-six, proslavery men sacked the free-state capital of Lawrence. Three days later, John Brown and his sons killed five proslavery settlers along Pottawatomie Creek with broadswords. The cycle of retribution ran for years.

When the Civil War proper began, Missouri was officially a Union state, its governor fled to join the Confederacy, its legislature voted to stay in the Union, but the guerrilla conflict on its western border intensified rather than ended. William Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson led Confederate irregular forces that operated largely outside military discipline, raiding and burning across both sides of the line. The damage was not only physical.

Communities in western Missouri were ordered entirely evacuated under Union General Thomas Ewing's General Order Number Eleven in August of eighteen sixty-three. Whole counties were depopulated and burned. The landscape took generations to recover.

Some of those grudges never fully closed.