Missouri in the American Civil War

A slave state since statehood in 1821, Missouri's geographic position in the central region of the country and at the rural edge of the American frontier ensured that it remained a divisive battleground for competing Northern and Southern ideologies in the years preceding the war.

When the war began in 1861, it became clear that control of the Mississippi River and the burgeoning economic hub of St. Louis would make Missouri a strategic territory in the Trans-Mississippi Theater.

In 1854, the Kansas–Nebraska Act nullified the policy set by the Missouri Compromise by permitting the Kansas and Nebraska Territories to vote on whether they would join the Union as free or slave states.

The conflict involved attacks and murders of supporters on both sides, with the Sacking of Lawrence by pro-slavery forces and the Pottawatomie massacre led by abolitionist John Brown the most notable.

Against the background of Bleeding Kansas, the case of Dred Scott, a slave who in 1846 had sued for his family's freedom in St. Louis, reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

The decision calmed the skirmishes between Missouri and Kansas partisans, but its publicity enraged abolitionists nationwide and contributed to the vitriolic rhetoric that led to the Civil War.

By 1860, Missouri's initial southern settlers had been supplanted with a more diversified non-slave-holding population, including northerners and immigrants from Europe, particularly Germans and Irish.

Lyon's troops, a Missouri militia mainly composed of German immigrants, many of them "forty-eighters,"[7] opened fire on the attacking crowd, killing 28 people and injuring 100.

William S. Harney, federal commander of the Department of the West, moved to quiet the situation by agreeing to Missouri neutrality in the Price-Harney Truce.

[citation needed] The meeting, theoretically to discuss the possibility of continuing the Price-Harney Truce between U.S. and state forces, quickly deadlocked over basic issues of sovereignty and governmental power.

Jackson and Price, who were working to construct the new Missouri State Guard in nine military districts statewide, wanted to contain the federal toe-hold to the Unionist stronghold of St. Louis.

[citation needed] Jackson and a rump of the General Assembly eventually set up a government-in-exile in Neosho, Missouri, and enacted an Ordinance of Secession.

[citation needed] On July 28, it appointed former Missouri Supreme Court Chief Justice Hamilton Rowan Gamble as governor of the state and agreed to comply with Lincoln's demand for troops.

[9] In October 1861, the remnants of the elected state government that favored the South, including Jackson and Price, met in Neosho and voted to formally secede from the Union.

[citation needed] Military actions in Missouri are generally divided into three phases, starting with the Union removal of Governor Jackson and pursuit of Sterling Price and his Missouri State Guard in 1861; a period of neighbor-versus-neighbor bushwhacking guerrilla warfare from 1862 to 1864 (which actually continued long after the war had ended everywhere else, until at least 1889); and finally Sterling Price's attempt to retake the state in 1864.

The Confederate and Arkansas troops fell back to the border, while Price led his Guardsmen into northwestern Missouri to attempt to recapture the state.

Price was reportedly so impressed by Mulligan's demeanor and conduct during and after the battle that he offered him his own horse and buggy, and ordered him safely escorted to Union lines.

Combined with the loss of such a pivotal leader of the federals' western campaign in Nathaniel Lyon, and the Union's stunning defeat in the war's first major land battle at Bull Run, Missouri's secessionists were "jubilant."

Reports are rife in Western Missouri that the Southern Confederacy has been recognized by England and France, and that before the last of October the blockade will be broken by the navies of both nations.

The rebels prophesy that before ten years have elapsed the Confederacy will be the greatest, most powerful, and prosperous, nation on the globe, and that the United States will decay, and be forced to seek the protection of England to prevent their being crushed by the South.

"[11] On September 29, Price was forced to abandon Lexington, and he and his men moved into southwest Missouri; "...their commanders do not wish to run any risk, their policy being to make attacks only where they feel confident, through superiority of numbers, of victory.

In March 1862, any hopes for a new offensive in Missouri were dimmed with a decisive Union victory at the Battle of Pea Ridge just south of the border in Arkansas.

A few weeks following the Battle of Wilson's Creek, he issued his namesake Proclamation, which imposed martial law in the state, threatened to execute prisoners of war, seize their property and, if they had any, free their slaves.

The riverine strategy put the Confederacy on the defensive in the west for the rest of the war, and effectively ended meaningful Confederate efforts to recapture Missouri.

In the intervening time, the state endured widespread guerrilla warfare in which Southern partisan rangers and bushwhackers battled Kansas-based irregulars known as Jayhawkers and Redlegs or "Redleggers" (from the red gaiters they wore around their lower legs) and their Union allies.

Jayhawker raids against perceived civilian "Confederate sympathizers" alienated Missourians and made maintaining the peace even harder for the Unionist provisional government.

11 which forced all residents of the rural areas of four counties (Jackson, Cass, Bates and Vernon) south of the Missouri River on the Kansas border to leave their property, which was then burned.

Price made his way to the extreme western portion of the state, taking part in a series of bitter battles at the Little Blue, Independence, and Byram's Ford.

The reunified Democratic Party exploited themes of racial prejudice and their own version of the South's "Lost Cause", which portrayed Missourians as victims of Federal tyranny and outrages, and depicted Missouri Unionists and Republicans as traitors to the state and criminals.

The notorious James-Younger gang capitalized on this and became folk heroes as they robbed banks and trains while getting sympathetic press from the state's newspapers—most notably the Kansas City Times under founder John Newman Edwards.