The Civil War in Missouri: A Military History

Preface

ix Preface In the history of the United States nothing rankles more than the tensions and enmities of the Civil War. In this military history of the war in Missouri, I have tried to offer a balanced account of the conflict’s triumphs and defeats. At the same time I recognize that all histories are shaped by the perspectives and experiences of the historians who write them. Perhaps some observations about my own background will help to locate this work in a usable context. I have dedicated this book to my late colleague James Neal Primm, an economic historian with a particular interest in banking policy. His knowledge of Missouri history was deep and wide, and in the arena of Civil War disputes and historiography, he was as surefooted as anyone I have known. Primm was from a Unionist family in Edina, in northeast Missouri, a region where proslavery and pro-southern sentiments clashed harshly with the free labor and northernoriented interests of the region’s commercial farmers and merchants. In the Unionist view, Missouri was not a southern state but an essential national corridor linking East and West. After World War II, Primm entered graduate school at the University of Missouri and studied history at a time when Revisionist historiography dominated interpretations of the Civil War Era. Among the most influential of the Revisionists was Avery O. Craven of the University of Chicago. Craven and the Revisionists generally downplayed the importance of slavery as a cause of the Civil War. More important were the irresponsible zealots on both sides of the sectional divide and the pandering politicians who empowered them. It was an interpretation of the Civil War that Primm understood but never accepted : he always knew that slavery was the cause of the war because his father told him that it was. So it is with me. My interest in history and my understanding of the past are shaped by family memories. I was born in Kansas City, Missouri. Neither of my parents had immediate family ties to the Civil War, but the war was never very distant from our lives. My father’s German ancestors immigrated to the United States immediately after the Civil War and eventually settled in eastern Kansas. My mother’s family moved into southwestern Missouri after the Civil War and settled in Neosho. My parents met and married in Kansas City where, I suspect, they believed they had left behind the parochial concerns of a distant sectional x Preface conflict. With the outbreak of World War II, my family moved to Arlington, Virginia , and my father began working for the federal government. In Arlington, the Civil War emerged from the landscape, and sectional identities informed social relationships. In the woods surrounding our apartment complex overgrown earthworks revealed the remains of the Civil War defenses of Washington, DC. Arlington House, Robert E. Lee’s mansion overlooking the Potomac, was close at hand, and the sites of the battles of Ball’s Bluff and Bull Run revealed the magnificent Potomac River valley and the rolling hills of the Virginia Piedmont rising to the distant Blue Ridge Mountains. My schoolmates who were native Virginians offered me a degree of acceptance because I came from a “slave state.” They were southern in sentiment and pointed out with pride that Baileys Crossroads (still a crossroads at the time) was the location of a skirmish during a daring raid by the Confederate partisan John Singleton Mosby. During summers, my family frequently made automobile trips back to Missouri and Kansas. During one trip we visited friends of my mother in Neosho (at some point I learned that the town had been the Confederate capital of Missouri ) before driving into eastern Kansas to visit an elderly aunt of my father. My great-aunt had been a longtime member of the Unitarian Church in Lawrence, Kansas, and remembered the congregation’s somber annual observance of William Quantrill’s murderous raid of August 1863. From her youthful memory my great-aunt retold terrifying stories shared with her by survivors. Before we left, I think it was at my mother’s suggestion, my sisters and I sang to her what we knew of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. My formal study of history began at Antioch College in 1960 and continued at the University of Wisconsin to 1969. For me the study of history coincided with the centennial of the Civil War and with the civil rights movement. I studied with historians who...