Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War on the Border ed. by Jonathan Earle and Diane Mutti Burke (review)

Three themes usefully can be explored in this wide-ranging collection of essays—the illusion of neutrality, the salience of racial slavery, and emerging definitions of the laws of war. The idea that Missourians could remain neutral during the Civil War ignored (or rejected) the Constitution and supporting federal legislation that empowered the president to call state militia into national service and to use them to intervene in states where combinations of individuals obstructed the execution of the laws. As Earle explains, Lincoln had first-hand knowledge of the nature of the struggle on the Missouri-Kansas border. The future president traveled by train from Hannibal to St. Joseph and delivered a speech at Fort Leavenworth in December 1859 that anticipated his more famous speech at New York City’s Cooper Union in February 1860.

Because President Lincoln invoked his authority as Commander in Chief in Missouri, Christopher Phillips, in the chapter “‘A Question of Power Not One of Law’: Federal Occupation and the Question of Loyalty in the Western Border Slave States during the American Civil War,” charges that federal forces violated the civil rights of civilian “neutralists.” Phillips tells the story of a federal patrol led by Lewis Merrill from the railhead at Sedalia through Saline and Lafayette Counties in December 1861. In Phillips’ telling, the purpose of the patrol was to run roughshod over helpless civilians. Phillips does not mention that a rebel army, commanded by Sterling Price, had recently occupied Lexington (in Lafayette County) and that at the time of Merrill’s patrol it occupied Oceola, about seventy miles to the south. Nor does Phillips mention the presence of a second army, commanded by Confederate General Ben McCulloch, in Springfield. Phillips portrays Iowans as invaders in Missouri. Price’s troops were Missourians, to be sure, but the soldiers with McCulloch at Springfield were from Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana.

The small-scale slaveholding culture of Missouri is delineated by Diane Mutti Burke’s chapter “‘Slavery Dies Hard’: Enslaved Missourians’ Struggle for Freedom.” In Missouri, slave labor coexisted with diversified agriculture and commerce. In this regard, there was little to distinguish slaveholding from non-slaveholding settlements on the Missouri–Kansas border. But slavery required physical domination by masters and the assertion of white racial supremacy. Casual brutality sustained slavery and a sense of manliness among slave owners that seemed barbaric to free-state settlers. Aaron Astor’s “The Lexington Weekly Caucasian: White Supremicist Discourse in Post–Civil War Western Missouri” underscores the persistent association of white supremacy with manliness well after the war. Yet, as Tony R. Mullis explains in “The Illusion of Security: The Governments’ Response to the Jayhawker Threat of Late 1860,” sharp cultural differences did not inevitably lead to violence on the Missouri-Kansas border. During the 1850s, partisans managed to avoid deadly confrontations while federal forces pursued broadly even-handed policies in Kansas.

Enmity ran deep, however, and once war began, atrocities occurred. In “‘I Came Not to Bring Peace, but a Sword’: The Christian War God and the War of All against All on the Kansas-Missouri Border,” the late Michael Fellman tells tales of barbarism in Missouri but (like Phillips) offers no context. Unmentioned are campaigns of conventional warfare in Missouri and the role that Bleeding Kansas and Bleeding Missouri played in the development of Lincoln’s Code which distinguished legal combatants from brigands.

Jennifer Weber notes in her concluding chapter, “‘William Quantrill Is My Homeboy’: Or, the Border War Goes to College,” that Kansans later called their university football team the “Jayhawks,” suggesting pride in their free-state origins. Missourians, however, did not call their team the “Border Ruffians” or the “Bushwhackers.” Missouri’s team became the “Tigers,” the name used by the Unionist militia organized in Columbia to protect the university town from Price’s invading (or liberating) Confederate army...