Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border by Donald L. Gilmore

Gilmore, author of Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border, said, “To understand the attack on Lawrence, a historian cannot view it as an isolated event one must fit the raid into the context of nearly a decade of struggle between leaders in Kansas, Missouri, the South, and the influential Northeast.”įor Missourians, it had seemed a foregone conclusion that they would settle the new Kansas Territory, established by the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, and thereby eventually bring Kansas into the Union as another slave state. All that was left to them was retribution. Their anger was past appeasement their sorrow could not be assuaged. Each had ridden into Kansas with memories of years of harassment and humiliation, images of their respective homes and farms made smoking ruins, and hands callused from digging graves. Widows sifted ashes for their husbands’ bones and all wondered quietly or wailed aloud, “ Why?”Įvery man among the 450 Confederate guerrillas who had put the torch to Lawrence knew why. As the task of interment went on deep into the night, lanterns lit the gruesome parade from downtown to the hilltop graveyard. With a shortage of coffins and the summer heat demanding immediate burial, remains were taken to local Pioneer Cemetery on boards or in buckets. Some bodies were burned beyond recognition in the town’s conflagration. The dead were counted at 150 men and boys but may have numbered as many as 200. Only a few businesses and a handful of homes survived. In four hours, the second largest town in Kansas, with a population of around 3,000, was effectively destroyed.

When the dust and smoke of those years cleared, the Lawrence raid would be recalled as the bloodiest day from the opening of Kansas Territory in 1854 to the end of the Civil War in 1865.

It was visible to dozens of counties on both sides of this bloody border, to the innocent and the guilty alike. The smoke was fueled not only by the death and destruction of this August day, but also by the years of increasingly abhorrent events on the Kansas-Missouri border. The Kansas winds did not blow there was nothing to dissipate the tower of smoke in the perfectly clear sky, a pall that rose like a dark monument built by the horrors of war. (Library of Congress)Īugust 21, 1863, was an oddly still summer day. Bitter hatred on both sides of the Kansas-Missouri border prompted the Civil War’s most notorious guerrilla attack.

Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border by Donald L. Gilmore