The Border Between Them

The most bitter guerrilla conflict in American history raged along the Kansas-Missouri border from 1856 to 1865, making that frontier the first battleground in the struggle over slavery. That fiercely contested boundary represented the most explosive political fault line in the United States, and its bitter divisions foreshadowed an entire nation torn asunder. Focusing on the countryside south of the big bend in the Missouri River, an area where there was no natural boundary separating the states, Jeremy Neely draws on the letters and diaries of ordinary citizens--as well as newspaper accounts, election results, and census data--to illuminate the complex strands that helped bind Kansas and Missouri together in post-Civil War America.