Missouri in the American Civil War

Common card · No. 325979

During the American Civil War, Missouri was a hotly contested southern border state populated by both Union and Confederate sympathizers. It sent armies, generals, and supplies to both sides, maintained dual governments, and endured a bloody neighbor-against-neighbor intrastate war within the larger national 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. By the end of the war in 1865, nearly 110,000 Missourians had served in the Union Army and at least 40,000 in the Confederate Army; many had also fought with bands of pro–Confederate partisans known as...

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