The Border between Them: Violence and Reconciliation on the Kansas-Missouri Line

 

 The most bitter guerrilla conflict in American history raged along the Kansas-Missouri border from 1856 to 1865, beginning long before the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861.

 A narrative history of the border war and its impact on the citizens of both states, The Border between Them recounts the exploits of John Brown, William Quantrill, and other notorious guerrillas, but it also uncovers the stories of everyday people who lived through the conflict.

 The book’s author, Jeremy Neely, is a past Governor’s Humanities Awards nominee and native Missourian. Neely grew up in Bates County, Missouri, right along the Missouri-Kansas border, and partially credits this for sparking his interest in the Civil War and specifically the Border War.

 “It was a uniquely affected area,” said Neely. “Bates County is actually the only place in the Civil War to become completely depopulated by the Union Army because the fighting was so bad. It began in August of 1863 and they finally started letting people come back into the area in 1865. For a year and a half, it basically ceased to exist.”

 Neely’s main goals in The Border between Them, which began as a dissertation, were to find out for himself and share with his readers what was happening on both sides of the state lines.

 “People typically will know more about and tell one side of a story or the other, especially with the Border War,” Neely said. “I wanted to tell the story of the area from both sides. It was a tricky balancing act, but it was really interesting.”

 Neely examines three border counties in each state that together illustrate both sectional division and national reunion. He 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. He shows how people on both sides of the line were already linked by common racial attitudes, farming practices, and ambivalence toward railroad expansion; he then tells how emancipation, industrialization, and immigration eventually eroded wartime divisions and facilitated the reconciliation of old foes from each state.

 “These people had more in common than what separated them, but making peace with each other was a slow and uneven process,” Neely said. “There were many folks who were never able to reconcile.”

 As a follow up to The Border between Them, Neely is working on a paper focusing on the men who rode under William Quantrill.

 “It’s a paper about reconciliation,” Neely said. “A lot of people were willing to put the past behind them and let bygones be bygones, but these men were at the limit on how far people were willing to go in forgiving old enemies.”

To learn more about The Border between Them, visit http://press.umsystem.edu/spring2007/neely.htm.

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