Missouri's Civil War

Missouri was the scene of many famous battles, operations and achievements of the civil war, including the northernmost battle of the Civil War west of the Mississippi River (Battle of Athens), the first Ironclad warship (the U.S.S. St. Louis), which was designed by James B. Eads and built at his shipyard in Carondelet, the first battle to include an African-American regiment (Battle of Island Mound) in October 1862, and the largest cavalry operations in American military history (led by Brig. Gen. Joseph Orville “JO” Shelby, commander of the South’s “Iron Brigade”).

Missouri also helped produce some of the most recognizable figures of the Civil War era. Missouri was the pre-war home to Dred Scott,William T. Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant. When war came, Missouri’s battlegrounds shaped the lives of such notables as Grant, Jesse James, Mark Twain, George Caleb Bingham and William Clarke Quantrill.

Prior to the Civil War, Missouri was home to a bloody guerilla war along the Kansas-Missouri border. Pro and antislavery forces ambushed and raided each other in an attempt to influence the question of slavery in Kansas. This fighting prepared Missourians for the type of Civil War they would witness. The atrocities and violence against family members of these early years helped motivate Missouri’s Confederate irregulars and “Bushwhackers,”such as the James brothers, Cole Younger, William “Bloody Bill” Anderson and William Clarke Quantrill.

Zigzagging across the Missouri-Kansas border between highways 71 and 69 south of Kansas City, Civil War buffs will find a number of small-town museums and historical markers related to the Kansas-Missouri border war between 1856 and 1861, and to the retreat of Gen. Price’s army after the defeat of Westport in October 1864.

Many facets of the Civil War can be found at national and state historic sites, museums, interpretive sites and cemeteries throughout Missouri.

Read more about the Civil War in the following regions of Missouri: