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

by Jeremy Neely

The most bitter guerrilla conflict in American history raged along the KansasMissouri border from 1856 to1865, 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.

328 pages, Unknown Binding

First published April 23, 2007