About the Book
Guerrilla warfare, border fights, and unorganized skirmishes are all too often the only battles associated with Missouri during the Civil War. Combined with the state’s distance from both sides’ capitals, this misguided impression paints Missouri as an insignificant player in the nation’s struggle to define itself. Such notions, however, are far from an accurate picture of the Midwest state’s contributions to the war’s outcome. Though traditionally cast in a peripheral role, the conventional warfare of Missouri was integral in the Civil War’s development and ultimate conclusion. The strategic battles fought by organized armies are often lost amidst the stories of guerrilla tactics and bloody combat, but in The Civil War in Missouri, Louis S. Gerteis explores the state’s conventional warfare and its effects on the unfolding of national history. Both the Union and the Confederacy had a vested interest in Missouri throughout the war. The state offered control of both the lower Mississippi valley and the Missouri River, strategic areas that could greatly factor into either side’s success or failure. Control of St. Louis and mid-Missouri were vital for controlling the West, and rail lines leading across the state offered an important connection between eastern states and the communities out west. The Confederacy sought to maintain the Ozark Mountains as a northern border, which allowed concentrations of rebel troops to build in the Mississippi valley. With such valuable stock at risk, Lincoln registered the importance of keeping rebel troops out of Missouri, and so began the conventional battles investigated by Gerteis. The first book-length examination of its kind, The Civil War in Missouri: A Military History dares to challenge the prevailing opinion that Missouri battles made only minor contributions to the war. Gerteis specifically focuses not only on the principal conventional battles in the state but also on the effects these battles had on both sides’ national aspirations. This work broadens the scope of traditional Civil War studies to include the losses and wins of Missouri, in turn creating a more accurate and encompassing narrative of the nation’s history.
Authors/Editors
Louis S. Gerteis is Professor of History at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. He is the author or editor of four other books, including most recently St. Louis from Village to Metropolis: Essays from the Missouri Historical Review, 1906–2006. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri.
Reviews
“Making a case for the national importance of Civil War military campaigns in Missouri, Louis Gerteis portrays the operations of Union and Confederate armies in vivid detail. Although Missouri was notable for the intensity of its guerrilla warfare, this book demonstrates that conventional armies largely determined developments in the state, forming the anchor of Union control in the trans-Mississippi theater.”—James M. McPherson, author of This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War “Gerteis knows Missouri history in the Civil War better than anyone else. This book should bring about an important reconsideration of Missouri’s place in Civil War history. That reconsideration will affect our view not only of the state’s history but of the nature of the whole Civil War.”—Mark Neely, author of Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War “With this well-written military history of the conflict in Missouri, Louis S. Gerteis fills a long-standing void in state, regional, and national history in relation to the Civil War. He corrects the popular misconception that in Missouri conventional fighting gave way almost entirely to guerrilla war after 1861. Missouri was in fact the scene of the war’s third largest number of engagements (after Virginia and Tennessee), and it was the interplay between conventional and unconventional war that gave the conflict there its particularly horrific nature. This is a most welcome addition to Civil War scholarship.”—William Garrett Piston, editor of A Rough
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