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Interesting. The war in Missouri is a frightening object lesson in how thin the veneer of civilization is. There have been few books written on this part of the war in comparison to the sea of volumes on the ‘high end’ campaigns east or west. If you have not read it I strongly recommend ‘Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War’ by Michael Fellman. Published in 1990 there are plenty of paperback copies around and it is available on line as a Google Book. This is a sociological study of the dynamics of the internal war within the borders of Mo. Fascinating and disturbing and Prof Fellman is a pretty fair writer. Jay Monaghan’s ‘Civil War on the Western Border’ is now nearly 50 years old and is episodic but does cover the conflict from its real origins in the Kansas guerrilla war that raged for several years before 1861. For a worm’s eye view of the union side there is Starr's ‘Jennison’s Jayhawkers’ which is a good very detailed modern history of the 7th Kansas, which the dust jacket pulls no punches stating ‘No other unit in the Union Army had so evil a reputation or had done so much to deserve it as the Seventh Kansas Volunteer Cavalry.’ Every town in much of the state must have had families that would never speak a word to certain other families even though that might live on the same street for decades.

Kentucky presents an even bigger void in narratives. Aside from Merton Coulter’s book on Kentucky in the war and reconstruction, I do not know of any extended book length general treatment of the conflict in that state. Coulter’s book is now more than seventy years old and the subject seems ripe for a new treatment. There are a number of books on expat Confederate military units. One of the best is William Davis ‘The Orphan Brigade’ published in 1980. The war seems to have left deeper scars in Kentucky than Missouri. A number of prominent unionists found it expedient to leave the state after the war. The odious General Burbage among the first. The bitterness of the post war divide is clearly illustrated by the incredible events surrounding the assassination of Gov. Goebel and the near state civil war that followed. This is another chapter in US history that cries out for a good non-specialist book length treatment.

Being from the South does give one a somewhat different perspective on history and makes current events disturbing as it evokes some old memories of how bad events can go.

The internal war in Missouri seems to have been so traumatic that after it was over aside from permanently alienated groups such as the James-Yonger Gang, people simply drew a curtain of oblivion over the events of 61-65 for day to day purposes. While politics were intense in the state there doesn't appear to have been the kind of protracted political violence that continued in Louisiana , for example