Why was living im Missouri during the civil war difficult?

Answer 1

Nobody was allowed to remain "neutral". There were officially organized military units, such as "Jennison's Jayhawkers" (7th Kansas Cavalry) and loose bands of guerillas ("redlegs") on the Union side, and Bloody Bill Anderson's and William Clark Quantrill's units on the Rebel side along with "bushwhackers". All went around robbing, pillaging and murdering those whom they had reason to believe supported the other side.

Missouri was a slave state and probably most people were pro-Confederate, but the Union early on in 1861 gained the upper hand militarily and very soon the pro-Confederate governor and state government and southern military units were forced from the state. The Confederacy conferred commissions on "partisan" leaders and thus some legitimacy on partisan bands, and this was how the Confederate sympathizers such as Anderson and Quantrill gathered were forced to operate.

There were endless acts of vicious butchery by both sides, often perpetrated by former neighbors, so the murderers were known, and as a matter of course vengeance had to be sought, so there was an endless cycle of bloodshed. The end of the war did not mean that these parties were willing to end the violence either. Some of the most famous American "outlaws" of the post-war era were former Confederate partisans and guerillas, who refused to give up the wartime robberies and murders. The included Jesse James and his brother Frank, and the Younger brothers, all of whom had rode with Bloody Bill. The Younger brothers were of a respectable family, who owned a large livery stable, and their father was a Justice of the Peace. But as they were known Confederate sympathizers, the Yankees, in an act calculated to try to force them to cease their activities, imprisoned all their women-folk in a rickety building in Kansas City - wives, mothers, sisters. The building collapsed and dozens of the women died. Another Yankee move intended to break the back of the Rebel movement involved forcing every single inhabitant of four counties in western Missouri to leave those counties (many of these were pro-Confederates and the men were off with the partisan bands) and then burning every single home and building in those four counties. For years after the war this area was called "the burnt district". As was said at the time, in Missouri it was "war to the knife, and the knife to the hilt".