>elected government declares neutrality
>pro-union elements coup the elected government and try to take it into the union by force
>state guard valiantly resists, Missouri only winds up seeking confederate help because they were forced into it
Out of all the units and groups who can be said to have solely been "fighting for their state" the Missouri State Guard is the one with the most valid claim. They also were extremely vicious guerrilla fighters honestly.
IT'S A SHAME IT WAS THE ONLY BORDER STATE TO DO SO
The entire State Guard of Kentucky dissolved itself and joined the Confederate Army in 1861. So it wasn't the only border state State Guard to do so.
I didn't know that, I thought grant illegally invaded them and that was that
Yeah there were about 35,000-45,000 Kentuckians in the Confederate Army, most former State Guardsmen loyal to the pro-Confederate shadow government that formed in Bowling Green. Kentucky was even accepted as a member in the Confederate Congress.
Kentucky and Missouri both kind of has internal mini Civil wars.
yeah I only knew about missouri because I'm from there. it was actually interesting how missouri was considered neutral, but citizens were raided as traitors not limited to jayhawk raids. And shit was so chaotic because Fremont was laundering hundreds of thousands of dollars from the US treasury while in control of missouri for the union, allowing the confederates to effectively take over the state due to his incompetence. It was actually Missouri where Grant was first put in control of any men but the first thing he did was went to kentucky
>if you fought for anything other than the sitting politician who agrees with you on this one thing then you are fighting for hecking black pipo to go to work at 6 am instead of sleeping in till 3pm on welfare
Why are Americans like this?
Why dont they understand men will naturally just fight to keep outsiders away from their homes?
Is it because Americans have become mentally ill troony worshippers who think access to White people is a human right?
When did Americans become so deranged?
a missoura boat ride
Watched Josey Wales last night which is what inspired this post to be honest.
>*spits chaw*
o7
>Grant was promoted to brigadier general in early August 1861 and assigned to a post in Missouri, where things were not going well for the Union just then. Command of the Union war effort in the Show Me State rested in the hands of the flamboyant John Fremont, the Republican Party's first presidential candidate. Fremont was surrounded by a cast of glamorous European soldiers-of-fortune, many of them extralegally commissioned, and corruption was widespread around his department even if he was not in on the take himself. A Union army under the fiery red-haired regular Nathaniel Lyon prepared to drive the Confederates from the state. Lyon's army had little equipment and no training or discipline, in fact little more than heart.
>If Lyon's army was ill-equipped, the Confederates were even worse off. Sterling Price, a native son of Missouri, had a force armed with old flintlock muskets, pistols, hunting rifles, and shotguns. Some of its units were led by lawyers who knew nothing of warfare and its chief of artillery confessed that he had never laid eyes on a shell before. Reinforced with Arkansas state guards led by Ben McCullough, Price somehow got this rabble across the state and clashed with Lyon's force at Wilson's Creek, in the southwest corner of Missouri, on August 10. Lyon was shot dead leading a charge and his soldiers became demoralized by the loss of him, broke, and ran from the field, and for a time it looked like the Confederates might overrun the entire state.
>officers leading charges
Come on
Yeah?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Lyon#Battle_of_Wilson's_Creek_and_death
moron.
>Fremont was removed from command of the Department of Missouri in November and David Hunter replaced him. Hunter's excessive and premature enthusiasm for abolition of slavery got him replaced by Henry Halleck in January 1862. Halleck was one of the Civil War's great mysteries. A doughy-faced New York native who had graduated West Point in 1839, he was widely respected as one of the Army's finest intellects and strategists; he had penned treatises on military strategy and also translated French texts. Bored by peacetime service, he returned to civilian life in the early 1850s to become a wealthy lawyer and amass a fortune. The civil war called him back into service and he was commissioned major general in the regular army a month after Ft. Sumter. But Halleck had no personal experience with the battlefield and his knowledge of war came entirely from books. He had an unfailing gift for passing the buck onto a subordinate; sometimes he might err or make a poor strategic decision but he never left anything in the records to suggest it was his fault.
>The experience of bitterly divided Missouri made Halleck into a grim hard war man and his actions predicted Ben Butler's rule in New Orleans. The women of St. Louis had taken to wearing red ribbons on their chests to indicate secessionist sympathies so Halleck retaliated by having a batch of red ribbons made up and distributed to the city's prostitutes, who were to wear them at all times. He then had a local newspaper put out an announcement that all the prostitutes of St. Louis had taken to wearing red ribbons lately.
Missouri and northern California should have linked up, seceded, invaded and taken Minnesota and Iowa, then created a Western Republic covering most of the central and northern great plains and pacific northwest.
>After his stint commanding a brigade at Bull Run, William T. Sherman was promoted to brigadier general in August and assigned to command in Kentucky, whose neutrality had been violated by the Confederate forces of Leonidas Polk when they entered the state on September 2. It was during this time that Sherman experienced a mental breakdown and delusions about the amount of enemy troops he was facing. Halleck eventually gave him a more modest assignment at Sedalia, Missouri but Sherman continued in a deep gloom. "Sedalia is a bleak, desolate place without water, fodder, or shelter. If Price does not wipe us out the winter surely will," he wrote his wife. Were it not for his family he added that he might have considered suicide. Although Sherman eventually pulled himself together, the experience left him with a bitter and lasting hatred of newspaper reporters for mocking him and calling him an unhinged lunatic.
One of my ancestors was in the 2nd Missouri Infantry, a MSG unit later incorporated into the Confederate army. Missouri was bonkers during the war, the closest thing to a true civil war with all kinds of different forces and shifting alliances, brutal atrocities, neighbors killing neighbors, and plenty of postwar aftermath with things like the James/Younger gang.
>Throughout the winter of 1861-62 the administration's preoccupation with occupying Unionist Eastern Tennessee was paramount. Lincoln petitioned Halleck for the possibility of sending troops to Buell for the purpose of this venture but Halleck replied that this was impossible. More than half of Missouri was in a state of revolt and he needed every last available man he could. Withdrawal of the occupying Union forces would almost guarantee the loss of the state. Lincoln received this message and remarked "Alas, as with everywhere else there is nothing to be done."
>Only George Thomas seemed interested in the Eastern Tennessee venture and he was not yet in a high enough position for his opinion to be heard. In mid-January, his troops clashed with Confederates led by Felix Zollicoffer. Because of his inexperience, General Thomas Crittenden had supervision of his small army, barely a few thousand men. On a rain-soaked January 16, the Confederates attacked Thomas's division at Mill Springs and were driven off, allegedly because they were armed with flintlock muskets that wouldn't fire in the wet weather. Zollicoffer was killed and Crittenden's handling of the army so poor that he was accused of drunkenness. Seeing the miserable condition of the roads, Thomas decided to beat a hasty retreat and return to camp.
Shold note that the winter-spring of 1862 was really wet with much above normal precipitation due to the eruption of a volcano in East Africa that affected global weather patterns.
The Missouri Constitutional Convention was also elected, and guess what, they overwhelmingly voted against seccession.
>Whatever other flaws Halleck might have, he did have a feel for the political aspect of this war in a way that most of the professional soldiers did not and this came in handy when Charles F. Smith came under suspicion. Smith, a mustachioed, white-haired regular in his 50s (USMA class of 1826) had been commandant of West Point when Grant and Sherman were there and the two had the deepest reverence and hero worship of him--later on Grant said he felt embarrassed to have his former teacher as a subordinate he was issuing orders to. He was the ultimate soldier's soldier and that included running everything in strict accordance to Army regulations. This stiffness, which was necessary with regular soldiers, seemed harsh and cruel to volunteer troops and they chafed at it. Smith was accused of secessionist sympathies while stationed in Paducah merely for enforcing orders against foraging. He was hurt by these charges of disloyalty but did not know how to answer them. It was thanks to Halleck's political acumen that he was able to protect Smith in a way that McClellan could not do for Charles Stone or Fitz-John Porter.
>Grant fortunately never got any accusations of disloyalty and from early on he was a hard war man. He made it clear that the Union armies would not protect the property and slaves of secessionist civilians and they had to pledge loyalty to the US government in exchange for its protection. The army would return escaped slaves if they belonged to loyal citizens but not otherwise. At the same time he also did not want his camp being used to harbor fugitive slaves and barred them from hiding out there.