Civil War
During the American Civil War, savage guerrilla warfare wracked Missouri. Younger fought as a guerrilla under William Clarke Quantrill. The fighting in Missouri during the Civil War was largely between pro-Union and pro-Confederate Missourians, though the bushwhackers held special hatred for the Union troops from Kansas who frequently crossed the border and earned a reputation for ruthlessness. Younger joined the Confederate guerrilla leader Quantrill in a raid on August 21, 1863, taking part in the killing of some 200 men and boys at Lawrence, Kansas, which the guerrillas looted and burned.
Younger later claimed he left the bushwhacker ranks to enlist in the Confederate Army, and was sent to California on a recruiting mission. He returned after the Southern defeat to find Missouri under the rule of a militant faction of Unionists, the Radicals, who soon took over the regular Republican Party in the state. In the closing days of the war, the Radicals pushed through a new state constitution that barred Confederate sympathizers from voting, serving on juries, holding public office, preaching the gospel, or carrying out any number of public roles. The constitution also freed the slaves ahead of the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It enacted a number of reforms, but the restrictions on former Confederates created disunity.
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Famous quotes by civil war:
“We have heard all of our lives how, after the Civil War was over, the South went back to straighten itself out and make a living again. It was for many years a voiceless part of the government. The balance of power moved away from it—to the north and the east. The problems of the north and the east became the big problem of the country and nobody paid much attention to the economic unbalance the South had left as its only choice.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“Since the Civil War its six states have produced fewer political ideas, as political ideas run in the Republic, than any average county in Kansas or Nebraska.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“Luxury, or a refinement on the pleasures and conveniences of life, had long been supposed the source of every corruption in government, and the immediate cause of faction, sedition, civil wars, and the total loss of liberty. It was, therefore, universally regarded as a vice, and was an object of declamation to all satyrists, and severe moralists.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“He was high and mighty. But the kindest creature to his slaves—and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not sold, had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in full view and provided for handsomely in his will. His wife and daughters in the might of their purity and innocence are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as the sunlight, and they play their parts of unsuspecting angels to the letter.”
—Anonymous Antebellum Confederate Women. Previously quoted by Mary Boykin Chesnut in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)