In July 1945, at the end of World War II, President Harry Truman toured the ruins of Berlin with Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower and Gen. Omar Bradley, commander of the 12th Army Group, the largest army in U.S. history. The three men stood at the apex of U.S. power at a moment of triumph.
Yet these three men were also connected to one of the darkest chapters in U.S. history: the violent anarchy that engulfed the Kansas-Missouri borderlands in the 19th century.
Truman came from a pro-Confederate family in western Missouri. Eisenhower, in contrast, was the son of German American parents with Union sympathies who settled in Kansas after the Civil War. Young Ike grew up listening to the town’s Union veterans tell combat stories. Bradley grew up in central Missouri only a short distance from the site of the Centralia Massacre, where 22 unarmed Union soldiers were executed in 1864.
As the United States turns 250—and stands at the precipice of another era of political violence—it is worth returning to the history of its most interior of regions, the Kansas-Missouri borderlands.
No place has embodied the extremes of U.S. history more than this place. In the 19th century, this was arguably where the Civil War started, and where its violence fell most heavily on civilians.
Yet a century later, the same place had become a stable core of U.S. power, underpinning a dynamic political order that yielded wide prosperity and popular support for U.S. global leadership. The region produced successive presidents (Truman and Eisenhower) and leading generals in the two world wars (John J. Pershing and Eisenhower), and served as the site of military industries and installations.
In short, the history of the Kansas-Missouri borderlands traces the United States’ path from failed state to global power—and into our own moment, when U.S. constitutional democracy is once again on shaky ground.
John Brown is depicted in a mural titled Tragic Prelude, painted by John Steuart Curry, circa 1938-40, at the Kansas State Capitol in Topeka. united Missouri Bank of Kansas City
In 1776, the lower Missouri River Valley remained lightly settled by Europeans. This was Indigenous country. The Osage controlled much of the region, while larger Indigenous powers such as the Lakota and Comanche dominated the wider plains.
The transformation began after the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. Acquiring territory on paper was easy. Imposing control over it was not. The United States spent decades dismantling Indigenous landholdings through treaties, military coercion, and forced removal.
The key figure was William Clark. Remembered today mainly as Meriwether Lewis’ explorer sidekick, Clark was more significant as a territorial administrator. Over the course of his career, he negotiated dozens of treaties that liquidated Indigenous control over vast stretches of land.
Military power underwrote this process. A chain of forts soon stretched across the region. Fort Osage, Fort Leavenworth, Fort Scott, and other outposts secured U.S. settlement and protected overland migration routes. The colonization of Missouri and Kansas was not just settlement but protracted military occupation.
The conquest of the region brought explosive economic growth. River towns in Missouri such as Independence, Weston, and St. Joseph became major commercial centers linked to the Santa Fe Trail and the migration routes to Oregon and California. The region emerged as a gateway between the agricultural interior and an increasingly global economy.
But this expansion also exposed the greatest weakness in the U.S. republic: the inability of its political system to resolve the slavery question.
Missouri entered the United States in 1821 through the Missouri Compromise, which sought to avert sectional conflict by balancing slave and free states. Yet the compromise postponed the crisis rather than solving it. By the 1850s, proslavery leaders—such as Missouri Sen. David Rice Atchison—feared that if Kansas entered as a free state, slavery in Missouri itself would be imperiled. The result was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise and reopened the question of slavery in the territories.
This ill-fated legislation triggered a settlement race between proslavery and antislavery settlers. Tensions escalated rapidly. Missouri “border ruffians” crossed into Kansas to stuff ballot boxes and intimidate voters. Antislavery militias mobilized in response. Private disputes over land metastasized into ideological confrontations over slavery.
The early conflict climaxed in 1856. A proslavery mob sacked Lawrence, Kansas, destroying printing presses and property. Days later, John Brown and his followers murdered five proslavery settlers at Pottawatomie Creek. Open warfare followed in eastern Kansas throughout the summer. The Civil War didn’t begin at Fort Sumter in 1861; it started in Kansas in 1856.
When the national Civil War erupted in 1861, the Kansas-Missouri borderlands became the site of a brutal, irregular conflict. This was a guerrilla war in which political cause gave way to cycles of retributive violence that erased the line between combatants and civilians.
Kansas produced militant antislavery fighters known as Jayhawkers. Pro-Confederate Missourians responded with guerrilla bands called bushwhackers. Figures such as James Lane, William Quantrill, and “Bloody Bill” Anderson became infamous for massacres and retaliatory killings.
The conflict reached its nadir in 1863. Earlier that year Union authorities arrested women accused of aiding guerrillas and confined them in a makeshift jail in Kansas City. When the building collapsed, killing several prisoners, Quantrill launched a retaliatory raid on Lawrence.
In August 1863, hundreds of guerrillas, many drunk, rode into the antislavery town at dawn. Carrying lists of prominent Jayhawkers to target, the bushwhackers soon descended into an indiscriminate orgy of violence, murdering over 150 men and boys before burning much of Lawrence to the ground. The death toll ranks as one of the worst massacres of civilians in U.S. history.
The Union response was equally extreme. Gen. Thomas Ewing issued General Order No. 11, forcing some 20,000 civilians to evacuate western Missouri. Among the refugees was Truman’s future mother, Martha, then just a 10-year-old girl. Union troops burned homes, confiscated property, and devastated the countryside. The region became known as the “burnt district.”
Appomattox did not end the violence in the Kansas-Missouri borderlands. Guerrilla feuds lingered for years. Former bushwhackers, such as Jesse James, became folk heroes. By the late 19th century, Missouri had become more sympathetic to the Confederate cause than it had been during the war itself.
Pvt. Henry Ellis of Co. A, 7th Kansas Cavalry Regiment (“Jennison’s Jayhawkers”), in Corinth, Missouri, between 1861 and 1865. Howard and Hall, Library of Congress
But violence and resentment were ultimately overtaken by a larger transformation. By the turn of the century, the region that had once resembled a failed state began its recovery, eventually becoming a center of industrial growth, agricultural production, and political dynamism.
Railroads integrated the island communities across the Plains. Kansas winter wheat—brought to the region by German-speaking immigrants from the Volga River region—increased the world’s food supply. Kansas City stockyards and rail hubs connected the U.S. interior to global markets. Immigration transformed the region’s productivity, demography, and culture.
It was in this context that the region produced a distinctive political culture that marginalized extremists. Kansas City’s Democratic party machine forged alliances between labor, business, immigrants, and eventually Black voters. Harry Truman mastered this local form of New Deal politics in the 1920s, positioning himself for a run that would, improbably, take him all the way to the White House.
Across the border in Kansas, moderate Republicans led by William Allen White fought off the Ku Klux Klan and other illiberal political movements. White’s battle against extremism extended beyond his home state: As chair of Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, he helped push an isolationist-prone voting bloc towards international leadership.
There was no truth and reconciliation project to sort through the trauma of past violence. Surprisingly few memorials were erected to honor the region’s many civilian victims. Instead, memory of violence softened into ritualized rivalry. The annual football game between the Universities of Kansas and Missouri became known as the Border War, transforming memories of guerrilla conflict into a good-natured rivalry with clear sides, set rules, and a final whistle.
The region once dominated by guerrilla firebrands was now stabilized by a pragmatic political center capable of sustaining both the New Deal and the bipartisan internationalism of the Cold War. A Missouri Democrat, followed by a Kansas Republican, constructed the political coalitions at home and abroad that ultimately defeated Soviet communism.
Truman and Eisenhower both carried lessons from the region’s violent past into global leadership. Truman often remarked that his family’s experience in the “burnt district” convinced him of the merits of the Marshall Plan to aid war-ravaged Europe. Eisenhower promoted a pragmatic politics of institutional discipline that was the antithesis of the ideologically charged violence of “bleeding Kansas” a century earlier.
To be sure, the region’s internationalist turn owed much to its privileged position in the national security complex. Military installations expanded dramatically during World War II and the Cold War. Wichita, Kansas, became one of the world’s great aviation centers, producing B-29 bombers on an industrial scale. Missile silos were ensconced across Kansas and Missouri in the early Cold War. The first completed stretch of interstate was I-70 in eastern Missouri.
The region scarred by 19th century civil war now boomed from the global commitments of the Cold War. Violence was off-shored; profits were kept at home.
The depth of the region’s internationalism was reflected not just in the leaders it produced but in the attitudes of ordinary people. Consider the story of Fulton, Missouri. The town’s small Westminster College, with Truman’s support, invited Winston Churchill to deliver a speech in 1946. The result was the famous Iron Curtain address, in which Churchill laid out the battlelines of the Cold War.
But the more revealing story came after Churchill had returned to England. Determined to place Fulton on the world map, local leaders raised funds for an extraordinary project: the relocation of a 17th-century church designed by Christopher Wren from bombed-out east London. Stone by stone, the English church was dismantled, shipped across the Atlantic, and rebuilt in Fulton. It became a monument to heartland internationalism.
Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill gives his “Sinews of Peace” address, popularizing the term “Iron Curtain,” alongside U.S. President Harry Truman at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946.Popperfoto via Getty Images
Fulton’s Churchill shrine now stands as a curious anachronism, an artifact of a bygone era when a small Missouri town celebrated its global connections. Judged by recent elections, however, the voters of Callaway County now want to build walls, not tear them down. In this, the region is once again a bellwether for what lays ahead, illustrating the perilous unraveling of the old 20th century order.
The relatively balanced economic regime of the mid-20th century has fractured. Wealth is clustered in Kansas City and Johnson County, Kansas, as globalization has hollowed out rural communities. Meanwhile, political polarization has intensified. The centrist politics that once defined Truman liberalism and Eisenhower conservatism has given way to one marked by outrage, conspiracy, and performative extremism.
The region’s leading politician today could not be more different from his predecessors: Josh Hawley, who hails from the old river town (and Civil War battlefield) of Lexington, Missouri. Rather than channeling the region’s violent past toward civic unity, Hawley has built a successful political brand on grievance, masculinism, and a raised fist during the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.
Most ominous is the concentration of military power and its disconnect from civilian life. In the mid-20th century, the benefits and burdens of the national security state were distributed across the region through military bases, defense industries, and a mass citizen army. Today, in contrast, military power is concentrated in a handful of megabases, especially Fort Riley, home to the 1st Infantry Division, and Whiteman Air Force Base in Knob Noster, Missouri, which houses the nation’s fleet of B-2 stealth bombers.
Military power defines these base communities, but, apart from flyovers on game day, it is invisible in the wider region. The nation’s astonishing hard power is increasingly untethered from the region’s civic life, just as its political system is breaking down.
Some of the old military infrastructure is now a destabilizing force. The Lake City Army Ammunition Plant outside Independence, Missouri, built during World War II, remains one of the country’s largest producers of small arms ammunition. Much of its production serves military and law enforcement needs. But it recently has expanded production for commercial markets, mostly ammunition for AR-15 assault rifles. Ammunition manufactured by Lake City has been used in Mexican cartel killings and high-profile mass shootings in the United States.
As the United States approaches its semiquincentennial in July, the history of the nation’s most interior region reminds us of two uncomfortable truths. First, don’t be fooled this July Fourth by linear accounts of the United States’ rise to greatness: U.S. constitutional democracy failed before it triumphed.
Second, violence has been as central to the U.S. experiment, as have natural rights, liberty, and patriotism. As the nation stands at the precipice of another era of political violence, all citizens would be well advised to reflect upon the history of the Kansas-Missouri borderlands.
