Missouri’s guerrilla conflict amid the Civil War is told in a new format.
Although Missouri did not host the Civil War’s most famous battles, it was, at varying points, the stomping ground of some of the most famous names the conflict ever produced. John Brown, William Quantrill, “Bloody” Bill Anderson, Jesse James, and even Ulysses S. Grant all fought in the Show-Me State during the war to varying degrees. It wouldn’t be entirely fair to say that the Civil War conflicts in our state have been overlooked; they are part of our state’s Civil War legacy, both academically and culturally. But the state’s Civil War history does feel rather nebulous and chaotic next to, say, a state like Virginia.
Something about our status as a border state (a state where slavery was legal, but the state did not formally secede from the Union), and perhaps more germane, our status as a frontier state at the time of the war, helps to defy the descriptions of opposing armies advancing, feinting, and retreating that can neatly summarize the battles that took place in some other states.
A new book, Hope Never to See It, put out by the University of Georgia Press might help make sense of our complicated Civil War legacy. Hope Never to See It is the result of a collaboration between scholar Andrew Fialka and illustrator Anderson Carman. Similar in presentation to a graphic novel, panels of illustrations are combined with dialogue and narration that either draw on or directly quote primary sources to tell the story of two particular incidents of guerrilla violence in Missouri in 1864.
The book’s initial frames depict an ambush of Federal troops in the wake of the incident now known as the Centralia Massacre, but then quickly rewinds to examine the irregular warfare happening in central Missouri throughout the summer of 1884. Specifically, it relays the story of a Union spy named Jacob Terman, alias Harry Truman, whose infiltrations of guerrilla bands throughout the state during the war culminated in a whiskey-fueled killing spree in Chariton County.
By focusing on violence committed by both Southern- and Union-sympathizing forces that mostly took place outside the regular scope of the organized military, a cycle of atrocity and retribution is revealed that defined the guerrilla conflict in Missouri throughout the Civil War. By viewing Missouri as an occupied frontier state in which either side of the war could hold dominion in a given county on a given day, Andrew and Anderson help to contextualize the civilian population who were caught up in the frenzy of violence and were acting perhaps less as partisans with strong sympathies on one side or the other and more as people doing their level best to avoid the ire of lawless operators of either stripe infringing on their homes.
The book’s illustrations lend a visceral, perhaps cinematic quality to events outlined within its pages. Although all of its narration and dialogue is historically accurate, its plot and pace will feel familiar to readers of comics and graphic novels, and it seems possible that this choice of medium could help introduce a new population of readers to this period in Missouri history.
Missouri’s status as a state ruled by both northern and southern tendencies, not quite west but not quite east, still defines its culture today. This book and its emphasis on a particularly chaotic span of days during a defining national conflict can help inform future generations of our Civil War legacy.
This book review was originally published in the November/December issue of Missouri Life.
