American Civil War
The collections described in this section constitute the significant body of records pertaining to the American Civil War held by The State Historical Society of Missouri. A wide variety of record types document many of the military, political, social, and psychological aspects of the war in Missouri and other areas of the country throughout the conflict.
The personal papers of soldiers afford the view of the war with the greatest detail and immediacy. The majority of these records was created by men in Missouri Union and Confederate regiments, and troops from other Midwestern states, active in Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, and other areas west of the Mississippi River, Kentucky and Tennessee, and the deep South, with more limited materials from the eastern
theater of war. The letters written home, the carefully packed diaries and journals, photographs, service documents, and other personal papers of these officers and men vividly sketch the war of the common soldier: camp life and the daily struggle with the elements and boredom; foraging, scouting, and skirmishing; and all the tumult of major campaigns and battles, from the early engagements in Missouri and
Arkansas at Wilson's Creek, Lexington, Pea Ridge, and Prairie Grove, through Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Corinth, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, and the Georgia campaign. Adding detail to the military picture, although more limited in scope, are telegraphs, orders, correspondence, muster rolls and other personnel and equipment records, and miscellaneous records of various levels of Union and Confederate commands.
The collections also include substantial documentation of the lives of the families left behind and depictions of the civilian experience of the Civil War. The letters, diaries, business records, military documents, and other papers of Missourians illustrate not only the normal stress of war and the rending of individual families, but also the traumatic
conditions of the war particularly prevalent in the cities, towns, and countryside of a border state: the social and economic dislocation of a divided population, and the brutality and predation of both the Federal military occupation and Confederate guerrillas.
These papers, in conjunction with an assortment of recruiting broadsides, proclamations, handbills, newspapers, scrapbooks, and other period ephemera, along with postwar records of veterans' organizations, memoirs, anecdotes, pension records, commemorative materials, and collections of research data, comprise a comprehensive and diverse resource for Civil War research.
A small number of Civil War manuscripts are available online.
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