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These gangs were guerrillas who often clashed with pro-slavery groups from Missouri, known at the time in Kansas Territory as "Border Ruffians" or "Bushwhackers". After the Civil War, the word "Jayhawker" became synonymous with the people of Kansas, or anybody born in Kansas. [1]
At the outbreak of the American Civil War in April 1861, Kansas was the newest U.S. state, admitted just months earlier in January. The state had formally rejected slavery by popular vote and vowed to fight on the side of the Union, though ideological divisions with neighboring Missouri, a slave state, had led to violent conflict in previous years and persisted for the duration of the war.
Border ruffians also engaged in general violence against Free-State settlements. They burned farms and sometimes murdered Free-State men. Most notoriously, border ruffians twice attacked Lawrence, the Free-State capital of the Kansas Territory. On December 1, 1855, a small army of border ruffians laid siege to Lawrence, but were driven off.
When the Civil War began, Hays enlisted the Missouri State Guard as the captain of a cavalry company. He commanded his men at the 1861 Battle of Carthage.Hays and noted guerrilla Dick Yager conducted a raid against Gardner, Kansas, on October 2, 1861, as part of the cycle of cross-border raids by the pro-Union Jayhawkers and the pro-Confederate Border Ruffians.
The Missouri-Kansas border area was fertile ground for the outbreak of guerrilla warfare when the Civil War erupted in 1861. The historian Albert Castel wrote: For over six years, ever since Kansas was opened up as a territory by Stephen A. Douglas' Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, its prairies had been the stage for an almost incessant series of political conventions, raids, massacres, pitched ...
The concept of a 'people's war,' first described by Clausewitz in his classic treatise On War, was the closest example of a mass guerrilla movement in the 19th century.In general during the American Civil War, this type of irregular warfare was conducted in the hinterland of the border states (Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, and northwestern Virginia / West Virginia).
The Lawrence Massacre (also known as Quantrill's Raid) was an attack during the American Civil War (1861–65) by Quantrill's Raiders, a Confederate guerrilla group led by William Quantrill, on the Unionist town of Lawrence, Kansas, killing around 150 men and boys.
The areas of Missouri, Kansas, and the Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma) were marked by extensive guerrilla activity throughout the rest of the war, the most well-known incident being the infamous Lawrence massacre by Confederate raiders in the Unionist town of Lawrence, Kansas of August 1863.