This history shines a light on America’s “first civil war”: the bloody conflict in Kansas Territory between abolitionists and proslavery extremists.

Long before the secession crisis at Fort Sumter ignited the War between the States, men fought and died on the prairies of Kansas over the incendiary issue of slavery. The bitter conflict was described in the Atchison Squatter Sovereign newspaper as “war to the knife and knife to the hilt.”

In 1854 a shooting war developed between proslavery men from Missouri and free-staters in Kansas over control of the territory. The prize was whether Kansas would become a slave or a free state when admitted to the Union, a question that could decide the balance of power in Washington.

War to the Knife is an absorbing account of this bloody episode in our nation's past, told in the unforgettable words of the men and women involved: Robert E. Lee, William Tecumseh Sherman, Sara Robinson, Jeb Stuart, Abraham Lincoln, William F. Cody, and John Brown—the abolitionist who was hailed by some as a prophet, and denounced as a madman by others.

Thomas Goodrich

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