A Different Kind of War: The Civil War Struggle for Missouri Paperback – February 18, 2026

Operations in Missouri constitute a dramatic, tragic, and often neglected Civil War story that deserves to be told. Missouri was a slave state that stayed in the Union, despite the best efforts of many in the state to win her for the Confederacy. Clashes of armies devolved into a desperate, catastrophic guerrilla war that spread into neighboring Kansas and featured hardened partisan fighters such as William Quantrill and “Bloody” Bill Anderson. The combination of raids and reprisals left several Missouri counties burnt-out wastelands. A Different Kind of War tells how, by fighting the third most engagements in any state during the war, the Union Army kept Missouri and its important manpower and resources in the Union. Joel Farrell tells this story through the eyes of notorious guerrillas and a who’s-who of Union generals who cycled through no-win postings in the troubled state. In Missouri, they found that they were fighting a different kind of war. Read more