The Hagerstown Civil War Round Table will be featuring a talk on Civil War in Missouri by Ethan Refuse. During the war, Missouri was a hotly contested border state populated by both Union and Confederate sympathizers. It sent armies, generals, and supplies to both sides, was represented with a star on both flags, maintained dual governments, and endured a bloody neighbor-against-neighbor intrastate war within the larger national war.
A slave state since statehood in 1821, Missouri's geographic position in the center of the country and at the rural edge of the American frontier ensured that it remained a divisive battleground for competing Northern and Southern ideologies in the years preceding the war. When the war began in 1861, it became clear that control of the Mississippi River and the burgeoning economic hub of St. Louis would make Missouri a strategic territory in the Trans-Mississippi Theater.
The event is at 7:30 pm on Thursday, December 6, 2018 at Homewood Suites, 1650 Pullman Lane Hagerstown, MD. Dinner at 6:30 pm, open to non-members as well as members, is $22 (reservations required) and the talk at 7:30 pm is $5 for non-members, both payable at the meeting. For more information visit https://sites.google.com/view/hagerstowncwrt/home, search for: Hagerstown Civil War Round Table, email hagerstowncwrt@gmail.com, or call Dennis Graham at 301 766 9516.
Ethan S. Rafuse received his Ph.D. In History and Political Science at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and since 2004 has been a member of the faculty at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, KS. His publications include McClellan’s War: The Failure of Moderation in the Struggle for the Union, Guide to the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign, Corps Commanders in Blue, and Robert E. Lee and the Fall of the Confederacy, as well as over 300 essays, articles, reviews, and entries in reference works. He is currently serving as the 2018-19 Charles Boal Ewing Chair of Military History at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.