An Instance of the Rape of German Women in Civil War Missouri

Historians continue to debate the character o f the American Civil War nearly a century and a half after its end. Mark Neely, in a Harvard University Press monograph entitled The Civil War and the Limits o f Destruction, has challenged James McPherson’s characterization o f the war between North and South as a “total war.” Neely contends the Civil War was “remarkable for its traditional restraint.” In reviewing Neely’s book, McPherson said in his own defense that while the war may not have been the “total war” that he called it a few decades ago, it was certainly a “hard war,” filled with property destruction and civilian death.' Both McPherson and Neely use events in Missouri as a central pillar to support their contrasting positions. O f Missouri, McPherson says. That state had a civil war within the Civil War, a war o f neighbor against neighbor and sometimes literally brother against brother, an armed conflict along the Kansas border, which went back to 1854 and never really stopped, o f ugly, vicious, no-holds-barred bushwhacking that came close to total war.” ̂ Neely, in writing o f Price’s 1864 raid into Missouri, says “Neither side fought without restraint. Neither unleashed the full fury o f unbridled wrath. Events remained under control.”^ This paper is not going to resolve the dispute between two o f Americas most respected Civil War historians, but it does assert that the guerrilla warfare in western Missouri in 1864 was, in one respect, worse than historians have known up to now. Specifically, there are good reasons to believe that “Bloody Bill” Anderson’s men gang-raped a significant number o f German immigrant women along the Lafayette County border on October 10, 1864.