In 1860, Charles R. "Doc" Jennison, leader of a Jayhawker band headed a posse that hanged two Missourians caught trying to return fugitive slaves to their masters.

On January 29, 1861 Kansas was finally admitted to the Union as a Free-State. Her struggle over the still unsettled slavery issue came at a terrible cost and provided a last ominous warning of the peril that awaited the nation. Topeka became the state capital with Charles Robinson as the first governor and James H. Lane, an active Free-Stater, one of the U.S. Senators.

The toll was only a foretaste of the suffering that the Civil War was to bring to both Kansas and Missouri. In these two states, the war was fought with the special ferocity that comes when kinsmen and close neighbors fall out. The five-year border conflict had brought the nation, month by month, inexorably to the brink of Civil War. This brutal and bloody struggle between Free-State and pro-slavery factions in Kansas Territory served both as a warning and a chilling prelude for the controversy that soon would engulf the entire country. Before long the entire nation would know its dreadful fate when, in April, 1861, the Civil War began.

Though Kansas had suffered terribly in the years preceding the Civil War and would continue to be a battleground for partisan bands on both sides, the war would extol an appalling price for Missouri. While Missouri was officially a Union state, never declaring to join the Confederacy, the majority of its population was pro-slavery. This resulted in a state of war within its own borders between the U.S. Army and Missouri citizens. Because of this, the State of Missouri never officially joined the Civil War due to its own internal struggles.

While the various political arguments that led to the war developed, the Missouri people at first tried to maintain neutrality. As, one by one, the southern states seceded, Missouri and Arkansas held to the union. Finally their position became impossible when President Lincoln ordered Missouri and Arkansas to raise a quota of men to help force the rebel states back in line. Unwilling to fight old friends, neighbors, and families, both states refused, with Arkansas seceding May 6, 1861. Missouri was now faced with a difficult choice. Hamilton R. Gamble, future provisional Governor had to say of the situation, "Our sympathies are with the South, but our best interests are with the North."

Just six days after the President’s  call for troops, confederate sympathizers seized the federal arsenal at Liberty Missouri on April 20, 1861.

With the official declaration of the Civil War, anti-Union Missourians, who had formerly been content to terrorize abolitionists in Kansas, now extended their operations into their native state, raiding pro-Union towns, ambushing Army columns and generally scourging the countryside, looting and killing. Meanwhile, the Jayhawkers increased their presence in Missouriand their crimes became more ruthless.