'It was a massacre': Inside the bloody roots of the Mizzou-Kansas rivalry

This story is the first of three in the series “Border Tales,” which chronicles the unique hostility between Mizzou and Kansas ahead of their football game Saturday. It dates back to at least the 1850s, when there was an actual border war over an issue that eventually tore the United States apart. Over a century later, historians, football players and more hold strong opinions about the rivalry and its blood-stained roots.

It’s a sizzling summer afternoon at the University of Kansas. David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium sits quiet, but it will be noisy soon. The date is Aug. 21, and the Jayhawks football team is less than 48 hours from its season opener against Fresno State.

In a little more than two weeks, the team will head east to Missouri, reviving a bitter rivalry that traces back to outright warfare.

A few blocks east of the stadium is Massachusetts Street, the main road that runs through downtown Lawrence, Kansas. For Matt Beat, this road is well-traveled. Better known as “Mr. Beat,” the former high school history teacher has 1.26 million subscribers on YouTube. His videos, which are mostly about American history, have touched seemingly all parts of the country.

Kansas, however, has a special place in his heart. Beat grew up in Augusta (about 30 minutes east of Wichita), and he attended KU, where he met his wife, Shannon. The two live just a few minutes west of campus with their two children, 14-year old Lydia and 11-year old Reegan.

Massachusetts Street is the heart of Lawrence. Flanked by shops, bars and restaurants eager to welcome students back to school, it’s hard to believe it once was swarmed by Confederate guerrillas. Lawrence was a Union stronghold during the Civil War era.

“Take a look around,” Beat said as he looked north on Massachusetts Street toward the Kansas River. “Imagine all of this was on fire. That’s how it was here.”

One hundred sixty-two years ago to the day, Lawrence didn’t need to imagine such carnage. That morning, a man named William Quantrill and a band of men from Missouri rode on horseback toward Lawrence just before sunrise. The guerrillas, armed with guns and malicious intent, planned to etch their names into history while putting others on gravestones.

After gathering along the outskirts of town, Quantrill and his raiders galloped into town and followed through on their plan. By the time the sun came up, Lawrence was laden in smoke. Over the course of a few hours, the Bushwhackers razed buildings and killed residents, many of whom essentially woke up just in time to die.

“They burned every building down. They killed anybody who got in the way,” Beat said. “It was a massacre.”

Bloody Kansas as a spark for civil war

Quantrill’s Raid, as it was later dubbed, was one of many destructive chapters in a long, violent period of guerrilla warfare between Kansas and Missouri. The fighting started before the Civil War in the period from 1856-58 that came to be called “Bleeding Kansas.”

But bloody battles along the border continued into the Civil War as other states back East were fighting either to splinter or hold the nation together. It was both a prelude and a contributor to the deadliest conflict in American history.

“Bleeding Kansas is absolutely central to the story of the Civil War,” Michael Woods, a history professor at the University of Tennessee, said. “The attention that Bleeding Kansas got not just in the border area but all throughout the country made it really decisive in making the Civil War possible and making it sort of imaginable to people that it could happen.”

The hostility between MU and KU isn’t unique, and neither are its historical origins. The root of the Ohio State-Michigan rivalry, for example, lies in the Toledo War, when Ohio and Michigan argued with each other over who owned a key strip of land near the border. Both sides even raised militias in anticipation of combat. However, the only casualty was a sheriff who was stabbed with a penknife.

The Border War’s roots are about more than two border states playing each other in football for a long time or fighting over a piece of land. This bitterness tastes of blood, which was shed for reasons that eventually tore the entire United States apart.

“What we see in Missouri and Kansas is the first act of what becomes a national civil war,” Dr. Jeremy Neely, a history professor at Missouri State University, said. “It’s a struggle over the future of America.”

“People killing each other, I think that qualifies as a war,” Beat said, “and it was for a very distinct purpose.”

Slavery at the heart of the dispute

That purpose, as you might have guessed, was human bondage and, more specifically, its future in the United States. The catalyst to the fighting - the origin of the origins, if you will - was the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which, in Beat’s opinion, is “one of the worst laws ever passed in U.S. history.”

Passed by Congress in May 1854, the act repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which set the 36°30’ parallel as the dividing line between slave states and free states in what was then the Louisiana Territory.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act also said that popular sovereignty would decide whether the newly created territories of Kansas and Nebraska would be admitted to the U.S. as free or slave states. In this case, residents of the two territories would decide the identity of Kansas and Nebraska’s statehood.

Well, that’s what was supposed to happen. Instead, many irritated Missourians, labeled “border ruffians,” flooded Kansas to illegally vote on the matter. They viewed Kansas’ potential admission as a free state as a threat to their livelihoods. Should it be admitted as a free state, their Congressional power would decrease.

But anti-slavery folks from parts north and east had the same idea. The New England Emigrant Aid Company helped move people from the New England region all the way to Kansas in hopes of making it a free state. That is believed to be why the main street that runs through Lawrence is called Massachusetts Avenue.

It didn’t take long for the two sides to clash.

“This is the closest we truly got to the mythical Wild West,” Beat said. “I say mythical because, when we think about the Wild West, most of that really didn’t exist like we think of in those old movies. But Kansas might be the exception, because you didn’t have a whole lot of law enforcement out here that was able to control mobs of people going after each other.”

From May to September of 1856, the animosity between pro- and anti-slavery folks exploded into war.

“No longer could the dispute over slavery be solved politically,” Neely said. “Over and over again, Americans had managed to strike these compromises, whether it was about Missouri statehood or the Compromise of 1850 or, if you want to go way back, the Constitutional Convention required a series of compromises over slavery. But that no longer seemed possible, because, out in the West, people had resorted to killing one another.”

On May 21, 1856, Missourians looted and burned down buildings in what became known as the Sacking of Lawrence. Raiders destroyed the offices of two anti-slavery publications, the Kansas Free-State and the Herald of Freedom, dumping printing presses into the Kansas River.

Enter John Brown and his abolitionists

Over the next few months, deaths would continue to pile up. John Brown, a famous abolitionist known for violent guerrilla tactics, orchestrated the murder of five people near Pottawatomie Creek. Both sides would continue to steal and kill. One of Brown’s sons, Frederick, died in the Battle of Osawatomie, which claimed the lives of four others.

By now, the conflict had made waves well beyond Missouri and Kansas.

“One of the things that I guess didn’t surprise me but stood out to me was the number of people who didn’t seem to care much about politics who did care about what was happening in Kansas,” Woods said. “They felt very connected to the people who were there, whichever side they identified with. It sort of captured their imagination in a way that other events in that period didn’t.”

Major newspapers back East were reporting on the conflict in a highly partisan way. Horace Greeley of The New York Daily Tribune is widely credited with coining the term “Bleeding Kansas.” In Washington, D.C., the issue was a knife that divided Congress so greatly that it almost killed a U.S. senator.

One day after the Sacking of Lawrence, Charles Sumner, an anti-slavery senator from Massachusetts, argued for Kansas to be admitted as a free state, calling out multiple pro-slavery Congressman in the process. Two days after Sumner’s speech, Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery representative from South Carolina, took a cane and whacked an unsuspecting Sumner over the head.

By the time Brooks was done swinging, he’d beaten and bloodied Sumner so badly that it would take the Massachusetts senator almost three years to recover from his injuries before returning to the Senate.

Kansas bans slavery

On Jan. 21, 1861, Kansas was admitted to the Union as a free state. The abolitionist fight was over, but the fight against Missouri wasn’t.

That September, a group of Jayhawkers — the anti-slavery equivalent of Bushwhackers — went to nearby Osceola, Missouri, and freed 200 slaves under the guidance of Kansas senator Jim Lane ... while also killing nine locals, looting buildings and lighting much of the town on fire. This became known as the Sacking of Osceola. The Jayhawkers had already burned the towns of Harrisonville and Butler.

“It was Bleeding Kansas and Bleeding Missouri at the same time,” Sean Rost, a historian at the State Historical Society of Missouri, said.

A little over two years later, Quantrill’s Raid would become the most consequential event of the border conflict, with around 400 Bushwhackers involved. The first victim of the raid was the Rev. Samuel Snyder, a United Brethren minister who was a chaplain to African American Union troops.

About 2 miles southeast of the stadium is a two-story brick house that used to belong to Robert H. Miller, a Scotch Presbyterian and abolitionist. Emily Hanks and Les Lynch now live in the house, which also used to be a stop on the Underground Railroad.

With the only entrance for vehicles being a long driveway to the back of the house, Hanks joked that the only people who used the front door were Quantrill and Amazon. That’s because right before the raid, Miller’s eldest daughter, Margaret, heard some commotion in the front yard and was greeted by Quantrill and his raiders. Margaret recognized Quantrill from his time as a schoolteacher in Lawrence.

“They told her to go back inside, shut the door and not come out,” Hanks said. “They proceeded to go about a quarter-mile up the road to Reverend Snyder’s house, who was outside milking his cows, and they brutally murdered him.”

Missourians bent on revenge

Not too long after the Millers were paid a tense visit, the Bushwhackers rode into downtown. Lawrence was entirely undefended.

Those who were already awake or were woken up by gunfire hid wherever they could. Lane, who was a primary target for Quantrill, took refuge in a nearby cornfield while still in his pajamas. He survived, but his house was burned down.

Only four buildings in present-day downtown Lawrence were spared. The Free State Hotel (now called the Eldridge Hotel), which had been burnt down in the Sacking of Lawrence, was burnt down again. By the end of the raid, somewhere between 150-190 people were killed, most of which were men and boys.

At this point, Lane and other Kansans wanted to make the Sacking of Osceola look like child’s play.

“They were just shell-shocked after Quantrill’s Raid,” Nicole Etcheson, a history professor at Ball State University, said. “Jim Lane is screaming that he wants to butcher the Missourians in retaliation. (Kansas Sen. and Union Gen. Thomas) Ewing is very rattled by Quantrill’s Raid that happened on his watch, and he’s got these Kansans who want to go in and lay waste to Missouri.”

Fearing even more deadly conflict, Ewing made a drastic decision. He issued General Order No. 11, which said that residents of Jackson, Cass, Bates and northern Vernon counties had 15 days to vacate their homes and relocate. The areas had become so violent that, according to Ewing, living there was no longer safe.

“There are historians that liken it to the most forceful thing the United States government has ever done against its own citizens,” Neely said. “It’s right there next to the internment of Japanese Americans (during World War II).”

After the removal of tens of thousands of residents, Union forces destroyed abandoned homes while killing livestock and burning land in an effort to dissuade Bushwhackers from pillaging the area themselves. The area became known as the Burnt District.

Bill Anderson earns his nickname

On Sept. 27, 1864, Confederate guerrillas brutally murdered Union soldiers in what was called the Centralia Massacre Led by William “Bloody Bill” Anderson. 

The guerrillas stopped a train filled with Union forces and shot 22 of them in front of Union Sgt. Thomas M. Goodman, who called the killings the “most monstrous and inhuman atrocities ever perpetuated by beings wearing the form of man.”

In the subsequent Battle of Centralia, Anderson & Co. killed more than 100 more Union soldiers.

Anderson’s bloodthirsty personality was well-known. According to Neely, he wore a necklace of severed ears and had a tendency to scalp his victims. He was motivated by the death of his sister, Josephine, who was one of several people killed when a makeshift jail in Kansas City collapsed Aug. 13, 1863. She’d been jailed for her suspected role as a Confederate spy, and the person who arrested her was Thomas Ewing Jr. By the war’s end, Anderson and Quantrill had become heroes in the eyes of the Confederates.

“They look to him as this avenging figure,” Neely said. “This idea that guerrillas were defenders of home and defenders of family was an attractive quality for Confederate sympathizers.”

The final large-scale conflict along the border was the Battle of Westport on Oct. 23, 1864, in Kansas City. There, Union and Confederate forces met, and thousands on both sides died, marking it the “Gettysburg of the West.”

The Union thwarted the last Confederate offensive west of the Mississippi River, and the Civil War drew closer to its end on April 9, 1865, at Appomattox Court House west of Richmond, Virginia. The Union had won the American Civil War, and its conclusion also marked the end of fighting along the border.

Almost four years and eight months later, college football was born on a grass field in New Brunswick, New Jersey. More than two decades would pass before the flagship universities in Kansas and Missouri played each other in the sport.

Some say time can heal wounds. But for Kansas and Missouri, the cuts not only ran deep, but they were still wide open in the early days of the football rivalry. Still pertinent were the thousands of lives lost during the Border War.

Until 1891, Exposition Park in Kansas City - the site of many early MU-KU football games - sat quiet.

But it would be noisy soon.

Copyright 2025 Columbia Missourian

This story was originally published September 4, 2025 at 6:00 AM.