This book contains historical facts and tidbits from Kansas history that led to the Civil War, and of life on the Kansas prairie, and the most interesting of the many stories Ralph collected over a decade of research on the Civil War and Kansas’s part in it.The American civil war has given rise to a vast multitude of books which, if taken together, cover events from every conceivable angle. So why another book? Why continued research on the civil war? The sad fact is that the civil war was Americans fighting Americans. The two major issues that brought on the civil war were the fight over state rights, which involved the right of secession from the union of the states under the constitution and the extension of slavery to new states and territories.The declaration of war by South Carolina politicians against the union was arrogant, boastful, and savage. They proceeded in haste to inaugurate civil war, and to drag the peaceful inhabitants of the other slave-labor states into it’s horrid vortex. The people, whose rights they had violated and whose sovereignty they had usurped, were stunned and bewildered by the violence of these self-constituted leaders, and they found themselves and their property at the mercy of mad men who, as the sequel proved, were totally unfit to lead in the counsels of a free, intelligent, and patriotic community.

--Ralph J. Postlethwait with Oliver J. Hurt

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