Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area presents Casualties of War: A Civil War on the Western Border Symposium. Measuring the struggle for freedom against the loss of liberty, the symposium explored the wide-ranging effects of the border conflict and the loss of civil liberty for those caught in its vortex.

Until the mid-nineteenth century, a democratically elected government of civilian authorities protected the US’s founding guarantees: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Events in eastern Kansas and western Missouri forced the unthinkable, posing a direct challenge to those American values. When a military attempts to exert control over a hostile insurgent civilian population, fundamental questions emerge – with consequences that reverberate through history to the present moment.

This day-long event gathered a broad-based group of historians to discuss the price of civil liberties during wartime at the Harry S. Truman Library & Presidential Museum in Independence, Missouri.

Sessions examined the Kansas-Missouri border war through the lenses of how geopolitical conflict shapes gender roles; the suspension of habeas corpus and invocation of martial law; the dawn of industrial total war; the lessons of insurgent movements; and more. Speakers included Kerry Altenbernd, Alisha Moore Cole, Dr. Harry Laver, Daniel L. Smith, and Richard Titterington.