Union Guerrillas in Civil War Kansas: Jayhawkers and Red Legs

A Tumultuous Time in Kansas

Both before and during the American Civil War, ragtag groups of Kansas militants patrolled the Kansas-Missouri border. Known as ＂Jayhawkers＂ and later ＂Red Legs,＂ they raided anyone they believed sympathetic to secession. For many in the state, these irregular warriors were heroes fighting for a Free Kansas and preservation of the Union; for their victims, these men were little more than opportunistic thieves. James Montgomery teamed up with Harriet Tubman to lead the Combahee River Raid, an audacious mission in South Carolina that liberated more than 750 slaves. George H. Hoyt, who once defended famed abolitionist John Brown, became a leader of a contentious group of pro-Union partisans known as the ＂Red Legs.＂ Authors Paul A. Thomas and Matt M. Matthews seek to answer the question of who these men were.

Paul A. Thomas is a library specialist at the University of Kansas with a doctoral degree in library and information management from Emporia State University. He has long been fascinated with the history of Kansas during the territorial and Civil War periods. His first book, Haunted Lawrence (2017), focused on the paranormal folklore surrounding Lawrence, Kansas. Matt M. Matthews is a former military historian with the U.S. Army’s Combat Studies Institute (CSI) and a former U.S. Army senior military analyst. Matthews is the author of several CSI Press publications, including The Posse Comitatus Act and The United States Army (2006), Operation AL FAJR: A Study in Army and Marine Corps Joint Operations (2007), The U.S. Army on the Mexican Border (2007) and We Were Caught Unprepared: The 2006 Hezbollah-Israeli War (2008). Matthews has also coauthored numerous scholarly articles on the Civil War in the Trans-Mississippi region.