This highly original work explores a previously unknown financial conspiracy at the start of the American Civil War. The book explains the reasons for the puzzling intensity of Missouri's guerrilla conflict, and for the state's anomalous experience in Reconstruction. In the broader history of the war, the book reveals for the first time the nature of military mobilization in the antebellum United States.

More about this title

Winner of the 2011 Francis B. Simkins Award sponsored by the Southern Historical Association.

Mark Geiger is a postdoctoral fellow at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.

"Heavily researched and fully documented, Geiger breaks much new ground in his eye-opening description of the previously unknown bank fraud and in his wider evaluations of how it shaped the conflict... a significant book that students of the Civil War state, or the insurgents who disrupted it, must consider. Clearly we still have much to learn about the Civil War's guerillas, and here is a guidepost for future efforts."—Kenneth W. Noe, The American Historical Review