Polly was in her mid-70s during the Civil War. Several of her grandsons fought in the war for the Confederacy.

Missouri was a hotly contested border state populated by both Union and Confederate sympathizers. It sent armies, generals, and supplies to both sides, was represented with a star on both flags, maintained dual governments, and endured a bloody neighbor-against-neighbor intrastate war within the larger national war.

A slave state since statehood in 1821, Missouri’s geographic position in the center of the country and at the rural edge of the American frontier ensured that it remained a divisive battleground for competing Northern and Southern ideologies in the years preceding the war. When the war began in 1861, it became clear that control of the Mississippi River and the burgeoning economic hub of St. Louis would make Missouri a strategic territory in the Trans-Mississippi Theater.

By the end of the war in 1865, nearly 110,000 Missourians had served in the Union Army and at least 40,000 in the Confederate Army; many had also fought with bands of pro–Confederate partisans known as “bushwhackers”. The war in Missouri was continuous between 1861 and 1865, with battles and skirmishes in all areas of the state, from the Iowa and Illinois borders in the northeast to the Arkansas border in the southeast and southwest. Counting minor actions and skirmishes, Missouri saw more than 1,200 distinct engagements within its boundaries; only Virginia and Tennessee exceeded this total.

Adair County took an active part in the Civil war. Slavery had never been an extensive institution here, there being only fifty-one slaves in the county in 1850 and eighty-six in 1860. Many of the early settlers had come from Kentucky or were of Southern descent and there was much sympathy with the South, but when the issue became clearly drawn between North and South, Adair County sided with the North. Even many of the Southern sympathizers were unable to agree with the doctrine of secession, so the only thing they could do when the Southern states began to secede was to oppose their action.

Several war mass meetings were held in Kirksville during the spring of 1861. W. T. Davis and Tom Brannon addressed those made up of Southern sympathizers. Meetings of Northern sympathizers were also held and it is said that at one large Union meeting, held on May 27, much enthusiasm was aroused by the sight of an aged man named Foster, the father of Adair county’s delegate to the state convention, carrying an American flag. Mr. Foster was a heavy slave owner.

Confederate troops were recruited from this county during May and June, 1861. It is said that not less than three hundred men joined the Confederate army while enlistments were being made and that many others slipped out of the county later and joined the Confederates.

In some of the counties of the state, Union Sympathizers were permitted to kill Southerners against whom they had an old grudge and go unpunished. This was not true in Adair, however. On July 4, 1861, a Union man named Ward, stabbed and killed a Southern man named Sumter. As he had a bad reputation previously, while Sumter had been quiet and inoffensive, Ward was put in jail and a few nights later he was taken out and hanged. No investigation of the lynching was made.

Adair County furnished at least four hundred and seventeen men to the Northern armies. Companies of Home Guards were organized in Adair County in 1861, some of which remained in the service only three months.

The first military event in Adair County occurred on August 19, 1861, a few miles northeast of Kirksville, between a squad of twelve men from the two Adair county companies and a squad of Confederate recruits under Captain Robert Hagar, of Monroe County. The Union men were scouting around, trying to find a Colonel Green, who was a successful Confederate recruiting officer. When at dinner at the house of a Union man, the Union troops were attacked and Corporal Hervey Dix, of Company D, Third Iowa Infantry, their leader, was killed in the fight that ensued. The appearance of Confederate reinforcements under Captain W. S. Richardson, of Lewis County, compelled the squad of Federals to flee as best they could.

The Battle of Kirksville

Although relatively unimportant as a battle, it was the only engagement of any size that took place in the county. Joseph C. Porter, a Confederate lieutenant colonel, was enlisting troops in Northeast Missouri. He was trying to gather as large an army as possible and move it to Arkansas, where it could join the forces that were gathering there. The Federals decided to attack the Southern troops and crush them before they became too well organized. Colonel McNeil, of St. Louis, with twelve hundred and fifty men, largely directed the attack.

From a camp in Lewis County. Porter started southward, keeping constantly on the move to escape attack and to increase the number of his enlistments. He was reinforced when he reached Callaway County, so that he had in all two hundred and sixty men. Porter then turned northward again, sending detachments to Paris and Canton to capture these places. A courier from Captain Tice Cain brought him the in-formation that Cain and his Schuyler county men had entered Kirksville and had taken it. This news caused Porter and his men to join the combined force under Porter now numbered about two thousand. Only about five hundred were well armed, while five hundred were fairly armed and one thousand were not armed at all. The large number of unarmed men is accounted for by the fact that Porter was gathering up recruits rapidly, many of whom had no arms of their own and could not get any until they reached the main Confederate army in Arkansas.

On reaching Kirksville, Porter warned the people to get out of town. Some of his troops barricaded themselves in houses and drew up his main line of defense behind a rail fence. Kirksville was then a small village, having a population of less than eight hundred.

McNeil’s forces arrived at the edge of Kirksville about 10 o’clock on the morning of August 6th and attacked Porter. After a hot fight in which Porter’s men were driven out of a cornfield by a battery of five guns and the public square was taken after a struggle, Porter was driven out of the town. McNeil’s troops were too fatigued to pursue, so most of Porter’s army escaped, although they lost some supplies. The loss on both sides is unknown. The number of Union men killed has been given as five by one authority and as twenty-eight by another. Of Porter’s two thousand men, only about five hundred were able to take part in the battle. The number of Confederates killed is variously estimated all the way from thirty-five to one hundred and fifty; the wounded from seventy-five to four hundred; and the captured from fifty to two hundred and fifty. McNeil’s force is said to have consisted of about one thousand men, of which number probably more than half took part in the fight.

On the day of the battle, fifteen Confederates, who had been captured in the fight, were executed because of alleged violation of their paroles. Porter kept up his recruiting, but was less successful.