Mizzou-Kansas Border War in sports replaces violent, Civil War-era rivalry

COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)

The rivalry between the University of Missouri Tigers and the University of Kansas Jayhawks is well known in college sports.

But the passion infused into it actually started as a way to move past the bloody conflict between pro-slavery groups in Missouri and anti-slavery settlers in Kansas.

University of Missouri history professor Jay Sexton said there's no big monument to honor the civilians who died in the bloody Border War of the mid-1800s.

"Historically, the football game actually functioned as the way in which the violence was remembered," Sexton said.

The violence starts in the early 1850s, when Kansas settlers were trying to decide whether the state should allow slavery or not.

Kansas' neighbor, Missouri, wasn't a strong slave state, but there were groups of pro-slavery people who would sneak into Kansas and illegally vote in the election, Sexton said. They were called Border Ruffians.

Eventually, the anti-slavery sentiment overpowered the pro-slavery minority in Kansas, and it becomes a Union state in 1861, Sexton said.

"In fact, it'll become the most hardcore anti-slavery state in the Union, and this is when the Kansas Jayhawks seek their revenge on the pro-slavery West Missourians," Sexton said.

The Civil War started in 1861 and ended in 1865. Sexton said the Jayhawk revenge era was one of the deadliest.

"Before you know it, the border has descended into anarchy and violence, in which no civilian is safe. Lots of innocent lives are lost, most tragically in the Quantrill raid of Lawrence, Kansas, in the summer of 1863," Sexton said.

Confederate guerrilla William Quantrill led his band of a few hundred pro-Confederate raiders into Lawrence, burning a large swath of the town, looting it and killing scores of men and boys.

Sexton also said Western Missouri was forcibly depopulated in the fall of 1863.

"This is where the Civil War is most severe in its violence to civilians," Sexton said.

About a year later, in 1864, Columbia created its own Union-aligned militia to defend the city and the University of Missouri from pro-slavery guerrillas called Bushwhackers. The unit was called the Missouri Tigers.

"The irony is that the Columbia Tigers and the Kansas Jayhawks are actually on the same side, or at least have the same enemy during the Civil War. It's only later that they're imagined to be rivals," Sexton said.

The first football game between MU and KU in 1891 was over 25 years after the Civil War ended, and it was a way to put the violence behind the two states.

"The Border War football game, when it was created in the 1890s, in part, is to airbrush sort of the worst bits of the history out of people's imaginations, and replace it with a regulated, good-spirited rivalry with clear sides, and most of all, a final whistle," Sexton said.

It wasn't until the mid-1900s that fans started imagining the games as a revival of the Civil War, Sexton said.

These days, it's unlikely that many fans know about the rivalry's roots -- they're just happy to be part of it.