Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri's Civil War, 1861-1865

Explores a financial conspiracy at the start of the American Civil War. This 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, it reveals the nature of military mobilization in the antebellum United States.

---

Winner of the 2011 Tom Watson Brown Book Award

An award-winning exploration of a Civil War financial conspiracy in Missouri—and its reverberations today

In this original work, Mark W. Geiger explores the impact of a previously unknown financial conspiracy in Civil War–era Missouri, a sham-loan scheme that devastated the state’s planter elite, caused a revolution in land ownership, and fueled a ferocious insurgency in the state.  

Geiger’s book—the first detailed study of the grassroots nature of financing for military mobilization in the American Civil War—shows how Missouri’s ill-conceived plan has affected the political direction of the state to this day.