Proving Disloyalty: Enslaved People and Resistance in Missouri’s Guerrilla Households

Abstract: This work highlights the central role that enslaved people played in Missouri’s guerrilla conflict. During the Civil War, with the loss of male labor to armies and guerrilla bands, households in Missouri became ever more reliant on enslaved labor. This included guerrilla households, meaning that enslaved people played a much more active role in maintaining guerrilla bands than has been previously acknowledged. By aiding guerrillas’ domestic supply lines, enslaved people gained information that could prove their enslaver’s disloyalty. Aware that such information could be exchanged with US officers in return for freedom papers, enslaved people across Missouri seized the opportunity to escape. In effect, their actions created a second supply line, one that moved information out of Missouri’s slaveholding households and onto the desks of provost marshals. Enslaved people made the domestic supply line a tool of resistance and redefined the relationship between the army and Black refugees in Missouri.