LETTERS: MISSOURI IN CIVIL WAR

To the editor:

Tamara Zellars Buck is a fine writer, and we always enjoy her columns, especially the one in the Feb. 1 issue in which she write on the origin and nature of Ebonics. However, her Civil War history is a bit skewed when she wrote "and how Missouri is in the Midwest and was a neutral state in the Civil War."

Missouri was anything but neutral in that war. Missouri remained in the Union and furnished 110,000 volunteers to the Union Army and 33,000 volunteers to the Confederate Army. These facts are an accurate gauge of the division of loyalty to the two sides amongst Missouri's population at that time.

Missouri's state government was Unionist, and it disenfranchised male civilians who supported the Confederacy from voting and from running for elective office and from being selected for appointive office. After the war, this disenfranchisement also applied to the surviving veterans of the Confederate Army, and it lasted until 1870 when the Missouri Legislature passed an act that restored ex-Confederates to full citizenship.

ROBERT L. SMITH

Cape Girardeau