Nebraska has no Civil War battlegrounds.
It wasn't even a state during the war.
Perhaps these facts explain why many think, in the larger story of the Civil War, Nebraska deserves no more than a footnote.
James Potter challenges that view.
Ever read an 80,000-word footnote?
The Chadron historian recently completed a book with the working title "Standing Firmly By the Flag: Nebraska Territory, the Civil War, and the Coming of Statehood, 1861-1867." The University of Nebraska Press intends to publish the volume next year.
"I think they're going to be surprised to see how much Nebraska and the war are connected," he said.
For starters, the political conflict behind the creation of the Nebraska and Kansas territories culminated in the shots fired on Fort Sumter 150 years ago this Tuesday. The same factors created the Republican Party and led to the political rebirth of a prairie lawyer from Illinois.
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Some 3,000 residents of the territory served on battlefields, with perhaps 240 giving their lives to the fight, to accidents or to disease. After the war, Nebraska became the first territory to gain statehood, in 1867.
In between, the same debates over slavery, emancipation, rebellion and unification ensued in Nebraska Territory as they did in the North and the South. All the while, the westward expansion continued, generating conflict between gold miners, settlers and Natives who refused to passively accept the invasion of their homelands.
It's a story populated by federals and freed slaves, copperheads and Jayhawkers, Omahas and Arapahos and newly minted Americans who spoke English, German, Russian, Spanish, French, Swedish, Polish and Czech.
"I think it's a great human story," Potter said. "I think the Civil War is one of the central stories of the American narrative and Nebraskans ought to understand the state's role in it."
The Kansas-Nebraska Act
The acrimony over slavery in the early to mid 1800s played out as a struggle between expansion and containment. Southern politicians worked to keep an equal number of slave and free states, maintain a balance of power and therefore preserve the horrific institution for economic and so-called cultural reasons.
They struck the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which allowed Missouri to become a slave state while Maine was made a free state. It also prohibited slavery in the northern territorial lands of the Louisiana Purchase. But the addition of new territories and states to the expanding nation meant the compromise could not last.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 represented the tipping point. The act not only created its namesake territories for the purposes of building a transcontinental railroad, but it also allowed settlers in those territories to decide whether to allow slavery.
The struggle between free-soil Jayhawkers and pro-slavery, bushwacking infiltrators from Missouri played out violently in "Bleeding Kansas." But not so in Nebraska, which was primarily settled by Euroamericans who arrived via free states such as Iowa and Illinois, Potter said.
The 1860 Census counted 28,841 white residents in the territory, most of whom lived along the Missouri River in settlements such as Tekamah, Omaha, Nebraska City and Brownville. Only 15 slaves were noted in the count.
"Nobody really expected slavery to flourish in Nebraska," Potter said. In 1861, the territorial Legislature made it official and prohibited slavery.
Another important effect of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was it led to the creation of the anti-slavery Republican Party, Potter said. It also split the Democratic Party into northern and southern factions, which opened a path for the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860. His election was quickly followed by secession of southern states.
The first shots were fired on April 12, 1861, in South Carolina.
"There's a lot to be said for the Kansas-Nebraska Act throwing fuel onto the fire that ignited the Civil War."
The War
The president called for volunteers to put down the rebellion, Potter said. Nebraska Territory responded in two significant ways.
In summer 1861, the First Nebraska Volunteer Infantry mustered 1,000 men in Omaha. By early 1862, the regiment joined Gen. U.S. Grant's campaign to take confederate Forts Henry and Donelson in western Tennessee, Potter said.
"The First Nebraska reached Fort Donelson on Feb. 14 and the next day helped repulse a desperate Confederate charge to break through Union lines," he wrote. "This defeat forced the Confederates to surrender on Feb. 16, 1862, the first major Union victory of the war."
Weeks later, soldiers of the First Nebraska also fought at Shiloh in southern Tennessee, at the time the largest battle of the war. The Union won a close victory and the First Nebraska earned praise from division commander Gen. Lew Wallace, who later became famous for writing the bestseller "Ben-Hur."
The 1st Nebraska served in assorted Union forts, sometimes engaging with smaller bands of rebels and guerrilla fighters in Missouri and Arkansas. It was ordered to become a cavalry unit in 1863.
In 1864, the 1st Nebraska returned to the territory and was stationed at Fort Kearny, where it was assigned to guard road ranches and stagecoaches from Native raiders along the Platte Valley.
Other Nebraskans volunteered to serve with Union regiments from Iowa, Kansas and Missouri throughout the war. And four companies of Nebraska cavalrymen, called the "Nebraska Battalion," joined troops from Iowa, Minnesota and Missouri to form what was later called the 5th Iowa Volunteer Cavalry. The unit fought in many battles in the South.
Some women from the territory accompanied their husbands and served as nurses in combat zones. Over time, Nebraska units were joined by a few former slaves, mostly as cooks, but who also accompanied the Nebraskans back to the territory.
A few settlers even left the territory to join the Confederate Army.
Some 3,000 men from the Nebraska Territory, about one-third of those eligible, served in the war. About 239 Nebraska soldiers lost their lives, although probably fewer than 50 died in combat, Potter said.
The home front
Although the territory was officially abolitionist, plenty of residents shared views sympathetic to the secessionist cause.
Potter found instances where men were reported to have left saloons and yelled, "Three cheers for Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee."
"They were thrown in jail and made to take the Union Oath of Allegiance," he said.
But even so-called Union supporters could face the wrath of the crowd. In Nebraska City, several Jayhawkers, often thieves and robbers parading as an anti-slavery vigilante band, were captured.
"...one of them was shot dead, and another thrust beneath the Missouri River ice," Potter wrote.
Political debates over the war roiled in the territory as well. Many Nebraska Democrats felt the war should stop at restoring the union, but not freeing slaves. They wanted to go back to the status quo before the rebellion. Some of these Democrats were labeled "copperheads," a term that designated them as Southern sympathizers.
Perhaps the most well-known copperhead was J. Sterling Morton of Nebraska City, now recognized as the founder of Arbor Day. Although not a slaveholder, Morton decried the Jan. 1, 1863, Emancipation Proclamation and criticized other policies of the commander-in-chief, Potter said.
The Aftermath
During the war, Lincoln selected the Platte Valley as the route for the Transcontinental Railroad. Construction of the railroad would forever change the face of Nebraska.
So would the Homestead Act of 1862. After the war, Union veterans could deduct their years of service from the homestead obligation, which attracted so many to Nebraska it became known as "the soldiers' state," Potter said.
As Nebraska stood on the verge of statehood in 1866, voters approved a state constitution that limited voting to white men only. Congress required removal of the voting restriction before granting statehood, which happened on March 1, 1867.
"Henceforth, Congress and not the states would control suffrage and other civil rights," Potter wrote.
The war also had a lasting effect on Nebraska's political landscape, as Republicans dominated for 30 years.
There's more than enough good material about the Civil War and Nebraska to fill the space between two book covers.
It's certainly more than a footnote.