re: Do you consider Arkansas and Missouri rivals?

quote:

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Their Yankee soldiers fought our Grays at Pea Ridge and Prairie Grove.

Bleeding Ar-Kansas


You didn't know this?

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The Governor of Missouri tried to move the capitol to Neosho, less than an hour from the Arkansas border.

LINK



On July 2, 1861 the Neosho State Guards under Captain Henderson Jennings assisted in the capture of the Union Army's Captain Conrad and a company of Colonel Sigel's Third Missouri Infantry Regiment, which had occupied Neosho and were quartered in the court house.

On October 21, Missouri Governor Claiborne Jackson and the pro-Southern members of the Missouri General Assembly who had been forced to flee from Jefferson City on the approach of the Union Army, held next to their last legislative session at Neosho. On October 28, 1861, they established a provisional capital in Neosho. Governor Jackson and the Missouri General Assembly met in the Masonic Hall, numbering thirty nine members of the House and ten of the Senate. They passed an ordinance of secession and the event was celebrated with cannon firing by General Sterling Price's State Guardsmen who were camped in the adjacent hills. The Confederate States government accepted the results of the vote, and Missouri was admitted as the 12th state of the Confederacy. However, the pro-Union members of the General Assembly had already convened, and supported by the occupying Union troops, had declared Jackson removed from office, as well as all who favored the South. The pro-Union members then set up a their own provisional government and appointed Hamilton R. Gamble to be governor. Missouri would have three governors during the course of the Civil War, one elected by the people (Jackson). and two appointed by the pro-Union government (Gamble and William Preble Hall).

General Price made an effort to organize a Confederate defense of Missouri and initially succeeded, but any chance for concerted pro-Southern action ended when he was defeated in March 1862 at Pea Ridge.