The Story of a Border City During the Civil War

St. Louis in 1860 was a city holding its breath. Perched on the fault line between North and South, it harbored both Union loyalists and Confederate sympathizers within the same streets, sometimes the same families. Galusha Anderson arrived as a young Baptist pastor in 1858 and remained through the war's most violent convulsions, witnessing a city that could not decide what it was becoming. This is his account: not a historian's distant analysis but a pastor's anxious journal transformed into memoir. Anderson moved through St. Louis's churches and boarding houses, its political meetings and military camps, recording the fears and contradictions of a border community facing the unthinkable. He documents the escalating tensions, the violent confrontations between Union troops and state militia, the pro-Southern mobs and the Union loyalists who fought to keep the city from splintering. What emerges is an unpartisan chronicle of a city at war with itself, told by a man who preached forgiveness while watching his neighbors tear each other apart. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the Civil War felt from inside a community that had to pick a side while the whole world was watching.