Divided Kansas Joins Union on Eve of Civil War

One hundred fifty years ago Thursday, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union forces at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia.

The war that began four years earlier, on April 12, 1861, cost hundreds of thousands of lives and changed the course of a nation.

And it defined Kansas like it did no other state, said Deb Goodrich Bissel, a Kansas historian from Topeka.

“We became a state at the beginning of the war,” Goodrich Bissel said. “Our formative years are during the Civil War. The era of Bleeding Kansas led up to the war and set the tone for what the war would be in the entire nation.”