The women who nursed the wounded soldiers, the ministers who were appalled by slavery, Southern sympathizers whose resentment grew as the Union gained control of St. Louis filled their letters, sermons and memoirs with their feelings about what they saw in the streets of St. Louis during the Civil War. A Most Unsettled State features their words and their feelings from disturbing resentments, descriptions of political maneuverings, to moving commentaries on tragic scenes of freed slaves and of maimed soldiers. The words of native St. Louisans Jesse Benton Fremont and Julia Dent Grant along with the pronouncements of the Chief of Police, the clerks, soldiers, and General William Tecumseh Sherman are included. Sherman first saw action in the Civil War in the streets of St. Louis, as a civilian, with his seven-year-old son Willie at his side. These first hand accounts follow from the spring of 1861 when both the North and the South coveted St. Louis the City transformed becoming the staging area, hospital and machinery of the Union forces in the Western theatre.