I think a few here is fond of the old Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but looking into the actions that he did during the years into the prelude of World War 2 was really interesting. At his behest, he supplied Joseph Stalin and the whole Soviet Union of military equipment and intelligence to prepare for the Nazis. I really don't think that Americans during at the time was on board with supplying another enemy, the communists, with their own handmade products just to hold off the Reich.
Let's not get started with the internment camps he did against Americans of Japanese lineage after the Pearl Harbor attacks, how the Democrats were tight-lipped about it to this day, and the communist project that the former First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt did in Arthurdale, Virginia, that was still left untold on how many people died due to starvation on that god forsaken experiment of hers.
Minor correction, but we were actually just barely a state in time for the Civil War. Our statehood was on Jan. 29, which was a few days after the first round of secession, because many of the Southern Slave states that had been blocking our statehood were no longer there to do it.
But yeah, Kansas gets overlooked a lot in the Civil War due to the fact that we were out of the way enough to not see any major fights. But as you said, we contributed one of the largest armies as a percentage of population of any state, and IIRC we also suffered the most civilian casualties as a percentage due to said Confederate revenge raids. The Sack of Lawrence was so brutal it got the Confederate government to suspend its guerrilla program. Officially, because it was not the sort of brutality they had authorized. Unofficial, I want to believe they heard the 1st Kansas screaming “Do you bastards have a death wish?!” in the distance and feared for their safety.
That would stand to reason, Civilian casualties in the Civil War were vanishingly small. The Battle of Gettysburg incurred only one civilian death by arms, and it was an errant shell that struck a farm-house. The only other places I could see possible statistically significant civilian casualties might be in Mississippi (counter-insurgency against union occupation), West Virginia (insurrection and counter insurgency against Virginia), and Missouri (which I believe was engaged in small scale local conflicts).
It wouldn't totally surprise me. Guerrilla campaigns can spiral out of control quickly, but reprisal attacks have a nasty habit of losing all fucking control together. Even from the Japanese bias perspective of The Rape of Nanking, the commanders basically admit that they lost all command and control once the troops started engaging in executions and looting. They actually report personally trying to restore order against some specific troops that were engaging in wanton destruction, but they admit to loosing so much command and control cohesion that they were left without the ability to even stop the destruction. It is not unheard of for an army to lose all cohesion when sacking a town to the point that there is not ability to command it. I wouldn't be surprised if you told me that partisans burned Lawrence and their commanders actually lost control, and then recalled any further operations due to the fact that they weren't sure they could successfully control their own army.