T. J. Stiles
Page 9
Even after all this, however, it still seemed as if war in Missouri would be averted. On May 21, General Price signed a truce with Lyon’s military superior, General William S. Harney. Harney wished to avoid further bloodshed, while Price and Jackson wanted more time to prepare their troops.17 But Frank Blair pulled strings in Washington (including the one attached to his brother Montgomery, the new postmaster general): he had Harney removed, leaving the decisive Lyon in charge. On Monday, June 11, 1861, Lyon confronted Jackson and Price in a tense meeting at the luxurious Planter’s House hotel in St. Louis. Missouri, he told them, could not be neutral, let alone Confederate. “Better, sir, far better,” he thundered, “that the blood of every man, woman, and child within the limits of the State should flow, than that she should defy the Federal government. This means war.” They had one hour to leave the city, he told them. Then he turned and stormed out of the room.18
Now Jesse and his family waved good-bye to Frank as he marched off to war in the second week of June. He was an amateur indeed. He and his ragged band from Centerville, like the rest of the army they joined, wore no uniforms. Officers pinned bits of calico to their shirts to designate their rank. Even Price rode about in a dirty white flannel suit, a “stout farmer-looking old gentleman,” in the words of one militiaman. Many of the rebel troops Frank met did not have a gun.19
After the Clay County recruits crossed the Missouri River on June 13 to rendezvous with Price, the Samuel family waited for news of the war. Word came that Lyon had swept out of St. Louis; that he had seized Jefferson City; that he had routed the State Guard at Boonville. As Jackson and Price hastily retreated toward Arkansas, it became clear that secessionist feeling in the rest of Missouri was not what it was in Clay County. A pitiful six thousand men had responded to the governor’s call for fifty thousand volunteers.20
But how quickly the fortunes of war can change. One moment, it appeared that Lyon had won control of Missouri with a swift, brilliantly executed campaign; the next moment, Price’s victorious army was marching back to the welcoming arms of Clay County. The turnaround began on August 10, when Lyon attacked the camp of Price and Confederate general Ben McCulloch along Wilson’s Creek in southwestern Missouri. The secessionists stood firm and soundly thrashed the Union army. The battered Federals retreated to the northeast, less hundreds of casualties, including Lyon, struck down on the field.
In the days following, Price marched north with the State Guard, gathering recruits along the way. With him came Private Frank James, veteran soldier of a conquering army that would soon drive the Union from the soil of Missouri.21
IN THE BUOYANT days of early 1861, towns and villages of the North and South united in military fervor. Neighbors and lifelong friends joined regiments together; women strung bunting from houses and storefronts; children and older citizens lined the streets as the young men marched to war. But in Missouri, things were different: neighbors eyed each other with suspicion; lifelong friends joined rival military companies; women divided between those who sewed U. S. flags and those who made state and Confederate banners. It would not take much to transform these differences of opinion into widespread bloodshed.
Treason has long been considered the unforgivable crime. To the secessionists of western Missouri, the traitors were those who refused to rebel—and so they swept the Unionists from their villages and fields as General Price marched north in the blistering days of August and September 1861. In the town of Savannah, nestled against the Kansas border in Andrew County, secessionists organized themselves into regiments after the victory at Wilson’s Creek. Swaggering down country roads, they began to intimidate their neighbors, taking what they wanted from the stores in town. “Some of us in Savannah, who were Union men, fought it as long as we could with words,” reported John R. Carter. “Some 300 came into town, raised a secesh flag and made a big yell over it.” Carter joined a company of local men who pledged to fight the rebels. But the secessionists, he said, “were too strong for us; we retreated towards the Iowa line.”22
“When the war broke out rebels ruled this town,” newspaper editor Charles Monroe Chase later said of St. Joseph. “More than half of her citizens were genuine secesh, and it was only after the severest military discipline that Unionism triumphed.” But it took time to recruit, train, and deploy Union soldiers. In the meantime, loyal citizens suffered. “Old man Brinton told me,” said another St. Joseph Unionist, “that myself and all men of my principles had got to leave this country in a few days.”23
All across the state, armed rebels instituted what James H. Moss called a “reign of terror” against their neighbors, driving columns of refugees into St. Louis, Kansas City, and neighboring states. The ruts and roads of Jackson County carried an exodus west as early as July 1861. Wagons filled with loyal families crossed into Kansas; in Independence, four men barely escaped hanging when they tried to enlist in the Federal army. Halfway through the month, fighting erupted. Hundreds of local Unionists, led by Kansas City businessman Robert T. Van Horn (and aided by 45 Kansas militiamen under Charles “Doc” Jennison) battled 350 secessionists in Morristown and Harrisonville.24
When General Price besieged the Union garrison in Lexington on the southern bank of the Missouri River on September 13, a tsunami of rebel enthusiasm swept Clay County. “At the start of the rebellion, the people of Clay were a unit for the Union,” commented loyalist F. R. Long, with some exaggeration, “but in the fall and winter of 1861 … it was quite the other way.” By the time Price reached the Missouri, he estimated that “firmly three-quarters of our people were disloyal.” Unionist merchant Edward M. Samuel thought the situation was even worse: of 2,000 voters, he could number only 150 to 200 loyal men.25 Secessionists formed committees in every township to gather supplies for Price’s army. Fresh recruits filled the ranks of new companies that crossed the river to join the siege of Lexington. Still others galloped with loaded guns to the homes of those few loyal men still living in the area.
“There were organized bands in the county at that time,” recalled O. P. Moss, the brother of Whig leader James H. Moss, “and we received information that the two Mosses, [James M.] Jones, and [Edward M.] Samuel must be got out of the way.” And so, “persecuted and driven from our county,” these outspoken Unionists fled to Caldwell County; behind them, the secessionists helped themselves to their horses and possessions for the benefit of Price’s army.26
How could civil society collapse so quickly? Many historians explain it away with a deus ex machina: Outsiders did it. “The most direct factor” leading to violence in the state, wrote Richard S. Brownlee, “lay in the abuses visited upon the civil population of Missouri by the Union military forces.” Invading Kansas troops, writes William E. Parrish, “found it impossible to think of Missourians as anything other than … natural enemies.”27
But, in fact, most Missourians had little or no contact with Union forces during the summer and fall of 1861. There were only a few thousand Federal troops in the state at that time, most of them collected into large camps to guard railroads and cities and to fight the main rebel army. Clay County, for example, experienced one brief raid in June, followed by limited incursions in September and December; none lasted more than three or four days. As for the Kansans, they had yet to make their presence felt, nor were they entirely indiscriminate. Jennison’s Seventh Kansas Cavalry Regiment did not move to Kansas City in force until November. His previous forays into Jackson County were made in coordination with local Unionists, in pursuit of existing rebel units. Indeed, the classic version of how rebellion rose in Missouri has it backward: most counties swung toward secessionism when the Union seemed weakest, when Union troops were farthest away. Nor was the rebellion largely a reaction to Lyon’s hasty attack on the state militia in St. Louis, though it certainly gave Southern partisans a boost.28
In truth, the secessionist movement was a force of its own, part of a drama that predated the war, that pitted Missourian against Missourian, with Federal f
orces appearing on the scene after the action had begun. “The germ lies in the troubles of 1855, relating to Kansas,” said John R. Carter. “The pro-slavery party remained in the ascendancy,” he reported, until Union troops moved in. During this period of border ruffian supremacy, “the rabid pro-slavery men” dealt out “oppression” to their opponents. “This feud existed in that region of Missouri before the commencement of the rebellion,” concluded a committee of the state legislature. “The original Union men in that region were opposed in the older day [the 1850s] to the raids that were made into Kansas,” and so they “engendered a bitter hatred against themselves from the strong pro-slavery men.”29
The division between Unionists and secessionists emerged out of the prewar split between the old Whigs and Know-Nothings on one side, and the Blue Lodge, border ruffian Democrats on the other. Both factions had favored slavery, but the extremists had championed armed force to get their way. Their movement became a cult of violence and intolerance, and they directed much of their fury at fellow Missourians who dared to dissent. These were the men who threatened a Whig meeting in Boone County in 1855, forcing it to call for the use of arms against abolitionists; these were the men who destroyed the Parkville Industrial Luminary that same year; these were the men who nearly lynched Darius Sessions, the Know-Nothing leader in Liberty, in 1856. Their mobilization against their neighbors was the essential ingredient in Missouri’s burgeoning internal war.30
When war erupted, the proslavery fire-eaters believed that Lincoln was carrying out a secret plot to free the slaves. “The secessionists have charged that the purpose of this war was to free the negroes,” reported the St. Joseph Journal. In 1872, a leading Missouri Confederate wholeheartedly agreed. The Civil War, declared newspaper editor John N. Edwards, “was fought that slavery might live or die.” Frank James and his fellow recruits expressed this idea when they said that they aimed to keep Missouri’s “soil and institutions sacred against invasion.” They had a personal stake in the question: one study of Confederate fighters from Jackson County shows that their families were almost twice as likely to own slaves as those of other men their age; and the total number they held averaged twice that of typical local slaveowners. In the dense clouds of paranoia wafting up from the fire over Kansas, they struck first—and their first target was the Unionists among them.31
Historians have often clouded the fraternal nature of Missouri’s internal strife by calling Confederate sympathizers “Southerners.” But their opponents were just as Southern, having been born in Missouri, Kentucky, and other slave states. Indeed, some of the men who fought hardest for the Union, in Clay County and elsewhere, owned slaves. Better is the term “secessionist,” or, to use the nickname of the times, “secesh.” The rift between the two sides was ideological rather than cultural or geographic. The secesh believed that slavery was under threat, and that it was more important than the nation itself. The loyalists did not see any danger to the peculiar institution, and in any case they cherished the sanctity of the Union above all else. “I am a Union man by nature,” wrote one man in Saline County, a slaveholding stronghold, and he spoke for many on his side. But Missouri’s Unionists faced a looming contradiction between their acceptance of slavery and their patriotism. As the war progressed, they would eventually divide among themselves between those who embraced emancipation and those who resisted.32
In the meantime, a large percentage of the population swung between the poles of Unionism and secession, suspended between their conflicting feelings of patriotism, affinity for the South, and fear of the consequences of taking sides. But this middle segment of the people was not inert. It shifted back and forth as the currents of war carried one side or the other toward victory. In those counties where slavery was insignificant, many people had only a limited notion of themselves as Southerners, and loyalty reigned more or less unchallenged. These areas helped make Missouri overall a predominantly loyal state. But in Clay and other bastions of slave-holding society, the situation was much more volatile.33 First the people there voted for Unionist James H. Moss to represent them in the convention on secession; later, as Price marched north, they acquiesced as the rebels prodded Moss out of Liberty with their rifle barrels.
And there was one other strand in this tearing social fabric: the slaves. With the chaos of war erupting around them, slaveholders eyed their human property nervously, while slaves themselves watched for opportunities that could lead to freedom.
AS GENERAL PRICE ordered trenches to be dug around the Union forces in Lexington on September 14, 1861, those opportunities looked distant indeed. The Federal cause was in chaos. The main U. S. army had been thrashed at Manassas, Virginia. The victorious State Guard had already reconquered almost half of Missouri. The capture of Lexington, just downstream from Clay County, would give Price control of the most important river town between Jefferson City and the western border.34
At sunset on September 16, as rain clouds cleared overhead, Jesse James, just fourteen, had his first chance to see the enemy: five hundred sodden recruits of the Third Iowa Infantry Regiment, who tramped into Centerville and camped for the night. By sunrise they were gone. Later that day, south of Liberty, they clashed briefly with a few State Guard regiments that were ferrying over the river to aid General Price. On September 21, they marched away, leaving Clay County to its own devices once again.35
Jesse’s family awaited information about the battle taking shape at Lexington. If Price succeeded, the entire state of Missouri might fall into the hands of the Confederacy. For all anyone knew, it would force Lincoln to accept the South’s independence, in light of earlier rebel victories. After all, no one expected the war to last much longer. Then came the ecstatic news: Lexington had fallen on September 20, the day before the Union troops evacuated Liberty.
But, without a single battle, the momentum suddenly shifted. On September 26, Federal commander General John C. Frémont moved west from St. Louis with thirty-eight thousand troops. He soon arrived at Sedalia, southeast of Lexington, threatening to trap the rebels against the river. Price had no choice but to abandon his prize, setting out on September 29 for the southwestern corner of the state. The days of great marches and battles in Missouri came to an end, and they would not return for three years, when Price would once again look down from the bluffs of Lexington. (When that moment finally came, Jesse would be there to welcome him back, sitting astride a horse with a half-dozen revolvers in his belt.)36
As the hopes of the Samuel family rose and plunged with Price’s fortunes, their lives changed in profound ways. With the South’s cotton fields fenced off by war, the hemp market collapsed; if Reuben and Zerelda had not already shifted their fields to tobacco before Fort Sumter, they certainly did so afterward. An adult male slave tended the farm. He would have been a bargain: after reaching an all-time high in 1860, prices for human beings plummeted once war broke out.37
The news from St. Louis that arrived each week in the Liberty Tribune also reflected change. With Governor Jackson in exile and the legislature dissolved, the only elected body still in existence was the convention on secession. It had reconvened in July 1861 and duly assumed power as a provisional government, electing its presiding officer, Hamilton R. Gamble, as governor. A firm Unionist, an old Whig, and the only member of the state supreme court to have voted to free Dred Scott, Gamble had the stature necessary to win public confidence under these strange and trying conditions. Though a strong minority of state residents still gave their allegiance to Jackson, most (perhaps two-thirds) accepted the self-appointed provisional government and its distinguished head. Lincoln quickly recognized Gamble and his regime, happy to have a loyal government in the state.38
As a conservative man grappling with a revolutionary situation, however, Gamble had to struggle to moderate the growing anger of loyal Missourians against their secessionist neighbors. “To bargain, temporize,” or “talk soft to traitors,” argued Unionists in the town of Mexico, “is like using the same
on water to persuade it to run uphill.”39
Even more troubling for Gamble were the steps now taken by the military command. On August 30, Frémont declared martial law in Missouri. He warned that civilians who aided the rebellion would be shot—and he announced the emancipation of all slaves of active rebels in the state. (Lincoln soon forced the general to rescind the lines relating to slavery.) It was an earth-shattering step. Never before had a state been placed under the control of the armed forces; the idea was so new that Lincoln himself mistakenly referred to “military law” instead of “martial law.” Missouri was a complicated case, the scene of both outright rebellion and Unionist fervor, with a functioning, but ad hoc, loyal government. But the president merely insisted that no civilians be shot without a White House review of each case, and he cautioned against capital punishment lest the rebels retaliate in kind.40
For the first time in American history, military commissions began to prosecute U. S. civilians. The inaugural trial took place on September 5, when Joseph Aubuchon was found guilty of having “an attitude of open rebellion.” A network of provost marshals, headquartered in St. Louis, began gradually to spread across the state, taking responsibility for ferreting out rebellion in the civilian population. By the end of the war, Missouri would see 46.2 percent of all the recorded military trials of civilians—almost 45 percent more than the army conducted in all eleven Confederate states combined.41