by Bruce Catton
What Virginia had done the border states might possibly do, and if they did the game was probably lost beyond recall.
Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri were slave states of divided sentiment, many people strong for secession, many more equally strong for the Union. With the western part of Virginia — where, it was beginning to appear, most people were unhappy over the state’s act of secession — these states lay in a long wide ribbon, reaching from tidewater to the Nebraska country. This ribbon might swing either way. If it swung south, then the Confederacy’s frontier lay along the Ohio River and the Mason and Dixon line, southern Indiana and Illinois could probably be pinched off, Washington itself would be wholly surrounded by hostile territory, and the Unionists’ task would be hopeless. On the other hand, if this area stayed with the Union, the way was open for a thrust straight into the heart of the Confederacy. The whole war might well be determined by what happened in the border states, and there the only certainty was that whatever happened was going to happen rather quickly.
Things came to a head first in Maryland. On April 19, less than a week after the surrender of Fort Sumter, the first of the new militia regiments to go to Washington, 6th Massachusetts, gay in its new uniforms, marched cross-town through Baltimore to change trains and got into a street fight with a mob of furiously secessionist civilians. Brickbats and paving stones were thrown, pistols were fired, soldiers fired their muskets; militiamen and civilians were killed, and southern sympathizers in and near the city came storming out in wild anger, destroying bridges so that no more of the despised Yankee regiments could profane their city. Temporarily the capital’s connections with the North were broken.
The Lincoln government wasted no time. The appeal of the Unionist-minded governor of Maryland, Thomas H. Hicks, that no more troops be sent through Baltimore, was complied with — it had to be, for a while, since the bridges were gone — but a heavy hand came down hard on the Maryland secessionists. A shifty, cross-eyed Massachusetts lawyer-politician named Benjamin Butler appeared in major general’s uniform with troops at his command, and after he had restored northern communications with Washington by way of Annapolis, he moved up and occupied Federal Hill, overlooking downtown Baltimore. The city’s mayor and nineteen members of the state legislature (which had just denounced the unholy war upon the South) were thrown into jail, along with a good many indignant citizens. When Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney issued a writ of habeas corpus to set one of these free, President Lincoln blandly ignored it. Eastern Maryland, where secessionist sentiment ran the strongest, was firmly held by Federal troops — and, all in all, by mid-May or a bit later the government had things pretty well in hand. The Supreme Court had indeed been flouted, the Constitution had been stretched, perhaps even broken (depending on one’s point of view), scores of people were being held in prison without due process of law, and an ardent son of Maryland was writing a flaming war poem, apostrophizing his state with the cry: “The despot’s heel is on thy shore!” No matter. Maryland was not going to go out of the Union, and what Maryland might have done if all of the legal niceties had been observed made no difference at all.1
The new administration, in other words, was not afraid to act. Yet it knew how to walk softly and speak in a soothing voice, as well, and while it was inflicting Ben Butler and unfeeling Yankee militia on eastern Maryland it was being most scrupulously considerate and correct just a little farther west.
As far as western Virginia was concerned, to be sure, the administration had very little to worry about. The people beyond the mountains owned few slaves and had no great admiration for the tidewater aristocracy, and Virginia had hardly seceded from the Union when they began casting about for means to secede from Virginia. For the moment, Washington needed to do nothing about them except indicate approval and stand by to lend a helping hand when necessary. But in Kentucky things were very different.
Kentucky needed very delicate handling. Its governor, Beriah Magoffin, had flatly refused to send troops to Washington for “the wicked purpose” of subduing the South and was known as a secessionist. The legislature, however, was Unionist, or largely so, and when the Confederates invited Governor Magoffin to send them some troops he had to decline, on the ground that it was beyond his power to do so. Then he issued a proclamation announcing that Kentucky would be wholly neutral in this war, and both factions within the state sat back to wait each other out, to jockey for position, and in general to see what would happen next.
It seemed fairly clear that most Kentuckians favored the Union. But it was equally clear that this was no time to jiggle Kentucky’s elbow, since any abrupt coercive move might turn everything upside down. For the time being both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were happy enough to let Kentucky be neutral if that was what Kentucky wanted.
What Kentucky would finally do, in fact, would probably depend a great deal on what Missouri did; and although the situation in Missouri was almost fantastically complicated, with a great many factors at issue, Missouri’s decision — as this fateful month of April drew toward its close — was going to be affected very powerfully by a sandy-whiskered, wiry, blue-eyed little captain of regular infantry named Nathaniel Lyon.
Born in Connecticut, Lyon was forty-two; an intense, pugnacious character who from childhood had wanted only to be a soldier. Graduating from West Point in 1841, he had taken into the army a strong detestation for higher mathematics — the calculus, he insisted, “lies outside the bounds of reason” and had doubtless been invented by someone of disordered imagination — and an orthodox faith in the Democratic party. This latter stayed with him through the Mexican War, in which he was wounded and got a brevet captaincy for bravery in action, and led him to vote for Franklin Pierce in the presidential election of 1852. The faith withered and died, however, in the mid-fifties, when he was assigned to duty at Fort Riley, Kansas, and saw the Border Ruffians in action. He became an ardent Free-Soiler, wrote pro-Lincoln pieces for a Kansas paper in 1860, and by the beginning of 1861 he was declaring that he would rather have war than see “the great rights and hopes of the human race expire before the arrogance of the secessionists.” He was also hoping that he might be transferred from the frontier to some spot where he could enjoy “the legitimate and appropriate service of contributing to stay the idiotic, fratricidal hands now at work to destroy our government.”2
He was transferred to St. Louis, which, as it developed, was just the place where his dream could come true. In St. Louis he met Francis P. Blair, Jr., the one man in the state who could give him the leverage with which he could act to the best effect.
Blair was one of the Blairs of Maryland, son and namesake of Andrew Jackson’s trusted adviser of the long ago, brother of Montgomery Blair, who sat in Lincoln’s cabinet; a powerful man of strong opinions, almost unlimited political influence in Washington, and a passion equal to Lyon’s own. He had been a principal organizer of the Republican party in Missouri; working closely with the anti-slavery, pro-Unionist German population in St. Louis, he had set up a little committee of public safety which, although entirely unofficial, was nevertheless relied on by Lincoln as a potential action arm in case matters came to a showdown. He and Lyon — who, technically, was on the scene merely to command a company of regulars in the U. S. Arsenal — quickly discovered that they could work together. They shared many traits, among them a conviction that what was going on in the country was in fact a revolution, and an instinctive feeling that a time of revolution was no time for crippling legalisms.
The legalisms would not bother them very much. Governor of Missouri was Claiborne Jackson, strongly secessionist, who tried to get a state convention to take the state out of the Union, saw the convention controlled by a Unionist majority, and was quietly waiting for a more favorable turn of events. Like Blair, he kept his eyes on the arsenal. It contained sixty thousand muskets, a million and a half ball cartridges, a number of cannon, and some machinery for the manufacture of arms. If the secessionists could seiz
e it they could equip a whole army and control the entire state. To prevent such a seizure there was nothing much but Blair’s iron determination and the presence of energetic little Captain Lyon.
Pulling wires that led to Washington, Blair moved to make the arsenal safe. Lyon’s superior officer there seemed to feel that if the state government should call on him to surrender the arsenal he could do nothing except comply, so Blair had him transferred to other parts, and defense of the arsenal was entrusted to Lyon. Top Federal commander at St. Louis was Brigadier General W. S. Harney, a hard-boiled old Indian-fighting regular who was thoroughly loyal to the Union but who could not make himself believe that Governor Jackson actually meant any harm. Blair sent more messages to Washington, and late in April — after Fort Sumter had been surrendered, after Governor Jackson flatly refused to raise troops for war against the Confederacy — Harney was suddenly called to Washington. (En route the old soldier managed to get himself captured by Confederates when his train stopped at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, where a thriving government arsenal had just been taken over by Virginia troops. The experience prolonged Harney’s absence from St. Louis and may have given him a new insight into the things that could happen to government property in a time of crisis.)3
In his absence command of everything in and around St. Louis devolved on Lyon, who then got as extraordinary a set of instructions from the War Department as any mere infantry captain ever received. To maintain order and defend national property he was empowered at his discretion to enroll up to ten thousand citizens of St. Louis and vicinity in the military service. (These could be none other than Blair’s Germans, who had been zealously drilling, often with Captain Lyon’s aid, in Turnverein halls all winter.) In addition, Lyon was told that if he, Blair, and Blair’s committee of public safety thought it necessary he could proclaim martial law.
Decidedly, this was stretching military regulations past what would ordinarily be considered the breaking point. Old Lorenzo Thomas, lanky and crotchety adjutant general of the army, was seen coming out of a White House conference on the matter looking very grave and shaking his head dolefully. “It’s bad, very bad,” he said. “We’re giving that young man Lyon a great deal too much power in Missouri.” General Winfield Scott, older and more decayed than Thomas but much more able to see to the heart of things, took it in stride. Across the bottom of Lyon’s instructions he scribbled: “It is revolutionary times, and therefore I do not object to the irregularity of this.”4
Not long thereafter things began to happen.
Governor Jackson called out some seven hundred troops of the state militia and put them into camp on the edge of St. Louis — for routine instruction, said the militia commander; to seize the government arsenal and take Missouri out of the Union, said Blair and Lyon. Lyon began swearing the Germans into U.S. service. It was hard to do this regularly, since in the ordinary course of things a state government formally offered troops to the Federal government; offered them, and looked after their clothing, pay, and equipment. None of this could happen in the case of the Germans, but they were sworn in anyway, larger irregularities having already been swallowed. Then Lyon reflected that Harney would sooner or later be getting back from Washington and decided that it was time to take steps.
His first step was to have a look at the state militia camp. He was an unlikely character for the part of female impersonator, but it seems that he tried it: dressed up in black bombazine dress, sunbonnet, and heavy veils (the better to hide his bristling whiskers), he rode through the camp in a rustic buggy, a basket of eggs in his lap, like any farm woman who had come in to bring some extra rations to a soldier son. Hidden beneath the eggs in the basket were half a dozen loaded revolvers, just in case. Lyon saw what there was to see, including company streets named after Jefferson Davis, Beauregard, and other Confederate heroes, and then he hurried back to the arsenal, where he called Blair and the committee of public safety into meeting. Shedding sunbonnet and bombazine and regaining the dignity of a proper army officer, Lyon announced that on his tour of the camp he had seen, through the veils and over the eggs, Missouri militiamen with weapons in their hands — weapons which, as he detected, had recently been taken by Louisiana insurgents from a government arsenal at Baton Rouge and which therefore rightly belonged to the Federal government. It was necessary, said Lyon, to occupy the camp, hold the militiamen as prisoners of war, and recover all of this government property forthwith.
This touched off an argument. Two members of the committee insisted that things ought to be done legally; if Captain Lyon wanted the munitions which were held by the militia and could show that these did in fact belong to the Federal government, let him go to court and get a writ of replevin.… But Blair and the others rode them down. The government had lost a number of arsenals in the last few weeks by clinging to legalities while men with guns in their hands went out and took what they wanted. The same thing could happen in St. Louis; if it did, the Union cause was as good as done for — and, as Lyon remarked, whatever was done had better be done quickly because Harney would be back any day now and he was unlikely to do anything at all, since he believed that a state governor had every right to camp his militia in his own state when and where he chose.5
Winfield Scott had said it; the times were revolutionary, and there was no sense in quibbling over irregularities. So on the morning of May 10, Captain Lyon marched out with several thousand troops — a few companies of regulars, plus various regiments of the recently enrolled German guards — surrounded the militia camp, and demanded its surrender.
Things went smoothly enough at first. General D. M. Frost was the militia commander. He made formal protest and statement of innocence, then gave in to superior force. Lyon marched two companies of regulars into camp, disarmed the seven hundred militiamen, seized a number of cannon, twelve hundred muskets, twenty-five kegs of powder, and odds and ends of military equipment — some of it, he noted darkly, bearing the stamp of the Baton Rouge arsenal — and then he prepared to take the prisoners down to the arsenal where they could be paroled. What might have been done with bailiffs and a writ had been done by the soldiery and, it appeared, had been done peacefully and in good order.
The trouble began when Lyon himself was knocked down by the kicking and plunging of an unruly horse. He was not badly hurt but he was stunned and out of action for a few minutes. He had nobody in particular for staff officers, and until he was himself again the proceedings came to a halt. This was unfortunate, because a crowd began to gather: a passionately secessionist crowd, which waved sticks, threw stones, and called down curses on the heads of the German home guards. (One of these regiments called itself “Die Schwarze Garde,” which the sidewalk demonstrators translated freely as “Damned Dutch blackguards.”) By the time Lyon finally had things moving — prisoners marching in column, with files of troops on both sides and armed detachments moving ahead and in the rear — he was at the storm center of a revolving mob which was likely to break out in open violence at any moment.
Some chance spark touched it off, as usually happens in such cases. A drunk tried to force his way through the military cordon, damning the Dutch, and was bounced back with unnecessary verve. Various people had been waving pistols for some time, and one of these pistols was fired, a soldier fired in reply, and presently there was a regular riot, with shots and screams and curses and the scuffling of heavy feet on the cobblestones, smoke billowing up past the house tops — and, in the end, with twenty-eight people lying dead and many more badly hurt.6
The militia had been disarmed, the lost government property had been reclaimed, the threat to the security of the arsenal had been lifted — and authentic civil war had gone raging through the streets of St. Louis, just as it had raged through the streets of Baltimore a few weeks earlier. There was a portent in it, a significance easy to overlook: in this war between the sections the first serious battles, producing bloodshed and corpses, were battles between soldiers and civilians, on city streets, at opp
osite ends of the long belt of border states. Regular troop action could come later; it all began with men in uniform fighting men not in uniform.
Harney got back to St. Louis in a couple of days and tried to pick up the pieces. He ordered the German troops out of the city, proposed to Frank Blair that they be disbanded — apparently not realizing that in this highly irregular war they had already been sworn into Federal service — and then he tried to work out a truce with the state authorities.
Commander of Missouri troops now was General Sterling Price, former governor of the state, a Virginia-born Mexican War veteran, a stout, serious-minded man of vast personal popularity. He was raising state troops, apparently for eventual use against United States troops; he was also conferring with the general commanding the United States troops, and out of this curious conference there came presently something along the lines of a cease-fire agreement. Both state and national forces would try to keep order and prevent bloodshed, the defense of the rights and property of all Missourians would be the concern of both sides, and any evilly disposed persons who tried to make trouble would be squelched; on this uneasy agreement perhaps the peace could be kept in Missouri.
But to men like fiery Nathaniel Lyon the keeping of the peace was the last thing that mattered. This truce (as Lyon saw it) had been arranged with men who favored secession — favored it, and would strike for it the moment they saw a good chance; the only possible thing to do with such people was to smite them hard and at once, and to treat with them at all was to come mortally close to recognizing the right of secession. Lyon fumed and wrote that “the Government seems unwilling to resist those who would cut its throat, for fear of exasperating them.” Blair wrote some more letters to Washington, and two documents soon after this came west — one, a brigadier general’s commission for Captain Lyon, the other a White House writ to Frank Blair giving him the power to remove General Harney if he saw fit.7