by Bruce Catton
Where the business really became complicated was in Kentucky, which was emotionally a part of the South and geographically a part of the Middle West; a tragically divided commonwealth, whose distraction was symbolized by the fact that it was the native state of Jefferson Davis, who was creating a new nation; of Abraham Lincoln, who was calling the country to arms to destroy that nation; and of Senator Crittenden, who had worn himself out all through the winter and spring trying to find a formula that would make both the new nation and its destruction by force unnecessary. Each of these men spoke for something fundamental in the state’s character, something that had become essential to the state’s personality. There was the devotion to the old South, the South of the half-unreal but magically compelling tradition, and there was also the devotion to the Federal Union and to the Northern and Western states that had drawn so many settlers from Kentucky’s soil; and there was, finally, the deep attachment to the great Henry Clay tradition of compromise and peaceful adjustment. With this last there existed, strangely, a conflicting tradition, as strong as any—the tradition of violent action, dating back perhaps to the Indian fighting that had run up and down the dark frontier like a flame, coming down through the feudists and the knife fighters and the wild young men who went armed to political caucuses and polling places. Kentucky wanted conflicting things, and what it wanted it was apt to reach out for with a muscular hand.
At the start Kentucky reached out for nothing. The firing at Fort Sumter and the summoning of troops left the state momentarily paralyzed, unable to adjust itself to the collapse of peace. Senator John C. Breckinridge, who had been the fire-eaters’ candidate for President in the last election, and whose sympathies were clearly with the Confederacy, remained in the United States Senate and hoped that outright war might yet be avoided. Senator Crittenden continued to talk of compromise and hoped that Kentucky might be the medium through which North and South could at last negotiate terms. Governor Magoffin, who had used strong words to reject Lincoln’s call, summoned the legislature in special session, saw that only a minority of the legislators shared his secessionist views, and came out at last with a proclamation of neutrality. (The United States Constitution provided for a state’s neutrality no more than it provided for a state’s secession, or for the coercion of one state by another, but the Constitution this spring was subject to all manner of extemporized interpretations. This was Governor Magoffin’s.)
“I hereby notify and warn all other states, separated or united, especially the United and Confederate States,” said the governor, addressing the legislature on May 20, “that I solemnly forbid any movement upon Kentucky soil, or occupation of any post or place therein for any purpose whatever, until authorized by invitation or permission of the legislative and executive authorities. I especially forbid all citizens of Kentucky, whether incorporated in the State Guard or otherwise, making any hostile demonstrations against any of the aforesaid sovereignties, to be obedient to the orders of lawful authorities, to remain quietly and peaceably at home, when off military duty, and refrain from all words and acts likely to provoke a collision, and so otherwise conduct that the deplorable calamity of invasion may be averted; but meantime to make prompt and efficient preparation to assume the paramount and supreme law of self-defense, and strictly of self-defense alone.”9
These were fine words if Governor Magoffin could make them stick, but the odds were against him. From the Alleghenies all the way to the Mississippi River, Federal and Confederate armies could get at each other only by crossing Kentucky, and the state’s neutrality was bound to have a short life—all the more so since this neutrality came from an even balance between opposing forces within the state rather than from a settled belief in neutrality for its own sake. At the same time, it was up to Lincoln and Davis to move with extreme care, for one false move could easily turn Kentucky from a neutral into an outright enemy, and this could be fatal. The danger was greater for the Federals. If the Ohio River should be the northern boundary of the Confederacy, Confederate independence was all but assured. Lincoln was said to have remarked that while he hoped to have God on his side, he had to have Kentucky; a little later he wrote that to lose Kentucky was about the same as to lose the whole game. Davis said, long afterward, that Kentucky might have been able to remain neutral if she had been physically stronger than either of the contestants, or if she had had a moral influence which all men would be obliged to respect. As things were—the Civil War being real, and not just a war of words—the hope to remain neutral struck Davis as “utterly impracticable.”10
The tactics by which Lincoln had compelled Maryland to remain in the Union would be ruinous in Kentucky; the state was different, the situation was different, and the administration’s program had better be different, too, as Lincoln was the first to realize. In Maryland there had been no time for delicacy or finesse. The Baltimore secessionists had put their hands on the government’s windpipe, the grip had been broken by the unabashed use of sheer power, and the administration would go to any imaginable lengths to keep that particular hand-hold from being regained. Nobody was gripping anything, in Kentucky. Direct action would spoil everything. This state had to be wooed.
The wooing would be largely negative. Officially, Lincoln would leave Kentucky strictly alone, as far as he could and as long as he could, and he saw to it that this was clearly understood. Before April ended, some of Kentucky’s leading Unionists, worried lest the policy applied in Maryland might also be used in Kentucky, sent Lincoln’s old-time friend Garrett Davis to Washington to sound the President out, and to Garrett Davis, Lincoln talked freely. He did not intend (he said) to send military or naval forces into any state unless the people of that state were in open resistance to the laws and authority of the United States. More specifically, he had in mind no military operations that would make it necessary to send troops across Kentucky. “If Kentucky,” Davis wrote to a friend in Louisville, “made no demonstration of force against the United States, he would not molest her.”11
Yet although he would abstain from molestation, Lincoln could not be inert. Jefferson Davis could take a passive attitude toward Kentucky; as long as the state remained neutral, it was a great shield for the deep South, protecting the Confederacy better than a whole cordon of forts would do. The Federal approach had to be more positive. Kentucky not only must be prevented from going over to the Confederate side; somehow, a majority of her citizens must be led to give active approval to the war for the Union.
There would be a propaganda drive, with speeches, newspaper articles, and the organization of Unionist clubs and societies. Here Lincoln could get help from one of Louisville’s influential citizens, Joshua Speed, who was his own intimate friend; also from another Louisville resident, Joseph Holt, who as Secretary of War during the final months of Buchanan’s regime had given Unionist stiffening to that unhappy man’s cabinet. And Major Robert Anderson, the hero of Fort Sumter, the regular-army officer with Southern sympathies and Unionist convictions, was by great good fortune a Kentuckian: he would be sent west, promoted, given authority to raise troops of Kentucky volunteers, but instructed to remain for the present north of the Ohio River. For the time being, at least, the state’s neutrality would be technically respected.
Respected, at any rate, on the surface. Both sides were surreptitiously, but without much genuine secrecy, trying to arm their adherents in Kentucky. Before May was over, Anderson wrote to Lincoln that he had talked to Joshua Speed, who bore a letter of introduction from the President mentioning the matter of providing arms for the faithful; “I will carefully attend to the performance of that duty,” Anderson promised. One Kentuckian who was most active in this connection was a burly, arrogant giant of a man named William Nelson, who had been a lieutenant in the navy but who believed he could better serve the Union by returning to his native state and getting Unionists there in shape to fight. Nelson took leave of absence from the navy and went to Louisville without definite instructions, with the unders
tanding that he would do whatever seemed most likely to be helpful. He got 5000 stand of arms into Kentucky, working with a committee of local Unionists. When the time came to use those weapons, Nelson would resign from the navy and become a general in the army. Governor Magoffin was organizing and equipping the state militia; thousands of secessionists were enrolling, and although the militia was ostensibly preparing to defend neutrality, few people doubted that the governor wanted it to go in eventually on the Confederate side. To balance this force, home-guard units of pro-Union sentiments were being set up in towns all across central and northern Kentucky, and “Lincoln rifles” were given these levies, quietly, by night. The state was developing two sets of troops, which might or might not some day come to blows.12
… To the President of the United States, Kentucky represented a chance to atone for an earlier miscalculation. Lincoln had moved too fast in connection with the other border states; his call for troops—embodying, as it did, the conclusion that secession must be destroyed by force of arms—had cost him four states, might yet cost still more. Kentucky could perhaps be saved. Much would depend on the kind of handling it was given. Much would depend also on what happened in Missouri, the uncertain anchor of the whole border tier, its vast land mass banked up west of Kentucky and Illinois, lit now by uncertain lightning flashes of violence. Kentucky would get diplomacy and soft words, but Missouri would get the hard hand that had beaten down secession in Maryland.
4: Collapse of Legalities
Missouri might go anywhere at all. The only safe prediction was that it would produce a great deal of trouble for somebody, perhaps for both North and South together, certainly for its own people. A slave state jutting north of the old Missouri compromise line, it was a blend of the South and the Middle West, admiration for the Confederacy existing side by side with devotion to the Union. In the West there were the spirited “border ruffians” who had made life so interesting for free-state settlers during the days when Bleeding Kansas was a national problem; in St. Louis there were many thousands of unassimilated German immigrants who cared nothing for the Southern tradition and were the dedicated foes of chattel slavery. (One of the baffling factors in the Missouri situation was the fact that its Unionists included both conservative pro-slavery men and zealous abolitionists, who distrusted one another about as much as they distrusted the secessionists.) The state was so far from Washington and Montgomery that both Federal and Confederate governments had to rely on the judgment and decisions of men on the spot; and, in the luck of the draw, these included certain very forceful characters who believed in direct action.
Among them was Claiborne Jackson, the governor; tall, angular, determined, an ardent Southern-rights man in his middle fifties, with a firm, straight mouth framed by a clean-shaven upper lip and a square lower jaw fringed with whiskers that ran from ear to ear in a sweeping crescent. Jackson had been elected in the fall of 1860. A Democrat, he had supported Douglas because the Missouri Democracy was solidly in the Douglas camp, but he really belonged in the secessionist wing of the party. He tried to take Missouri out of the Union early in 1861, at the time the cotton states went out, but lost the fight when the voters, electing delegates to a state convention, chose a Unionist majority. Jackson waited, returning to the fray when Lincoln called for troops. On April 17 Jackson sent his bristling refusal to Washington; and on the same day he wrote a letter to Jefferson Davis, entrusting it to two captains in the state militia, Colton Greene and Basil W. Duke, and proposing a plan of action which might put Missouri in the Confederacy despite the unfortunate result of the recent election. (American political leaders always respect the will of the majority, but in time of crisis they sometimes have even greater respect for the way an accomplished fact can force a majority to change its mind.)
Jackson’s plan had to do with the United States arsenal in St. Louis. This institution contained a good store of weapons—probably 30,000 infantry muskets, by the best estimate, together with ammunition and other items of equipment—and if state troops controlled by a secessionist governor could get those arms, the Federal power in Missouri would be overthrown. Jackson was asking Davis for the loan of some field artillery, along with a few mortars if possible.
“Missouri,” he wrote, “has been exceedingly slow and tardy in her movements hitherto, but I am now not without hope that she will promptly take her stand with her Southern sister states. The Arsenal at St. Louis, now under the command of an abolition officer, it is feared will be greatly in our way—in the event of active hostilities being commenced against the Confederate States. To remove this obstacle it will probably become necessary to have a few large guns to batter down its walls and drive out our enemies.”1
Governor Jackson anticipated, correctly, that President Davis would be helpful, and he set about plans to use the guns the Confederacy was sending to him. A state law authorized him to call the militia into camp for drill and instruction; accordingly, the governor ordered a militia general named D. M. Frost (a good man, but a shade mild in his manner for a time like this) to get his brigade together and put it in camp on the hills overlooking the arsenal. When the guns arrived, Frost could take the arsenal and its priceless military stores.
The guns would be forthcoming. Davis wrote to Jackson admitting that “a generous but misplaced confidence has, for years past, prevented the Southern States from making the preparation required by the present emergency,” which meant that the Confederate government was short on ordnance supplies. However, two 12-pounder howitzers and two 32-pounder guns, with ammunition, were available and were being sent, and as an old soldier Davis felt they should be sufficient. “These, from the commanding hills, will be effective, both against the garrison and to breach the inclosing walls of the place,” he wrote. “I concur with you as to the great importance of capturing the arsenal and securing its supplies.… We look anxiously and hopefully for the day when the star of Missouri shall be added to the constellation of the Confederate States of America.”2
So far, so good; until the ordnance reached him, Governor Jackson was going to be most circumspect. He had called a special session of the legislature, to meet on May 3, and he would tell the legislature that although Missouri’s interest and sympathies were identical with those of the other slave states, Missouri “at this time has no war to prosecute.” It was merely necessary for the state to spend money arming for its own defense. Before the legislature met, he wrote frankly to a friend: “I do not think Missouri should secede today or tomorrow, but I do not think it good policy that I should publicly so declare. I want a little time to arm the state, and I am assuming every responsibility to do it with all possible dispatch. Missouri should act in concert with Tennessee and Kentucky. They are all bound to go out, and should go together if possible.… Nothing should be said about the time or the manner in which Missouri should go out. That she ought to go and will go at the proper time I have no doubt.”3
Thus ran the plan of Governor Jackson; perfectly feasible, carried on below the surface, with as much secrecy as was possible in a time and place where complete secrecy was all but impossible; a plan that might wreck the old Federal Union beyond repair. Working against the governor, like military engineers counter-mining far underground, were men fully as ruthless and determined, with a plan of their own.
One of these was the hard-drinking, hard-fighting Frank Blair—Francis P. Blair, Jr., son of redoubtable Old Man Blair, of Washington, brother to Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, and himself a Republican Congressman from Missouri; a man who was considered a moderate on the slavery question but who was rarely moderate on anything else. Another was the soldier whom Jackson had mentioned in his letter to President Davis as the abolitionist officer who controlled the arsenal—Captain Nathaniel Lyon, fiery, with bushy red hair and whiskers, remembered by an old army acquaintance as “wild and irregular … a man of vehement purpose and of determined action”;4 precisely the man to work under the direction of Frank Blair in a situation in wh
ich all the rules were off and no holds were barred. These two had a pretty clear idea of what Governor Jackson was up to, and to his conspiracy they erected a counter-conspiracy of their own. That neither the governor’s plan of action nor their own had any basis in ordinary legality was wholly characteristic of the atmosphere of the spring of 1861.
Blair had thought about the arsenal as promptly as Governor Jackson had, and he went into action just as soon as the Republican administration came into office—as soon, that is, as his own copper-riveted political connections with the White House would be of service. Lyon was then in command at Fort Riley, Kansas; a harsh disciplinarian, disliked by his soldiers because of the ferocious punishments he inflicted, known as a man of almost fanatical devotion to the Union.5 Blair pulled strings, and Lyon was transferred to St. Louis and made commandant of the arsenal. Blair then bethought himself of the Wide-Awakes, the Republican marching clubs that had tramped the streets, singing and chanting and carrying banners, during the presidential campaign. He had organized a number of these in St. Louis, enrolling chiefly the Germans; these he now turned into an irregular sort of home guard, and Lyon helped to give them military drill—some of the units, it was reported, put in eight hours a day at it. Since they were wholly outside the tables of State or Federal military organization, it was impossible to equip them at public expense, but uniforms and other items of the soldiers’ outfit were bought with money raised from anti-Confederates in the East. For arms, Blair kept his eye on the stacks in Captain Lyon’s arsenal.