by Bruce Catton
All across the state men were choosing their sides, and many who had been tacitly supporting the Union went over to the Confederacy; among them, most importantly, Sterling Price, the state’s leading citizen, former Congressman, former governor, soldier in the Mexican War, a high-minded man of lofty ambitions—one of the “conditional Unionists” who found the conditions imposed by Frank Blair too much to stomach. He called the St. Louis affair “an unparalleled insult and wrong to the state” and pronounced for the Confederacy, and Governor Jackson promptly commissioned him a brigadier general and put him in charge of the state militia. Price took charge of the state troops that were being called up, spurred Confederate recruitment, ordered guns mounted to control navigation on the Missouri River, and sparred for time to get substantial forces organized. In southwest Missouri other secessionist levies were raised; and in the southeast corner of the state, near the great river, an energetic eccentric named M. Jeff Thompson collected several thousand informally organized guerrillas and got ready to harass the Yankees, issuing proclamations the while. (Thompson rode about his camps on a spotted stallion called Sardanapalus, attended by a huge Indian orderly named Ajax; he cruised the river periodically in a tugboat which he denominated his flagship, and wrote that the Confederate authorities could crush the St. Louis Unionists without trouble if they would just burn all the breweries and declare lager beer contraband of war; “by this means the Dutch will all die in a week and the Yankees will then run from this State.”)2
For an uneasy fortnight the Federal authorities seemed to be in a conciliatory mood. General Harney, who had been temporarily removed from his command so that Lyon could work with Blair, was returned to St. Louis, and he did his sober-minded best to restore order. He refused to disavow the capture of state troops at Camp Jackson, but he announced that he did not want to interfere in any way with the governor or other state authorities and warned that he would “suppress all unlawful combinations of men, whether formed under pretext of military organizations or otherwise.” He wanted to dissolve the German home guards, but was persuaded (by Frank Blair) that he lacked authority to do this. Then he entered into a formal truce with General Price and Governor Jackson—an odd sort of non-aggression pact, under which Federal troops would stay out of territory held by state troops, and both sides would work to preserve the peace; an excellent idea if preservation of the peace was the principal end in view, but by this time both sides had other goals. Two delegations of St. Louis Unionists hurried off to Washington to see Lincoln, one delegation urging that General Harney be sustained, the other demanding that he be thrown out.
Harney deserves a little more sympathy than he usually gets. He was an old-school army officer, completely loyal and deeply conscientious, operating now in a situation which no man of his background and training could easily understand. Rather clumsily, the War Department tried to coach him. In a letter that may have been drafted by Lincoln, the adjutant general notified Harney that despite the truce a good many Unionist citizens in Missouri were being driven from their homes by effervescent secessionists. “It is immaterial,” said the letter, “whether these outrages continue from inability or indisposition on the part of the State authorities to prevent them. It is enough that they devolve on you the duty of putting a stop to them summarily by the force under your command.” Harney was warned to take no stock in the peaceful professions of the state authorities; these men, he was told, were really disloyal and would maintain the peace only when they lacked the power to disturb it. Whatever happened, he must suppress any movement that seemed to be hostile to the Federal government. Meanwhile, unknown to Harney, Lincoln sent to Frank Blair a curious and irregular document—a paper giving to Blair full authority to remove Harney from his command whenever Blair considered it necessary. Lincoln confessed that he was not entirely satisfied with this document, doubted its propriety, and hoped that Blair would not have to use it; Harney had already been removed and then reinstated, and if he were removed once more, people would think the administration did not know its own mind. “Still,” the President concluded, “if, in your judgment, it is indispensable, let it be so.”3
Before very much time passed, Blair did consider it indispensable. He was informed that Governor Jackson had invited the governor of Arkansas to send troops into Missouri, he noticed that Confederate levies were being organized all over the state—and, on May 30, “feeling that the progress of events and the condition of affairs in this State make it incumbent upon me to assume the grave responsibility of this act,” he called on Harney, presented the letter, and told the old general that he was out, with Nathaniel Lyon, now a brigadier general, taking his place. Harney went into hurt retirement; he wrote to the adjutant general that his confidence “in the honor and integrity of General Price, in the purity of his motives and in his loyalty to the Government, remains unimpaired.” It seemed to Harney that the manner of his removal had “inflicted unmerited disgrace upon a true and loyal soldier,” and he felt that his motives had been impugned by “those who clamored for blood.” A stout Southerner living in St. Louis wrote angrily that “Frank Blair is dictator” and felt that the whole affair was simply the violent extension of a political quarrel: “The Republicans are as grandiose & sneering as if they had won a great victory. It is only a political one—they are below par socially.” From Washington, Postmaster General Montgomery Blair wrote to Frank Blair that it was “not so much disunion as hostility to the Republicans” which gave Governor Jackson most of his support, and he warned his brother “not to arrest the Union feeling by making it too visibly your property.”4
Lyon assumed his new duties on May 31, and Jackson and Price got ready for trouble. They held the machinery of state government, and they needed time to finish their preparations; and time was the one thing Lyon did not propose to let them have. The Unionists held St. Louis, with perhaps 10,000 troops at their disposal, and despite the shock caused by the Camp Jackson affair, a majority of Missourians leaned toward the Union. The Unionists had the initiative, and Lyon proposed to use it.
There were people in the state who still hoped that neutrality could be maintained, and they arranged for a meeting between Governor Jackson and General Price and General Lyon. Lyon issued a formal safe-conduct, and on June 11 Jackson and Price came to St. Louis to see him. The meeting lasted several hours and was stormy; it could hardly have been anything else, since the conferees wanted incompatible things and were men of deep conviction and strong passion. Governor Jackson offered to disband the state troops and remain neutral if the Federals would disband the St. Louis home guards and promise to move no troops into any part of the state not already occupied by Federal soldiers. Lyon hotly refused, demanding that the militia be sent home but refusing to disband the home guards, and finally saying flatly that he would see every last Missourian dead and buried before he would agree that the state government could impose any restriction whatever on the Federal authority within the state. “This means war,” he told the governor and the militia general. “One of my officers will conduct you out of my lines in an hour.”
Returning to Jefferson City, Governor Jackson tried to pick up the pieces. He began by issuing a proclamation telling the people of Missouri that the Blair-Lyon team proposed to reduce the state “to the exact condition of Maryland.” He called out 50,000 militia, and although he asserted that Missouri was still a member of the Federal Union, he insisted that its citizens were “under no obligations whatever to obey the unconstitutional edicts of the military despotism which has introduced itself at Washington, nor submit to the infamous and degrading sway of its wicked minions in this State.” He concluded: “Arise, then, and drive out ignominiously the invaders who have dared to desecrate the soil which your labors have made fruitful and which is consecrated by your homes.”5
The war was taking a fantastic shape. Missouri was still in the Union, lying outside of the direct line of fire between the two sections, a majority of its people (as far as anyone could
tell, in this state of profoundly mixed sentiments) still loyal to the Union; yet its government and the national government were fighting one another. Governor Jackson’s appraisal was accurate enough. Things were indeed following the pattern that had been set in Maryland, and there was no Constitutional precedent for anything that was happening. State governors do not ordinarily negotiate with foreign nations for arms with which to seize Federal arsenals, nor do regular-army officers commonly set out to destroy a legally constituted state militia. Now these things had happened, and because they had happened they would make other things happen, equally extraordinary.
Lyon lost no time. He was impetuous and intolerant, driving on to enforce his own will, the will of Frank Blair, and ultimately the will of the determined President in Washington, of whom skeptical patriots had said, only a short time before, that they feared he lacked iron. Lyon put his troops on the march while Governor Jackson was still drafting his proclamation, and on June 14 he moved into Jefferson City, seizing the machinery of state government and sending Jackson and Price off in hasty retreat. With hardly a pause, Lyon pushed on fifty miles to Boonville, which was the concentration point for the state militia—the militia that, if given time to assemble, organize, and equip itself, would be a powerful force for the Southern Confederacy. On June 16 there was a brief fight at Boonville, in which some 1700 men led by Lyon met a smaller contingent of state troops; a hard little fight between untrained forces, with a good deal of shooting but very few casualties, which ended in the complete rout of the militia. Lyon’s little army occupied Boonville, while Jackson and Price headed for the extreme southwestern corner of the state to make an effort to rally new forces. Lyon halted to organize and outfit his troops for further adventures; he notified Washington that he would hold Boonville, Jefferson City, and the line of the Missouri River, and that he himself would presently move on to Springfield, far to the south.
This fight at Boonville, the slightest of skirmishes by later standards, was in fact a very consequential victory for the Federal government. Governor Jackson had been knocked loose from the control of his state, and the chance that Missouri could be carried bodily into the Southern Confederacy had gone glimmering. Jackson’s administration was now, in effect, a government-in-exile, fleeing down the roads toward the Arkansas border, a disorganized body that would need a great deal of help from Jefferson Davis’s government before it could give any substantial help in return. In Missouri as in Maryland, the Lincoln administration had taken the important first trick; had taken it by displaying an uncomplicated readiness to disregard all of the ancient rules of the game. Ardent Southerners might still believe that the Yankees would not really fight, but they were at least beginning to see that the Yankees had a government that knew exactly what it wanted and would stop at nothing to get it.6
The Confederate government also knew exactly what it wanted, as far as that was concerned, and it would pay the ultimate price to get it, if necessary, but it was playing a very different sort of game. It was fighting to conserve, not to destroy; far from engaging in revolution, it was taking the most ancient rules and giving them a literal interpretation, and everything that it did would be done in the strictest observance of those rules. Its very existence was justified by the belief that the states which composed it had a legal and moral right to do what they had done. It was this government’s first article of faith that it was completely and eternally Constitutional—Constitutional, not by the writ devised at Montgomery, but by the older Constitution which Lincoln said that he was making war to preserve. The very essence of secession was the desire to maintain unaltered a society, an order of things, which the world was threatening to change, and no government on earth had a more sincere and dedicated desire to uphold the established formulas. Strict constructionists had made secession in the first place; having made it, they could not be other than what they had always been.
In the early stages—in the canvassing and negotiating which led up to secession, and in the time when the existence of the new nation was being proclaimed—this had been an immense advantage. Men who persuasively say and obviously believe that they are religiously following the most hallowed laws do not look dangerous, and even men who disagree with them will not quickly prepare to fight against them. But now, with war on the land, this scrupulous insistence on Constitutionality was a handicap. It ruled out flexibility of action. The ruthlessness which would strike quickly, cunningly, beyond the law, was not possible, because the new government was legalistic, and in a situation where irregular action was imperative, it had to follow the forms. Furthermore, it was naturally bound to assume that the rival government, the one at Washington, would also follow the forms; to believe otherwise would be to admit a revolutionary situation existed, in which case the argument that the Confederacy was Constitutional rather than revolutionary would fall to the ground. One result of all this was that the Confederacy had lost Missouri.
Missouri, in any case, was very far away from the center of Jefferson Davis’s interest just now. The fatality which beset both governments so much of the time was keeping his attention centered principally on the East; on Virginia, the most powerful and welcome of new states to join the Confederacy, and on Richmond, Virginia’s capital and now, by vote of the Confederate Congress and seemingly by the common consent of all Southerners, the capital of the Confederacy as well.
The Confederate Congress adjourned on May 21, after voting to make Richmond the new capital: a move which was both a gesture of defiance and a sign of confidence. To put the center of the new government a scant hundred miles from the center of the old government was to invite invasion. The Confederacy would function on its most exposed frontier; at the time the move was made, there was very little to keep Federal warships from steaming up the James River and bombarding the capital, and invading Yankees would find Richmond ever so much nearer than Montgomery—or, for that matter, Atlanta, which had hoped it might be chosen. But in a way the move was forced. Howell Cobb explained it, in a speech at Atlanta, saying that Confederate troops had already gone to Virginia and that the government wanted to follow them: “In the progress of the war further legislation may be necessary, and we will be there, that when the hour of danger comes we may lay aside the robes of legislation, buckle on the armor of the soldier, and do battle beside the brave ones who have volunteered for the defence of our beloved South.” The Montgomery Weekly Advertiser had protested that the move was preposterous, “utterly at variance with the dictates of prudence and sound policy,” but it confessed that it was probably necessary for President Davis to be near the front, so that he might take command of the armies in person if need be; and, anyway, Virginia was the state above all others whose secession had given the Confederacy an appearance of breadth and permanence, and to go to Richmond was to indicate full reliance on Virginia’s solidity.7
The real trouble with the move was not so much that it put the Confederate capital on the firing line as that it compelled the Confederate government, over the long pull, to see the whole war in terms of military action in tidewater Virginia. The enormous importance of the West, of the Mississippi Valley, of Missouri and Kentucky and Tennessee, would be inevitably diminished, in the government’s eyes, by the tremendous battles that would be fought within a day’s ride of the capital. The focus of vision would be narrowed, and a price would be paid for it.
Meanwhile, on May 23, Virginia formally voted to secede. Inasmuch as the state had actually gone to war as soon as its convention passed the ordinance of secession, the verdict finally registered at the polls (overwhelmingly for secession, throughout most of the state; strongly against it, in the thirty-nine counties west of the Alleghenies) made little practical difference, except that it at last pushed the Federal government into direct action. Willing to cut across restraints elsewhere, Lincoln had abided by all of the rules in respect to Virginia. Not until the voters themselves had ratified secession would he move. Once ratification came, however, he moved quickly
. Long before dawn on the morning of May 24 he sent eight regiments across the Potomac to seize Alexandria and Arlington Heights and to establish a firm bridgehead on secession soil. The first invasion of the South was under way. It was not much of an invasion and it did not occupy much of the South, but it was a symbol. A great many young men must die before it was finished.
Much would die with them; including a way of looking at life and seeing nothing but its freshness and the fact that it was made to be spent, a special notion of how things might be with the spirit when the ultimate challenge is faced, a feeling for the overtones that can haunt a man’s hearing as he goes down the long pathway into the dusk. This also was symbolized, as Federal troops first put their feet on Virginia soil. Among the eight regiments that went across the river (it was two o’clock in the morning and there was a big moon to shimmer on the water and to put mysterious shadows under the dark trees) there was a rowdy, untamed, and not too noteworthy outfit known as the New York Fire Zouaves: a regiment of amateurs led by an amateur, going down to the Alexandria wharves by boat in search of a war that would be all youth and flags and easy valor and rewarding cheers; not destined to be hardened by fire into the company of the elect. The colonel was luckier than the rest. He was named Elmer Ellsworth, and he would die before the illusion had a chance to fade, leaving a name that would live longer than the cold facts required.