by Bruce Catton
Behaving thus, the people were by no means disagreeing with those leaders who wanted to conduct the war without reference to the explosive issue of slavery. They simply wanted action, responding to a reflex that ran from the emotions through the muscles, and they showed what they wanted in various ways. From Charlottesville, Virginia, a correspondent of the Charleston Mercury wrote that “the cool western breeze which is rippling the tasselled corn into endless waves comes laden with the hum of war from the distant Alleghenies,” and he reflected sagely: “Go where you will over this broad land, the air is instinct with strife.” A spirit less pastoral, and also much less conventional, moved a citizen of Alabama who wrote to the Confederate Secretary of War proposing the formation of volunteer companies of freebooters which would make war at no cost to the Confederacy, supporting themselves by the seizure of Yankee goods and chattels: “Such companies propose going and fighting without restraint and under no orders, and convey the property captured to their own private use, thereby benefiting their own pecuniary circumstances as well as doing their country good service by crippling the enemy.” This proposal got nowhere, but the editor of the Richmond Examiner called for harsh measures, asserting: “The enemy must be made to feel the war. They must be made to understand that there is a God that punishes the wicked, and that the Southern army is His instrument.”12
The notion that those led might get ahead of their leaders was general. Early in May, governors of the Northern states lying west of New England met to urge vigorous prosecution of the war, and their feelings were expressed in a letter drawn up by Governor Alex Randall of Wisconsin and forwarded to President Lincoln.
“There is a spirit evoked by this rebellion among the liberty-loving people of the country,” wrote Governor Randall, “that is driving them to action, and if the Government will not permit them to act for it they will act for themselves. It is better for the Government to direct this current than to let it run wild. So far as possible we have attempted to allay this excess of spirit, but there is a moral element and a reasoning element in this uprising that cannot be met in the ordinary way. There is a conviction of great wrongs to be redressed and that the Government is to be preserved by them. The Government must provide an outlet for this feeling or it will find one for itself. If the Government does not at once shoulder this difficulty and direct its current there will come something more than a war to put down rebellion—it will be a war between border States, which will lose sight, for the time, of the Government.”13
Using different words, these Northerners and Southerners were all testifying to a common belief—that this war which was going to mean fighting, pain, destruction, and tremendous anger was destined sooner or later to go out of control. It could not be just “a war to put down rebellion.” Its elements were too violent. Men who had never learned to endure wrongs with patience had become convinced that wrongs were being done to them. People eternally eager to dedicate themselves had come to feel that there were noble causes to be served. Finally, there were enemies to be hurt in a land where the only rule about a blow struck in anger was that it must be struck with all of the strength one had.
… Tornado weather: sultriest and most menacing, as the Wisconsin governor had said, along the border—that cross section of nineteenth-century America that ran for a thousand miles from Virginia tidewater to the plains of Kansas, reaching from the place of the nation’s oldest traditions to the rude frontier where no tradition ran back farther than the day before yesterday. Here was where the fighting was beginning—along the border—and here was where the war was going to take shape.
For a long time the shape of it would be hard to make out, partly because the pattern would be slow in taking form and partly because it was so easy to look for it in the wrong place. Then as now, the eye was drawn to Virginia, to the legendary country between the Potomac and the James, the floodlit stage where rival governments would have formal trial by combat. The Bull Run frenzy had gone to its limit here, arrogant overconfidence blowing up at last in a froth of pride and shame and panic; and the governments were thought to have learned something by it. They would take their time now, organizing and equipping and drilling with much care, moving (when it was time to move) according to professional plan and not because of pressure raised by “Forward to Richmond!” headlines in an overheated press. Here, it was said, was where the final decision would be reached, and all that happened elsewhere would be secondary.
But the border ran a long way, and eastern Virginia was no more than a fraction of it. Beyond were Allegheny valleys and Cumberland plateau, western Virginia and eastern Tennessee, Kentucky with its rich Bluegrass farmland going west from the mountains all the way to the central artery, the Mississippi; and beyond them was Missouri, stretching out to the Kansas-Nebraska vastness where the war had had at least one of its beginnings. In each of the related segments of this border the war had a different guise and a different meaning. Here it was a battle in which ill-equipped armies learned their trade in blundering action; there it was a matter of shadows in the dusk, neighbor ambushing neighbor, hayrick and barn blazing up at midnight with a drum of hoofbeats on a lonely lane to tell the story, or a firing squad killing a bridge-burner for a warning to the lawless. The separate scenes were monstrous, confusing, ever-changing; put together, they might make something planned neither in Washington nor in Richmond.
2: A Mean-Fowt Fight
John Charles Frémont brought to Missouri a great reputation, a brand-new commission as major general, and a formidable set of abilities which did not quite meet the demands that Missouri was about to make. He entered the Civil War at the precise place where it wore its most baffling aspect, and although he presently saw with tolerable clarity what needed to be done he knew hardly anything about the way to go about doing it. He was famous as The Pathfinder, the man who had charted trails across the untracked West; he had been the first presidential candidate of the new Republican party in 1856, helping to make another sort of trail into an even more trackless wilderness; and now he was in Missouri, a bewildering jungle where a trail could be blazed only by a man gifted with a profound understanding of the American character, the talents of a canny politician, and enormous skill as an administrator. Of these gifts General Frémont had hardly a trace.
Perhaps nobody really understood what was going on in Missouri, and the fault was partly Nathaniel Lyon’s. Lyon was like a sword—hard, narrow, and sharp—and he had gone slashing through the complex loyalties of this border state so vigorously that almost everyone was adrift. A captain in the Regular Army, exercising a highly irregular authority and leading troops which were almost equally irregular, he had in May surrounded, captured, and disarmed a contingent of Missouri state militia legally camped in a St. Louis suburb, with subsequent gunfire and the killing of sundry civilians. Then, elevated abruptly to the position of brigadier general, Lyon had in effect declared war on the governor of the state, secessionist-minded Claiborne Jackson, driving that functionary off toward the Ozarks and occupying Jefferson City, the state capital. Missouri had not seceded—could not really secede, now, because all of the machinery of state government was gripped by the Federal power—and a majority of its people almost certainly had been Unionists, at least to a degree, from the start. The state probably would have stayed in the Union in any case, but Lyon took no chances. He kept thinking, no doubt, of a fact which greatly worried hard-drinking Frank Blair, the brother of Lincoln’s Postmaster General and son of that tough activist, Old Man Blair of Maryland: Francis P. Blair, Jr., Republican leader in Missouri and Lyon’s principal sponsor. Blair complained that one big problem was the presence of a great many good men “who liked the Union very much but did not see the necessity of fighting for it”; men who thought that “the best way to put down the rebellion was to make a show of force but not to use it at all.” Lyon believed in using it; did use it, with the result that Missouri was divided into factions and sub-factions, with almost everybody in the state appa
rently either making war or preparing to make war—on his next-door neighbor, as often as not.1
This was what Frémont stepped into when he reached St. Louis on July 25, and he can hardly be blamed if he found it confusing. His responsibilities were broad, his means were limited, and the crisis seemed immeasurable. He was supposed to safeguard Missouri and all the Northwest, and he was also expected to organize, equip, and lead an army down the Mississippi to New Orleans, reclaiming the great valley and reopening it to commerce and breaking off the whole western part of the Confederacy. He had about 23,000 troops, more than a third of which were three-months volunteers whose terms were about to expire. Governors of the Western states were sending recruits to him, but he had hardly any arms for them, nothing much in the way of uniforms or other military equipment, scanty rations and transportation, and no money. As far as he could learn, every county in the state contained “a Rebel faction … at least equal to the loyal population in numbers and excelling it in vindictiveness and energy.” St. Louis struck him as “a Rebel city” whose upper classes were unanimously secessionist; bands of night riders were despoiling loyalist citizens all across the state, and the militantly anti-Union state guard was alleged to have 25,000 men under arms. Worst of all, there were said to be nearly 50,000 Confederate soldiers in Arkansas and Tennessee ready to invade Missouri, seize its railroads, reclaim its capital, capture St. Louis, and occupy Cairo, Illinois, at the point where the Ohio River joined the Mississippi. If they did all of this the war in the West would be gone beyond redemption and the independence of the Confederacy would be virtually assured.2
The picture actually was not quite that dark. Frémont’s informants had more than doubled the size of the state guard and had nearly doubled the strength of the Confederate armies beyond the borders, and they had totally ignored the great difficulties the commanders of those forces would encounter once they began a co-ordinated offensive: and anyway St. Louis was not really as much a “Rebel city” as Frémont considered it. But the picture was dark enough. If the Federals were to make war in the West with any success at all they had to secure Missouri and the mouth of the Ohio and then move down the Mississippi in great strength, and although the authorities in Washington knew this they were not devoting much attention to it because they were concentrating on problems nearer home. They did not exactly suppose that the Missouri situation would take care of itself but they did expect that Frémont would take care of it for them, and they were not going to pay detailed attention to what he did unless he got into serious trouble. Things being as they were, it was almost inevitable that this would happen.
It began, as so many things in Missouri had begun, with Nathaniel Lyon. When Frémont reached Missouri Lyon was far off in the southwestern part of the state, near the market town of Springfield, gloomily uncertain whether he was nearing the conclusion of a triumphant offensive or the beginning of a disastrous defeat. He had done a good deal for the Union cause thus far. He had exiled the governor and forced the secessionist militia to operate without a base, a war chest or an adequate legal footing, and he had given the Unionists time to set up a state government which would co-operate with the administration in Washington. But he had done all of this by prodding a hornets’ nest with a stick, and the turmoil he had raised threatened now to overwhelm him.
Lyon had taken 7000 troops to southwest Missouri. By the end of July these had dwindled to 5000, what with the loss of time-expired three-months men and the general wastage that came of poor training, sketchy supplies and no pay, and he was a long way from home. His enemies were gathering to pounce on him—30,000 of them, Lyon believed: fewer than half that many in sober fact, but still more than twice his own strength. He believed that he could neither advance, hold his ground nor retreat without heavy reinforcements, and he had been demanding help for weeks without getting any.3
Frémont knew that Lyon needed help but he did not think that he could do much for him. There were some 6000 Federal troops in northeastern Missouri, trying to tamp down a mean guerrilla warfare; they had their hands full and Frémont felt that he could not remove any of them. He believed that he had to hold the railroads that fanned out west and southwest from St. Louis; to guard the line of the Missouri River and hold Jefferson City, and to garrison St. Louis itself; and there was very little manpower to spare. Frémont was getting reinforcements, but for the immediate present they were of little use; he wrote that the new regiments were “literally the rawest ever got together … entirely unacquainted with the rudiments of military exercise,” and most of them had no weapons.4 Worst of all, Frémont’s intelligence service told him that the Confederates were planning to move on Cairo—a fairly correct appraisal, although the move was not nearly as imminent as Frémont’s people believed—and Cairo was the most sensitive spot of all; the one place which the Union had to hold if it was ever to wage offensive warfare in the Mississippi Valley. Cairo at the moment was all but defenseless. The Federal post there was commanded by Brigadier General Benjamin M. Prentiss, who was supposed to have eight regiments but in fact had only two and who could muster hardly more than 600 effectives for duty.
It was against this background that Lyon’s calls for help had to make themselves heard, and they came through but dimly. Frémont found that he could scrape together a disposable force of 3800 men, and he concluded that they were needed at Cairo more than at any other point. At the end of July he took them to Cairo personally, making a big parade of their departure from St. Louis in order to impress the rebellious with the fact that the weak spot was weak no longer. He wrote to Lyon telling him, in substance, to use his own judgment—hang on if he could, retreat if he thought he had to—and somewhat tardily he ordered two regiments to join him.5 The regiments had a long way to go, and Lyon never saw them. When Frémont’s steamers left the wharf at St. Louis and started downstream for the mouth of the Ohio, Lyon’s number was up.
Apparently Lyon knew it perfectly well. He was a score of miles beyond Springfield, his advanced base, and the Confederates were threatening to side-slip and occupy that town in his rear. If he went back to Springfield he was not strong enough to stand a siege there, he was woefully short of supplies, and the nearest point of safety was a town called Rolla, one hundred miles northeast of Springfield, at the end of a railroad to St. Louis. There seemed to be nothing for it but to retreat to Rolla, but his march would be very slow and the Confederates—who had a great deal of cavalry, an arm of which Lyon had practically none—would almost certainly surround and destroy him en route. He wrote a letter to Frémont remarking, with calm understatement, “I find my position extremely embarrassing,” and he confessed that he did not know just what he ought to do; and as a matter of fact no good choice was open to him. He pulled back from his advanced position to the town of Springfield, and he wrote that he would hold this place as long as he could even though this might “endanger the safety of my entire force.”6 It was a desperate sort of letter, written by a man beset, and by the time Frémont got it Lyon was dead—victim of the decision Frémont had made, of his own impetuosity, of the unfathomable civil war that had burst into flame along the untamed border.
At the end of the first week in August, Lyon was going about Springfield smoldering with glum anger, inspecting his outposts with the air of a man who had been abandoned to the fates, breaking out now and then with profane denunciations of the distant Frémont who was sending no help. He was still full of fight. When a subordinate asked him when the army would leave Springfield he snapped: “Not until we are whipped out.” He held a council of war, apparently concluded that a retreat would ruinously dishearten the Union people of all western Missouri, and at last made up his mind to take a long gamble. Unable to stand still or to fall back he would attack in spite of the odds, staking everything on one throw. He drew up his plans and got his little army in motion.7
It was an odd sort of army, wholly representative of its time and place. Lyon had, to begin with, a handful of regular infantry an
d artillery, tough and disciplined, full of contempt for volunteers, home guards, and amateur soldiers generally, whether Union or Confederate. He also had several regiments of Missouri infantry, principally German levies from St. Louis, short of equipment and training, most of them grouped in a brigade commanded by Franz Sigel. Sigel was an émigré from the German revolutionary troubles of 1848, trained as a soldier, humorless, dedicated, unhappily lacking in the capacity to lead soldiers in action; a baffling sort, devoted but incapable, who induced many Germans to enlist but who was rarely able to use them properly after they had enlisted. There were two rough-hewn regiments from Kansas and there was a ninety-day outfit from Iowa, a happy-go-lucky regiment whose time was about to expire but whose members had agreed to stick around for a few days in case the general was going to have a battle. (The Iowans did not like Lyon at all but they trusted him, considering him a tough customer and competent.)8 There were also stray companies and detachments from here and there whose numbers were small and whose value was entirely problematic. In miniature, this was much like the Union army that had been so spectacularly routed at Bull Run except that it was even less well equipped and disciplined.