by Bruce Catton
Yet if this army was odd the army which it was about to fight was ever so much odder—one of the very oddest, all things considered, that ever played a part in the Civil War. Lyon’s army would have struck any precisionist as something out of a military nightmare, but it was a veritable Prussian guard compared to its foes. The Southerners were armed with everything from regulation army rifles to back-country fowling pieces, a few of them wore Confederate gray but most of them wore whatever homespun garments happened to be at hand when they left home, and for at least three fourths of them there were no commissary and quartermaster arrangements whatever. The various levies were tied together by a loose gentleman’s agreement rather than by any formal military organization, and many of the men were not Confederates at all, owing no allegiance to Jefferson Davis, fighting for Missouri rather than for the Confederacy. The war was still a bit puzzling, in these parts.
The core of this army (from a professional soldier’s viewpoint, at any rate) was a brigade of some 3200 Confederate troops led by Brigadier General Ben McCulloch, veteran of the Mexican War and one-time Texas Ranger, an old pal of Davy Crockett who looked the part, an officer who liked to sling a rifle over his shoulder, get on his horse, and do his scouting personally. His men were well armed, most of them wore uniforms, and they had had about as much military training as anybody got in those days—enough to get by on, but nothing special. There were also 2200 state troops from Arkansas, one cavalry and three infantry regiments led by Brigadier General N. B. Pearce. These men had good weapons but no uniforms and little equipment—they carried their ammunition in their haversacks for want of better containers—and they had brought along two batteries of artillery, guns which until quite recently had reposed in the United States arsenal at Little Rock.9 And, in addition, there was the Missouri State Guard under Major General Sterling Price.
No one quite knew how many men Price had—between 9000 and 10,000, probably, of which number only about 7000 could be used in action; the rest had no weapons at all. There were a few regimental organizations, but for the most part the formations were nothing more than bands bearing the names of the men who led them—Wingo’s infantry, Kelly’s infantry, Foster’s infantry, and so on. The men had no tents, no supplies, no pay, hardly any ammunition and nothing whatever in the way of uniforms; an officer could be distinguished by the fact that he would have a strip of colored flannel on his shoulders, and one of the men described General Price himself with the words: “He is a large fine looking bald fellow dressed in common citizen clothes an oald linen coat yarn pants.” None of them had been given anything which West Point would have recognized as drill; one group, led by former country lawyers, was called to quarters daily by the courtroom cry of “Oyez! Oyez!” and customarily addressed its commanding officer as “Jedge.” Not even in the American Revolution was there ever a more completely backwoods army; these men were not so much soldiers as rangy characters who had come down from the north fork of the creek to get into a fight. Their commissary department consisted of the nearest cornfield, and their horses got their forage on the prairie; and a veteran of the State Guard wrote after the war that any regular soldier given command of this host would have spent a solid six months drilling, equipping, organizing, and provisioning it, during which time the Yankees would have overrun every last county in Missouri once and for all. He added that although Price’s men had very poor weapons—some of them actually carried ancient flintlocks—they knew very well how to use them, and they did not scare easily. They were wholly devoted to General Price, whom they always referred to as “Pap.”10
Price was in truth worthy of devotion, and the mere fact that he was out here at all testified to the strange complexity of the war on the border. A handsome, stalwart man in his early fifties, Virginia-born and a resident of Missouri for thirty years, Price was a good lawyer and a good politician; had served in the state legislature, in Congress and as governor, and had led a regiment in the Mexican War, winning a brigadier’s star for gallantry. He was no secessionist; on the contrary he had counted himself a good Union man even after the bombardment of Fort Sumter and President Lincoln’s call for troops, and although he had not been prepared to help destroy the Confederacy he had not been prepared to help establish it either. He had taken to the warpath, in fact, only after Lyon compelled everyone in Missouri to choose sides; he was definitely fighting against the Federals now, but he was not so much fighting for the Confederacy as for the vain hope that the war could be kept out of the front yards of the people of Missouri. He wanted to put limits on the war, so that no one but soldiers need be hurt. Later this fall he would sign a formal agreement with Frémont providing for an end to guerrilla warfare, cessation of arrests for political opinion, and a mutual pledge that “the war now progressing shall be exclusively confined to armies in the field.”11 The Federal authorities would quickly disavow this agreement, and in the end Missouri knew all of the horrors civil war could bring, but nobody could say that Price had not done his best.
In a military sense Price was an orphan, serving a government which was adrift in no man’s land, and although he was a major general and Ben McCulloch was a brigadier, McCulloch’s commission came from Jefferson Davis, a full-fledged President, and Price’s came from Claiborne Jackson, who was only a fugitive; if Price and McCulloch were to go to the wars together it would have to be on McCulloch’s terms. Price learned this a few days before his troops, Pearce’s Arkansans and McCulloch’s brigade made camp together by a stream called Wilson’s Creek, ten miles southwest of Springfield. Lyon had just moved back into Springfield, and it was obvious that the combined force ought to attack him immediately. But McCulloch had a poor opinion of Price and a worse one of Price’s troops, and he was not entirely sure that he himself ought to be in Missouri at all: the Confederate government, he had been informed, did not want to wage aggressive warfare on foreign soil, which seemed to include Missouri, and he had visions of disaster. Price had a hot argument with him, threatening to attack Lyon unaided, telling him: “You must either fight beside us or look on at a safe distance and see us fight all alone the army you dare not attack even with our aid.”12 In the end Price won the argument by putting himself and his entire command under McCulloch’s orders; and McCulloch at last ordered that on the night of August 9 the combined force take to the road and crush Lyon’s army.
Defective military equipment can modify tactics. It rained that night, and McCulloch—reflecting that the men had no proper ammunition boxes but carried their paper cartridges in cloth haversacks, where they would almost certainly get soaked on a march in the rain—canceled the orders.13 It made little difference, in the end, because at the same time Lyon issued his own orders for an attack on the Confederates, and on the morning of August 10 the two armies collided in a remarkably bloody battle at Wilson’s Creek.
Lyon’s plan was bold—the sort of plan that is called brilliant if it works and foolhardy if it fails. His troops plodded out of their camp in the evening drizzle. Sigel, with 1200 men, swung south on a wide flanking march, to come in on the Confederate right and rear. His men were ragged, wearing gray shirts trimmed in red, many of them shoeless, some of them lacking pants; they looked, indeed, much like the Arkansas and Missouri soldiers, which led to a good deal of confusion during the fight. While Sigel was moving, Lyon with the rest of the troops—4200 men, or thereabouts—marched straight ahead to fall on the Confederate center and left. Lyon apparently shared McCulloch’s feeling: Price’s Missourians were so poorly trained and armed that he could attack despite their advantage in numbers.
Just before the columns moved, Lyon rode down the lines on his dapple-gray horse, telling the men they were about to go into battle, urging them to fire low, and repeating: “Don’t get scared; it’s no part of a soldier’s duty to get scared.” As an inspirational eve-of-battle speech, it was not a success; Lyon looked exhausted and spoke in a monotone, and one of the Iowa irrepressibles was heard to mutter: “How is a man to help being
skeered if he is skeered?”14 Some time after midnight the men halted for a rest. At daylight they moved on and the battle was begun.
Just at first things went well for the Federals. Sigel got into position, wheeled up his artillery, and routed a camp of Confederate cavalry, then led his men forward across an open valley to press his advantage. But this move was made slowly and inexpertly; McCulloch saw that the force was not large, and put on a sharp counterattack; Sigel’s men broke and fled, abandoning five guns and streaming away so incontinently that the battle saw them no more, Sigel himself going all the way back to Springfield, the private soldiers going off every which way.15 Lyon, meanwhile, drove in the pickets in his front and got into a savage fight on a low ridge, an open meadow and a strip of timber, where he quickly learned that he had been mistaken about Pap Price’s militia. The ridge became known that day as “Bloody Hill.”
It was a small battle but a very hard one, devoid of tactical subtleties once Sigel’s flanking move dissolved. It came down to simple head-on slugging, on a battlefield hardly more than half a mile wide—the smallest major battlefield in all the war. A Confederate officer said about all that needs to be said of it when he called it “a mighty mean-fowt fight.” Now and then, inexplicably, silence would fall on the field, while the two armies caught their breath; then the fighting would flare up again, deep smoke settling on the ground, the opposing lines no more than fifty yards apart. Pap Price kept riding to the front to see what the Federals were up to, his men calling to him to get back out of danger; on the Federal side, Lyon was twice wounded and his horse was killed, and he confessed to an aide that he feared the day was lost. Strange little pictures survive: the 1st Iowa holding its fire and calling on its neighbors not to shoot while a mounted Texan galloped boldly out into an open field, in point-blank range, to retrieve a fallen flag; a Federal soldier, crouching alone, his rifle pointed straight up at the sky, feverishly firing, reloading and firing again as fast as he could, valiant as a man could be, harming no one; a Confederate colonel telling his men to shoot the Yankees in the belly because a man dying of such a wound died slowly and so had time to prepare to meet his Maker; one of Price’s Missourians, carried to the rear with a broken thigh, struggling and demanding that he be put down, crying: “I want to kill more Yankees!”16 Participants remembered many scenes like these; they do not seem to have recalled seeing very many men on either side running off in panic.
It lasted most of the morning; an amazing battle, in which raw recruits fought like veterans, disorganized Missourians and time-expired Iowans going to it as steadily as the regulars themselves, providing an odd refutation of the Bull Run lesson and its teaching about the dreadful folly of putting armies into battle before they are ready. Perhaps it was Lyon and Price personally who made the difference, or perhaps the difference lay in the men in the ranks; or, possibly, it was just that this happened in Missouri rather than in Virginia. Anyway, the battle ended in no rout. It ended, logically enough, when Nathaniel Lyon got killed; the fighting died down when the flaming fighting spirit died. Somewhere around eleven o’clock in the morning a part of the Union line seemed to be giving way, and Lyon (remounted now, carrying on in spite of his wounds) galloped over to get things in order. He waved his hat, got laggards back into action, moved the line forward, and then was shot from his horse with a bullet in his heart. The line held, and after a time the fighting came to an end. The Federals discovered that their highest-ranking officer then available on the field was Major Samuel D. Sturgis of the regulars, and so Major Sturgis took command of the army. Sensibly enough, he led it back to Springfield. The Confederates made no pursuit. As the man said, it had been a mighty tough fight.17
The figures show it, as far as figures can. The Federals had roughly 5400 men on the field and lost approximately 1300 in killed, wounded, and missing; just about 25 per cent of the total number present, a high figure for any battle. Probably more than 10,000 Confederates were present, but thousands of them never got into action; the casualty list—Missourians, Arkansans, and McCulloch’s brigade, all together—ran to slightly more than 1200. All in all, the battle put at least 2500 men out of action.18
Near the place where one of the Confederate batteries had been posted there was a farmhouse, and during the battle the farmer’s wife had taken refuge in the cellar. She came out after the battle ended and found a party of soldiers helping themselves to apples from her trees. An officer rode up and told the men to stop it, but the woman assured him that she did not mind; there were plenty of apples, everybody had had a pretty bad morning, let them take all they wanted. Then, looking at the boys fresh from the battle that had been raging at her own doorstep, she asked, as an afterthought, a question which might have been asked by the harassed Missouri majority, the farm people on whose homesteads the fighting and the marauding were taking place and who stood to be plundered and fought over no matter which army was present. “Are you Lincoln’s folk, or Jeff Davis’s folk?” she inquired. Jeff Davis’s folk, the boys said.19
3: The Hidden Intentions
Lyon had done more than was immediately apparent. He had lost a battle and he had lost his life, but he had won the summer—the crucial ten weeks in which Missouri’s fate rested on a knife’s edge—and the Lincoln administration would in the end win the state. Late in July, while the campaign around Springfield was coming to a climax, a state convention met in Jefferson City with Unionists in full control—a thing which Lyon’s offensive made possible. The convention promptly deposed secessionists by declaring all state offices vacant; then it filled those offices with solid loyalists, naming Hamilton R. Gamble as provisional governor, and the Confederate cause in Missouri thereafter was a losing cause. The machinery by which the state could impose taxes, collect money, organize troops and then arm, feed and support them had passed forever into the hands of the Confederacy’s enemies; which meant that General Price and his amazing militia, along with any other Missourians who wanted to go forth and fight for the South, could never make their weight felt. They were waifs and waifs they would remain, and the handicap was too much for them.
More than three months later General Price explained the handicap in a long letter to Jefferson Davis, an epistle which sounds a little bit like the Apostle Paul tabulating his woes. Most of the people of Missouri, he said, favored the Confederacy, but they were in an almost impossible position. They were “without any military organization and but few military men; without arms and without an army; overrun by Federal armies before a blow on our side could be stricken; pursued as fugitives from the state capital at the moment when the governor called our people to arms; fleeing with a handful of men to the extreme southwestern corner of the state … having to fight for the arms we have and to capture nearly all the appliances of war with which we are now supplied; with a powerful foe extending his lines across the state, so as effectually to cut off our succor and recruits from the north side of the Missouri River, our metropolis all the while in the hands of the enemy, thus giving him control of the railroads and rivers as well as the banks and channels of commerce and centers of intelligence, the war being waged as well upon the people of the country and private property as upon the army.” His soldiers, he went on, were no more than “half fed, half clothed, half supplied with the necessary means of subsistence and comfort.” They had never been formally recruited and organized; they were simply men “caught up from the woods and the fields—from the highways and byways, by night and by day—without an hour’s or a day’s preparation.” He believed that he could add 20,000 men to his force if he just had some backing; Missouri, he was sure, could take care of herself, “once the Confederate government renders us such assistance as to make our force available.”
The pressure was on him; the war was changing, and he was changing with it. In the beginning he had opposed secession and had wanted to do no more than to keep the war out of Missouri; now he was a militant Confederate, declaring that he had “placed home and comfort and propert
y and family and life on the altar of my country’s safety,” pledging his state to make war to the end if the Confederacy would give the proper help.1
There was a pressure on General Frémont, too. Like General Price he would in the end commit himself to a cause which had not been his when he got his commission. The news from Wilson’s Creek sounded like sheer catastrophe—Lyon dead, his crippled army in full retreat, armed Rebels rampaging about unchecked, a big Confederate offensive imminent—and St. Louis itself seemed no better than an echoing cave of the winds. There were soldiers without weapons or supplies, military contracts going unfulfilled for lack of money, and a dismaying lack of the administrative firmness that could remedy these defects. Placed in a position where he was bound to make a certain number of mistakes, General Frémont had the unhappy knack of making exactly the kind of mistakes that would get into the headlines and offend the very people whose support he needed most.
It began with headquarters itself—with the look of it, the atmosphere that pervaded it, and the people who were visible there. Headquarters had been housed in a good three-story dwelling that lay behind a pleasant lawn enclosed by a stone wall, at Chouteau Avenue and Eighth Street, rented for $6000 a year. The building was not actually too big and although the price was high it perhaps was not really excessive, in view of the fact that this was one of the most important military departments in the United States; but somehow the place seemed a little too imposing. Frémont had guards all over the premises, and there were staff officers to sift his callers—the unending stream of people who simply had to see the general, most of whom had no business getting within half a mile of him—and presently people were muttering that the man lived in a vast mansion and surrounded himself with the barriers of a haughty aristocracy.