1861 (45 page)

Nor was this the only female contribution to the cause—far from it. Throughout the city, one St. Louisan reported, women and girls were wrapping gunpowder and musket balls into cartridges “as fast as their fingers could fly.”
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The resourceful Lyon and Blair had managed to take Jackson’s rebuff of Lincoln’s orders and turn it to their advantage. In a long letter to Secretary Cameron on April 18, Blair officiously instructed the administration on how to win the war within a few months, laying out an elaborate strategy that began with mustering his Home Guards into the U.S. Army and putting him and Lyon in charge of them.

In other words, if Jackson would not supply his militia, their motley bands of Germans would step in to fill the gap. Cameron passed this request along to General Scott, who approved the order with a shrug, scribbling, “It is revolutionary times, and therefore I do not object to the irregularity of this,” before Lincoln signed off as well. Thus, Lyon, still officially a mere company captain, now found himself briefly commanding the entire
Department of the West—in other words, almost everything between the Mississippi and the far side of the Rockies. April 1861 was a time when such things could happen.
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Within days, four regiments of loyal Home Guards were mustered into federal service: Sigel’s
Lyons Fahnenwacht,
plus one regiment under Blair, one under the versatile Boernstein (who dusted off the skills he had acquired in the Imperial Austrian Army), and one under
Nicholas Schuettner, another local Forty-Eighter and leader of an anti-secessionist street gang. Of these forty-two hundred troops, all but one hundred were
Germans. Several more regiments started forming as reserves. Lyon, without any official promotion, began styling himself “General.” Forests of white tents sprouted on the Arsenal grounds, as thousands of muddy boots dealt their coup de grâce to
Major Hagner’s beloved lawn. Bands played; companies marched; some of the soldiers, according to a reporter, even tried “running and leaping in the Zouave practice.”
At dusk the light of cooking fires flickered among the encampments, while “all nooks and crannies sounded with German war songs and soldiers’ choirs,” Boernstein recalled after the war. Ever upbeat, he claimed that even those officers with the most refined
European palates pronounced the camp food excellent. “The general happiness, the humorous mood, the awareness of doing a good deed and the physical exertions served as seasoning to
stimulate the appetite,” he wrote. “I cannot recall days so cheerful, exciting or invigorating as those first few days at the arsenal when we were forming our volunteer regiments.” The main thing, one recruit wrote, was that each man was “eager to teach the German-haters a never-to-be-forgotten lesson.”
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Less visible maneuvers were also taking place at the Arsenal. Having issued his troops all the weapons and ammunition they would need, Lyon determined to send much of what remained out of harm’s way, to the Union troops mustering in
Illinois. As a handpicked crew of men worked secretly to pack up the weaponry, Lyon had spread a rumor, via local barrooms, that a shipment of weapons from the Arsenal would be sent across the city
in streetcars that night. Sure enough, at 9:00 p.m., a trolley convoy loaded with wooden crates rolled slowly up Fifth Street.
Minute Men instantly rushed out of ambush, halted the trolleys, pried open the containers, and pulled out the guns: a few rusty old flintlocks from the Arsenal’s junk room. Meanwhile, down on the river, the steamboat
City of Alton,
her lamps doused and paddlewheels barely turning, slipped quietly from the
Arsenal quay and up the Mississippi with 25,000 well-oiled muskets and carbines aboard.
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Over the next couple of weeks, the opposing forces in St. Louis performed an uncanny pantomime. Across the city from the Arsenal, secessionists set up an armed camp of their own in an area called Lindell’s Grove, formerly a park and picnic ground. They dubbed it
Camp Jackson in honor of the governor, laid out rows of tents grandiosely dubbed Beauregard Street and Davis Street, and before long,
more than a thousand state troops had arrived, under Missouri’s militia commander, General
Daniel Frost. These soldiers, William T. Sherman later recalled, included many “young men from the first and best families of St. Louis.” Ostensibly, Jackson and Frost had assembled them for a regular militia encampment, just as might be done in peacetime. As at a typical antebellum militia gathering, a festive, even indolent atmosphere
prevailed; young ladies came and went to visit their beaux, and mothers brought hampers of food to their sons. But in fact, the commanders were expecting more troops to assemble, and they were awaiting a much-anticipated gift from Jefferson Davis.
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Late on the night of May 8, another mysterious steamboat docked in St. Louis—this one unloading cargo rather than taking it aboard. Perplexed longshoremen were summoned to the levee to help move some enormously heavy crates marked “Tamaroa marble”: material
for an upcoming art exhibition, they were told. Actually, the crates contained two howitzers and two siege cannons, five hundred muskets, and a large supply of ammunition, all
recently confiscated by Confederate authorities from the U.S. arsenal down in Baton Rouge. As far as arms caches went, this wasn’t much, but it was a start.
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Unlike Lyon’s ingenious trolley-car trick, though, the midnight shipment of “art supplies” was a lame ruse indeed. By midmorning, several longshoremen, who happened to be Germans, had reported the suspicious activity to the Arsenal commander.

Instead of being alarmed, Lyon seemed elated. For weeks he had thirsted for a chance to humiliate the rebels. But the state militia and
Minute Men had not given him an opportunity. Jackson, though hungry for the Arsenal and its stores, could not attack while so badly outgunned and outnumbered. Without such provocation, Lyon and Blair had felt constrained from moving against Camp Jackson. After all, the officers and men there were
officially state troops, and the state had not yet gone over to the Confederacy; indeed, the Stars and Stripes still flew above the camp. So while the arrival of Jeff Davis’s cannons and muskets may not have given Jackson and Frost much additional firepower, it gave Lyon and Blair exactly what they needed: a pretext.

I
N THE EARLY AFTERNOON
of May 9, a handsome barouche with a black coachman in the driver’s seat pulled up to the front gate of Camp Jackson. Inside it rode a genteel old lady dressed in a shawl, a heavy veil, and an enormous sunbonnet. In her lap she held a small wicker basket. The sentries waved her through; clearly this was just a widow paying a visit to her militiaman son. The basket must be full of sandwiches she had lovingly
prepared for her dear boy.

In fact, the wicker basket held two loaded Colt revolvers. And if the sentries had peered under the old lady’s veil, they would have glimpsed something even more surprising: a bushy red beard.

Surely there must have been a hundred simpler ways to reconnoiter the rebels’ picnic ground. Nathaniel Lyon, however, was not one to pass up an opportunity for intrigue, and apparently thought his escapade would seem picturesque rather than ridiculous. He had borrowed the dress, shawl, veil, and sunbonnet from Frank Blair’s mother-in-law. Anyhow, his leisurely drive through Camp Jackson showed him exactly what he wanted to see: the mysterious crates from
the steamer, still unopened.
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Early the next morning, a horseman was seen galloping southward down Carondelet Road, on his way to the U.S. troops’ outlying encampments. By midday, columns of soldiers were marching through the streets of the city, converging on Camp Jackson. Boernstein, in a splendid plumed Alpine hat, rode astride a horse at the head of his regiment.
Herr Oberst
Sigel, on the other hand, rolled along in carriage behind his men: the first casualty
of the day, he had fallen off his horse onto the cobblestones and hurt his leg.
Tony Niederwiesser, the saloonkeeper, strutted at the head of a company.
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For weeks, the city’s German press had throbbed with ever-purpler prose. “The North has awakened from its slumber; the earth shakes under the tread of its legions, and the South trembles,” exulted the
Westliche Post.
“Suddenly a new race arises like a phoenix from the general conflagration, and our workaday politicians sink into the oblivion they deserve.… The great goal of mankind—the demand for freedom—will
rise ever more glorious and flow like gold in the heat from the fire of battle.” Two days before the advance on Camp Jackson, the editors had hailed “the uprising of the people in the Northern states”—that is, the tremendous surge of patriotic feeling and military enlistment after Sumter—as one of the greatest events in world history since the defeat of Napoleon. “This period will be called the
second American Revolution,
”
they predicted. “It will … be able to turn the great principles enunciated in the first revolution into reality.” And, thanks to the quick dissemination of news by steamboat and telegraph, this revolution would also spread across the Atlantic, so that “soon the cry of jubilation of the liberated nations of Europe will echo across the ocean, greeting us as saviors and brothers.”
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Yet the German volunteers themselves, after all their excitement during the previous months, seemed strangely subdued on the morning of the attack. As they marched through the streets of St. Louis, no one sang; no bands played. Dressed in their civilian clothes, they seemed to trudge like cattle, one observer said. Perhaps, like
Isidor Bush (himself now a private in one of the Home Guard regiments), too many had already seen firsthand
the unpredictable calamities of war.
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Ulysses Grant stood across from the Arsenal’s main gate, in front of the Anheuser-Busch brewery, watching the troops file out. (Still eager to make acquaintances that might lead to a commission, he took the opportunity to introduce himself to Blair, who was on horseback marshaling the companies, and wish him luck.) William T. Sherman, on his way to the streetcar company office, heard people on every corner saying excitedly that the “Dutch” were
moving on Camp Jackson.
The streets were filling with people hurrying after the troops, swept along almost involuntarily, “anxious spectators of every political proclivity,” one witness wrote, “never doubting for a moment that if a fight should occur they could stand by unharmed and witness it all.” One big, bearded man, distraught at Lyon’s surprise attack, shouted, “He’s gone out to kill all the boys,—to
kill all the boys!” Although a couple of Sherman’s friends urged him to come and “see the fun,” he hurried in the opposite direction, walking quickly home to make sure his seven-year-old son, Willie, had not joined the packs of schoolboys scampering toward the excitement.
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With soldierly precision that impressed the onlookers, Lyon’s regiments surrounded Camp Jackson on all sides. In the grove itself, there seemed to be little commotion and no sign of resistance. General Frost’s militiamen were outnumbered at least eight to one. Lyon, on horseback, surveying the scene with satisfaction, sent in an adjutant with a curtly worded note:

Frost had little choice. He sent the adjutant back with a note acquiescing, under strong protest, to the demand.
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At this point the second casualty of the day was suffered. Dismounting with the note in hand, Lyon was promptly kicked in the stomach by the overexcited horse of one of his aides. Doubling over in pain, he collapsed senseless on the ground. A doctor from one of the German regiments hurried over to him, and Lyon gradually began regaining consciousness, but apparently he was still incapacitated when the evacuation of Camp Jackson began.
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Blair’s and Boernstein’s regiments drew up in formation on each side as Frost’s men began to file out through an opening in the fence. All around them, crowds of civilians pressed in. Many were friends
and relatives of the captured soldiers, anxious to see that their loved ones were all right; others had come to hail the Union triumph; most were probably just gawkers. Even Sherman, hearing that Frost had surrendered peacefully,
now came to watch, holding young Willie by the hand. These spectators were amazed at the sight: militiamen in the splendid uniforms of Missouri’s most elite dragoon regiments; the flower of the old families—Longuemares, Ladues, Gareschés; the cream of St. Louis in “the beauty of youth, aristocratic breeding, clannish pride”—now captives, every one of them, stacking their arms in submission, trudging sullenly down Pine Street between the ranks
of their drab “Dutch” captors. Two black women in the crowd, exultant, began laughing and yelling taunts at the humiliated militia. Soon other bystanders began hurling insults at the victorious Germans: “Damn Dutch!” “Hessians!” “Infidels!” One man cheered for Jeff Davis; another for Abe Lincoln. Lyon’s officers, trying to drown out the cacophony, ordered a brass band at the head of the column to start playing. Still the
obscenities flew; women spat on the Union volunteers; others started scooping up rocks and dirt to throw at them. A few men brandished revolvers and knives.
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