1861 (46 page)

Afterward, no one could agree on how the shooting started. One teenager recalled seeing a boy his own age pitch a clod of dirt at a mounted officer. Other witnesses described an unarmed man stepping out of the row of onlookers and being savagely bayoneted by one of the “Dutchmen.” The most credible accounts corroborate what Sherman would remember. As he and Willie watched, a drunken man in the crowd tried to push his way through the ranks of Sigel’s
troops to reach the other side. When a sergeant blocked him with his musket, shoving him roughly down a steep embankment, the drunkard staggered to his feet, pulled a small pistol from his pocket, and fired. An officer on horseback screamed as the bullet tore a gaping wound in his leg. (The captain, an exiled Polish nobleman named
Constantin Blandowski, would die of his injury a few weeks later.) And so it was that the panicking soldiers turned
their muskets on the crowd. Somewhere up at the head of the column, surreally, the German band kept playing.
¹²¹

Sherman ran back toward the grove, pulling Willie into a ditch and covering the boy with his body as they heard bullets cutting through the leaves and branches overhead. Around them people stampeded in all directions, some of them wounded. A few bold civilians stood their ground and fired back at the soldiers. Captain Lyon, one of the few professional soldiers on hand and perhaps the only one capable
of bringing his raw recruits under control, was
still woozy from the kick he had received. By the time the shooting stopped, bodies lay everywhere: a middle-aged street vendor, a teenage girl, a young German laborer in his work clothes, and several soldiers from both Frost’s and Lyon’s commands. A wounded woman sat keening on the ground, clasping the body of her dead child in her arms. In all, more than two dozen people had been killed or mortally hurt.

Lyon, dazed, stood looking around him, murmuring in a strange, soft voice: “Poor creatures … poor creatures …”
¹²²

Others stared amazed at the sight of buildings pockmarked with bullet holes, like wounds torn in the city itself. Much commented on afterward was the remarkable power of the new Minié rifle balls, how such small lumps of lead could make such big craters in brickwork and stone.

A twelve-year-old boy, returning home with his father to Pine Street, saw something that would still haunt him more than six decades later:

The retaliation began that night. Crowds of secessionists gathered in front of the Planter’s House as impromptu orators railed against the Black Republicans and Hessian mercenaries. At last the mob decided to wreck the
Anzeiger
print shop; storming down Main Street, they smashed the window of Dimick’s gun store and began grabbing shotguns and rifles. Fortunately for Boernstein’s paper, some quick-thinking Home Guards blocked the street and
fended off the attack with fixed bayonets. For the next twenty-four hours, though, Germans foolish enough to appear in public were chased down and beaten, stoned, sometimes lynched. One of the reserve regiments was ambushed by secessionists firing from behind the pillars of a Presbyterian church; in the ensuing confusion, several soldiers unlucky enough to become separated from their comrades were seized and executed with shots fired point-blank to the head. Rumors began reaching the
city of similar reprisals across the state; in towns too small to
have any Germans, Republicans were slain or “abolitionist” churches burned.
¹²⁴

Meanwhile, in the wealthier neighborhoods of St. Louis, it was said that the “Dutch” were about to sack and burn the city. “The ‘upper ten,’ the rich, proud slaveholders,” as Boernstein called them, loaded up draymen’s wagons with mahogany furniture and chests of linen and fled by the thousands, crowding aboard ferryboats, seeking the safety of the Illinois shore.
¹²⁵

But Captain Lyon’s sights were now set beyond St. Louis. He had accomplished everything he needed to do there.

Within a matter of weeks, Lyon, Blair, Sigel, and their German volunteers were marching toward central Missouri in hot pursuit of Governor Jackson, who by this point had unilaterally declared war on the United States and called for 50,000 volunteers to defend against Yankee invasion. (Boernstein and his men stayed behind to guard St. Louis.) Jackson fled Jefferson City at the troops’ approach, accompanied by most of the prosecession legislature and the Missouri
state troops. Lyon caught up with them fifty miles away, at Boonville, where he dealt them a quick but decisive defeat. After just a few casualties on each side, the state troops broke ranks and fled, hotly pursued by the German regiments, into the far southwestern corner of the state. Missouri would never again be in serious danger of falling into rebel hands.
¹²⁶

While Thomas Starr King and Jessie Frémont may not have saved California for the Union, it is reasonable to say that Nathaniel Lyon, Frank Blair, and the Germans did save Missouri. Somehow, the strange, almost accidental alliance of two outsize egotists (one of them possibly psychotic) and several thousand idealists had carried the day.

Grant himself would believe for the rest of his life that but for them, the Arsenal—and with it St. Louis—would have been taken by the Confederacy. Some historians have argued that the militia at
Camp Jackson, even if reinforced, could never have posed any serious threat by itself, which is perhaps true. But by seizing the initiative, by transforming the
Wide Awakes into soldiers and
moving against the secessionists before they could properly organize, the “damn Dutchmen” had sent their enemies reeling, never to regain balance. In effect, a small band of German revolutionaries accomplished in St. Louis what they had failed to do in Vienna and Heidelberg: overthrow a reactionary state government. And they had done it in a matter of weeks, while in the East the armies were stumbling toward a war of attrition that would last almost four years. If the
Union in 1861 had just had a few
more Lyons and Blairs in charge of its troops, its conquest of the South might have played out very differently.
¹²⁷

But even swift victory did not come without a price. For the rest of those four years,
Missouri would be the scene of atrocities unlike any seen elsewhere: ceaseless guerrilla warfare that erased distinctions between soldier and civilian almost entirely; violence with no greater strategic purpose than avenging the violence that had come before; in a few notorious instances, hundreds lined up and executed in cold blood. There would be
many more shattered buildings, dead children and dead mothers, gutters awash in blood.

O
N JULY 4, 1861,
a thousand miles from Fort Churchill—at Julesburg in the newly organized
Colorado Territory—a crew of workmen raised the first pole at the eastern end of the transcontinental telegraph. On the same day, too, news went out that President Lincoln had just appointed
John C. Frémont, newly returned from Europe, to command the
Department of the West. He and his wife would set out as soon as possible for St. Louis.

Throughout that summer, two telegraph lines converged over the deserts and plains. As the termini drew closer, the route of the
Pony Express grew shorter and shorter, until at last the swift horsemen were carrying messages across only the little distance between the wires. The connection was made in October at Salt Lake City; the indomitable
Hiram Sibley and his partners had beaten Congress’s
seemingly impossible deadline by more than a year. Within days, communications traffic was so heavy that operators began talking of the need for a second wire and even a third. “When once the Yankees get started,” an Ohio newspaper editor marveled, “it is hard for them to stop.”
¹²⁸

The honor of sending one of San Francisco’s first messages across the continent was accorded to the Reverend Thomas Starr King. His words raced eastward as dots and dashes, arriving thus at the office of the
Boston Evening Transcript:

The arc of the sun he had once so powerfully traced was now reinforced by a strand of copper filament.

Over the four years to come, as the war raged east of the Mississippi, more and more lines would be drawn across the West.

In 1862, Congress—suddenly liberated from sectional gridlock in its half-empty chamber—would pass the Homestead Act, promising 160 acres of federal land to any man or woman willing to settle it. In the autumn of the following year, the first lengths of the transcontinental railway were laid at Sacramento. Lines of new counties, farm boundaries, townships, and streets spread across the map, mere pencil markings that soon took shape on the landscape itself.
Miles of rail fences followed, and the twin ruts of new wagon roads.

And across all of it, the wire—busier and busier, its indifferent electrons carrying speeches and sermons, grain prices and casualty lists, through mountain passes that the Pathfinder once had crossed.

—H
ERMAN
M
ELVILLE
,
“The March into Virginia” (1861)

The Marshall House, Alexandria, Virginia, circa 1862 (
photo credit 7.1
)

D
URING THE FIRST DAYS OF MAY,
an unusual sight greeted visitors to the Capitol. In the great Rotunda, beneath the interrupted dome, young men in gray-and-red uniforms and fezzes swung like merry acrobats from ropes and shimmied up pillars. They capered over the muddy grounds, one observer wrote, “leaping fences, knocking down sentinels, turning aside indignant bayonets, hanging like monkeys from the outer ledges of the dome, some two
hundred feet above the firm-set earth.”
¹

Those staid classical halls had witnessed some strange things already that year. The rancorous scenes to which they had long since become accustomed—Northerners thundering against Southerners, slaveholders denouncing abolitionists, torrents of baroque invective relieved only by occasional fistfights—had yielded suddenly to an unprecedented calm. But now, just weeks later, there was neither tranquility or rancor here. Rather, it might have seemed at first
glance that a flying circus had invaded the Capitol.