Coming Fury, Volume 1 (62 page)

It came to an end after a while, and the soldiers were able to finish their trip to the arsenal. No one ever made a really accurate count of the casualties, but it appeared that at least twenty-eight people had been killed or mortally wounded, with many more receiving lesser hurts. Most of those shot were civilians, some of whom had come out to do nothing more than see what was going on; a child had been killed in its mother’s arms, a woman was dead, at least three of the prisoners had been shot—by whom, nobody ever quite knew. The soldiers had had losses, too. Captain Constantine Blandovski, of the Third Volunteer regiment, had been mortally wounded while his company was standing at rest, a man from Poland dying in a haphazard battle no one had planned, others from Europe dying with him. Death had struck at haphazard and from a clear sky, and the terror was remembered. One citizen said that up to the moment of actual violence the soldiers had passed silently, except
for the unending shuffle of heavy feet, their presence all the more frightening because they looked so awkward. Emerging from his cellar after the riot ended, this man found a dead “Hessian” sitting on the sidewalk, his back against the house, a bullet hole in his head; near by a servant with mop and bucket was scrubbing bloodstains from the sidewalk. Farther down the street there was a little fruit stand, run by an Italian who probably knew and cared as little about secession and unionism as any man in America. A stray bullet had killed him, and the cries of his widow and children hung in the empty street.
¹⁵

St. Louis was a wild town that night. Thousands of people were on the streets, asking for news, prepared to make news on their own account. Groups paraded back and forth, shouting, brandishing weapons, now and then firing in the darkness, some carrying the United States flag, others bearing the flag of the Confederacy. Proprietors of saloons, restaurants, and theaters prudently shut up shop, fearing a general riot. A store selling firearms was raided, and fifteen or twenty rifles were carried off before the police could disperse the mob. Somehow, general rioting was averted, but trouble broke out afresh the next day when one of the German regiments, marching from the arsenal to its mustering place, fell afoul of an angry crowd at Fifth and Walnut streets. In the senseless firing that resulted, from six to twelve persons were killed—some of them, it was believed, soldiers hit by wild shots fired by their own comrades.
¹⁶

The militiamen captured at Camp Jackson were duly released, paroled prisoners of war. Nobody quite understood what kind of war this was, but a war of some sort unquestionably had begun—it had taken lives, it had its formal roster of men taken prisoners, and the kind of neutrality Kentucky had been enjoying was going to be forever impossible for Missouri.

The month that followed the bombardment of Fort Sumter settled it. Resorting to violence, the country now had to abide by
the results of violence; the fury that had been invoked would grow great, with gunfire in the streets, armed riders on the country roads, undisciplined militia driven on toward the great test of battle. The secession of the cotton states might, just possibly, have ended simply as a political-pressure play. But the second secession changed all of that. States like Virginia and Tennessee were taking part in no pressure play. They went out to stay out, a terrible finality implicit in their action. The confused and brutal struggle for the border states was a logical consequence—logical, because the only logic that prevailed now was the rough logic of chaos itself.

This logic can lead to unexpected conclusions. Blair and Lyon had won the civil war in St. Louis before it really got started, which was just what they set out to do, but as far as the rest of the state was concerned, they had won nothing; they had simply made more civil war inevitable. The fighting in St. Louis was clear warning that the middle of the road was no path for Missourians. No longer would carefree militiamen lounge picturesquely in a picnic-ground camp, serenading the girls while they waited for glory and an easy triumph. Now they would fight, and other men would fight against them, and no part of the United States would know greater bitterness or misery. Here was a state still close to the frontier, where men were predisposed to violence and where half a decade of dispute over the slavery issue had created many enmities, the lines of hatred running from farm to farm and from neighbor to neighbor. Altogether, it was a bad state in which to ignite a civil war.

The seismic shock of what happened in St. Louis on May 10 struck the state legislature first. That body was in session at Jefferson City, the state capital, and until about six o’clock on the evening of May 10 it had seemed to be safely Unionist. It had long since refused to vote for secession, providing instead for a state convention which had solidly beaten an ordinance of secession and had voted for a benevolent neutrality more or less on the Kentucky model; but when the first dispatch from St. Louis arrived, the legislature was galvanized into swift, pro-Confederate action. It might even have voted to take the state out of the Union, if it had not previously delegated authority in that respect to the state convention; as it was, it gave the Union cause a sharp defeat, passing a military appropriation bill which the Unionists had
bitterly opposed. This bill authorized the governor—Claiborne Jackson, against whose secessionist ambitions the whole Blair-Lyon blow had been aimed in the first place—to spend $2,000,000 to repel invasion; it also put every able-bodied man in the state in the militia, made the militia strictly subject to officers appointed by the governor, and made criticism of the governor an offense that could be punished by court-martial. Having done this, the legislature adjourned for the evening, only to be called back into session by messengers at midnight, a violent thunderstorm raging, church bells ringing, anxious citizens braving the storm to see what new crisis had developed. Word had just come in that 2000 troops were leaving St. Louis to march on the state capital, and the governor had called the legislators into secret session.

That midnight session was eerie; tense, shadowed, poised halfway between the desperate and the ludicrous. Almost everybody came to the meeting armed, some men excessively so. Rifles were stacked in the aisles, or leaned against the desks; some members sat in their places with guns between their knees, and some wore heavy belts to which were fastened revolvers and bowie knives; and there were armed guards at the doors. The tension was allayed when it became known that the Osage bridge, which must be crossed by any despotic Dutch levies that intended to enter Jefferson City, had been burned. There would be a breathing spell, then. The solons voted to send the state treasure to some safe place out of town, voted to do the same with the state’s supply of powder, and then adjourned for the night, their weapons unused. In the morning it was learned that the march on the capital was not taking place after all.
¹

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.”