by Bruce Catton
His resources were not yet exhausted. The top army commander in the St. Louis area was Brigadier General William S. Harney, an old Indian-fighting type with a good military record, but not quite the man (as Frank Blair saw it) to defend the government’s interests in Missouri at a time like this. Harney was as loyal to the Union as any regular officer need be, but he would always abide by army regulations, and the regulations made no provision for the sort of thing Blair and Lyon were considering. Blair tugged at his strings once more, and Harney was temporarily relieved from his command and ordered to Washington: whereupon Lyon got orders from the War Department instructing him to arm loyal citizens, protect the public property, and muster into service four regiments of Missourians. The loyal citizens and the four regiments would of course be Frank Blair’s Germans, and the public property would be chiefly the weapons in the arsenal.6 (In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a steamboat was taking aboard bulky boxes labeled “marble,” and consigned to a St. Louis address. In the boxes were the siege guns and howitzers that Davis was sending to Governor Jackson to enable Jackson to take possession of this same public property. This artillery, as it happened, came originally from a Federal arsenal in Baton Rouge, seized by Louisiana troops earlier in the winter.)
Governor of Illinois at this time was Richard S. Yates, a stout Republican who was deeply disturbed by the thought of a Confederate state along his own state’s western border, and who was even more disturbed by the fact that the Mississippi River, the corn belt’s traditional traffic artery to the outside world, now flowed through militantly foreign territory. He would do anything he could to help Unionists gain the upper hand in St. Louis, and now —by prearrangement with the Blair-Lyon team—he sent Captain James H. Stokes, of the Illinois militia, down to St. Louis on a steamer to help get those muskets out before Governor Jackson could seize them. Captain Stokes took his steamer to the wharf on the night of April 25, and before daylight more than 20,000 muskets and 110,000 cartridges had been put aboard. The steamer then went upstream, got to a railhead at Alton, on the Illinois side, and trans-shipped the arms to Springfield. (There was a great to-do about this in the Northern press, with colorful accounts of how an elaborate ruse was employed to foil a secessionist mob which wanted to prevent the transfer. It made a good story, full of melodrama, doubtless welcomed by a Northern public that was beginning to understand that there was a war on and expected a little excitement in the public prints; but it was pooh-poohed by the editor of the Missouri Republican, a loyalist paper in St. Louis, who wrote that no secessionist mob had even tried to keep the weapons from being shipped, and said the midnight transfer “could just as well have been done in the daylight.”)7
By the end of April the muskets were gone, except for those that had been retained to arm Blair’s German regiments and other “loyal citizens,” and General Frost’s state troops had not yet made their camp on the site commanding the arsenal. Lyon accordingly put his own new troops on the chosen site, and when Frost’s men were assembled, on May 6, Frost put them in camp in a grove on the western edge of St. Louis. In honor of the governor this place was known as Camp Jackson: it was a pleasant clearing with a good board fence around it, its principal roadways were named for Jefferson Davis, General Beauregard and Fort Sumter, and on spring evenings the camp was thronged by “the fairest of Missouri’s daughters” who strolled about “in company with their sons, brothers and lovers.” A big United States flag floated above General Frost’s tent, and altogether the camp looked like the scene of any peacetime militia muster, except that the militiamen and their visitors all did seem to have strong secessionist leanings. Also, on the night of May 8, the load of munitions from Baton Rouge reached St. Louis, and guns and ammunition were quietly hustled out to camp.
Governor Jackson unfortunately was a little late. The Federal arsenal now was guarded by several regiments of troops, and although these soldiers were complete amateurs, the same was true of the militiamen who had been called together to oppose them. Even though the Confederate artillery had been received, there was no very good place to put it. General Frost’s little brigade was actually at a loose end. It went on with its drill, while the governor and the general waited to see what would happen next.8
Now the business took on a farce-comedy coloration. Captain Lyon wanted to see for himself what the state troops were up to. (Legally, these troops had every right to be where they were, but Lyon angrily referred to them as “a body of rabid and violent opposers of the general government” and said that they were “a terror to all loyal and peaceful citizens.”) Accordingly, Lyon rigged himself up in the most improbable of disguises—black bombazine dress, veil, market basket, and whatnot—got into a buggy with a Negro coachman, and had himself driven all through the camp, ostensibly Frank Blair’s mother-in-law out to see the sights, peering darkly through the veil for signs of subversion and rebellion, reinforcing his conviction that Camp Jackson menaced the integrity of the Union and must be dealt with immediately.
William Tecumseh Sherman was living in St. Louis at this time, a retired army officer working as superintendent of a street railway company. He knew Lyon from old army days, and when he heard about this flamboyant act of espionage he refused to believe that it had really happened. Lyon, he pointed out, had “a full rough beard and a shocking head of hair” and was just about the last man in North America to play the part of female impersonator. Also, said Sherman, Camp Jackson was pretty much open to all visitors, and anyone could have strolled through the place at any time without trouble. Apparently, however, Lyon really made the visit, complete with gown, veil, and gloomy suspicion, and immediately afterward he and Blair concluded that the time for action had come.9
On May 9 four of Blair’s home-guard regiments were drawn up at the arsenal to receive ammunition. Sherman saw them there, saw Lyon running about (in proper regimentals once more, fortunately) with his hair in the wind and his pockets full of papers, and Sherman assumed that things were about to happen. General Frost, who had been hearing things, made the same assumption, and on May 10 he wrote to Lyon saying he understood that Lyon planned to attack Camp Jackson. General Frost said, with dignity, that this was hard to believe. Surely no United States officer would attack law-abiding citizens who were carrying out their Constitutional function of organizing and instructing a body of state militia? The message reached Lyon by messenger just as he was preparing to march; he contemptuously refused to receive it and started for Camp Jackson, with two companies of regulars and several thousand of the German guards. Southerners who watched the detachment start out eyed the Germans with contemptuous disdain. One man wrote that these recently enrolled soldiers “did not march so much as shuffle along” and felt that they looked apathetic and uncomprehending; felt, too, an eerie sense “of something silently fatal, bewildering, crushed, ghastly.” Lyon got his men out to the camp early in the afternoon, and sent in a peremptory demand for surrender. Frost surrendered, under protest, there being by this time nothing else that he could do.10
Frost might have done several things if he had acted earlier. He might have attacked the arsenal in spite of the odds against him as soon as the ordnance from Baton Rouge reached him. He might have fortified Camp Jackson and made ready to fight it out there. He might have retreated, to gain time and strength for a showdown later on. But by the afternoon of May 10 it was too late for him to do any of these things, and the real trouble seems to have been that he simply did not understand the kind of game that was being played. He had been preparing to do an extra-legal thing—seize a United States arsenal by force of arms—and he had relied, for protection, on the very legalities that were being disregarded. He had never quite managed to get down to business; his camp had been informal, easygoing, romantic, a “fashionable rendezvous,” as one sympathizer called it, where “all was forgotten save youthful vanity, impossible ambitions, flirtations.”11 Frost’s note to Captain Lyon had the muted ring of General Taliaferro’s complaint, at Norfolk, where the burnin
g of abandoned warships and machine shops seemed cowardly and disgraceful; it was not legal for the United States Army to attack state militia; men ought to go by the rules. But the rules were collapsing all over the land, and General Frost was helpless, and so Captain Lyon’s men went through Camp Jackson, lining up prisoners and assembling the captured war material.
Lyon hastily checked on what he had captured; 50 officers and 639 enlisted men, 3 siege guns, 1 mortar, 6 brass field pieces, 1200 rifled muskets, and an assortment of ammunition, equipment, and whatnot, along with 30 or 40 horses. Nothing would do now but to march the prisoners down to the arsenal so that they could be properly paroled. The procession was formed, regular troops leading the way, followed by German home guards, the prisoners surrounded by armed men; late in the afternoon the military band sounded off and the troops began to move.12
A great many people had come out to watch, and the troops moved through an increasing throng. Sherman believed that the bulk of the spectators were simply curious folk who wanted to see what was going on, but there were many loyal Southerners on the scene, and as the files of unhappy prisoners came tramping along, the crowd became more and more hostile. People surged off the sidewalks, jostled the moving troops, cheered for Jefferson Davis, and called down curses on all Dutch soldiers. (Good Southerners in St. Louis never referred to these Unionist Germans as Germans; they always called them Dutchmen, or Hessians, usually with a select string of qualifying adjectives.) One thing that gave Southern-minded folk in St. Louis a particular sense of outrage was the feeling that General Frost’s youthful soldiers represented chivalry, breeding, an aristocracy of birth and manners, and that it somehow was deeply wrong—almost unthinkable—for regular-army scum and clumping foreigners to presume to dictate to them. When news of the march to Camp Jackson circulated through the town, a woman told Sherman there would be bloodshed, because Frost’s men came from the best families in St. Louis, had much pride, and would fight to the death rather than surrender. Sherman remarked that “young men from the best families did not like to be killed better than ordinary people,” but this did not console her very much. The regular soldiers who led the procession presently leveled their bayonets to force a passage. They opened a path without serious trouble, but the German regiments behind them lacked the regulars’ tough discipline, and when the crowd menaced them with revolvers, they reflected that they carried loaded weapons themselves and got ready to use them.13
They boiled over into outright violence before long, just as a similar situation had brought violence in Baltimore. When the crowd saw the files of prisoners, flanked by armed men, what little restraint there was vanished entirely. A woman screamed “They’ve got my lover!” and ran close to spit on one of the guards; the guard turned on her with his bayonet and chased her down the street, wholly ignoring the storied sanctity of Southern womanhood. A drunken man with a revolver tried to break through the cordon, was pushed violently away, and began to fire, wounding an officer. Some of the Germans fired in reply; then the column wavered to a halt and suddenly the firing was general. In the beginning, it was said that most of the soldiers fired in the air, hoping to frighten the crowd into retreat, but this did not last long, and many of the bullets found human targets. In a little open square Sherman stood watching, with his small son at his side. When the firing began, he pulled the boy to the ground and lay over him to protect him; he estimated that at least 100 bullets passed over them before the firing died down. Smoke clouds drifting across the pavement veiled the movement of running men and women, and there was a wild uproar of musket fire, shouts, screams, hoarse cries of command, and the clatter of hurrying feet.14
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.
5: Symbolism of Death
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
