1861

by Adam Goodheart

  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.111

  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.112

  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.

  IN 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.113

  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.114

  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.”115

  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.116

  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.117

  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:

  SIR—Your command is regarded as evidently hostile to the Government of the United States.

  It is for the most part made up of those secessionists who have openly avowed their hostility to the Government, and have been plotting at the seizure of its property and the overthrow of its authority. You are openly in communication with the so-called Southern Confederacy, which is now at war with the United States; and you are receiving at your camp, from the said Confederacy and under its flag, large supplies of the material of war.…

  In view of these considerations … it is my duty to demand, and I do hereby demand of you, an immediate surrender.

  Frost had little choice. He sent the adjutant back with a note acquiescing, under strong protest, to the demand.118

  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 o
ver 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.119

  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.120

  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:

  Two bullets had struck our house, and just outside a German soldier was sitting on the side-walk with his back to the wall. Coming closer we could distinguish where the Minié bullet had penetrated his temple. He was dead. Close by a servant with a pail of water was washing a stream of blood off the side-walk where someone had been killed, and the sight to me was indescribably horrible. My father said this was civil war.123

  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.

  ON 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