Authors: Adam Goodheart
1861 (44 page)
Neither she nor he would rest much in the months and years ahead. Each would continue separately the campaign they had begun together.
T
HE CONVENTION TO DETERMINE
Missouri’s course in the national crisis assembled
in St. Louis on March 4. Although this was also, by chance, the day of Lincoln’s inauguration, it dawned unpropitiously for the local Unionists. They awoke to find two secessionist flags flying above their city. One floated from the staff atop the courthouse dome; unguarded, it was
easily removed. The other would be a good deal trickier to deal with. It wasn’t much to look at: a dark blue cloth hastily stitched with a crude patchwork of secession emblems, from the palmetto and star to the Southern cross to the state arms of Missouri. But it hung from the front porch of the Berthold Mansion, which was very well guarded indeed.
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Before long, a large and angry crowd—mostly Germans—was filling the streets for several blocks in each direction, shouting for the flag to be taken down. Each window of the mansion bristled with loaded muskets: clearly the
Minute Men were prepared to defend their banner at all costs. (The protesters didn’t know it, but the defenders also had a swivel gun, loaded with musket balls and tenpenny nails, aimed from the
inside at the front door.) Soon, drumbeats were heard approaching through the streets: the Wide Awakes were coming, and they too were armed.
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The two sides faced each other across the narrow porch. A thousand miles away, the Black Republican president was taking his oath of
office. Everyone knew that this standoff on Fifth Street might erupt at any moment into a bloodbath—and they knew what such a bloodbath could mean, not just for their state but for their country.
Somehow violence was averted that morning. One eyewitness account says vaguely that “after many entreaties by the thoughtful and intelligent of the Unionists, the rank and file accorded obedience.” Another, more specific, describes a civic elder who climbed atop an Italian fruit vendor’s small donkey cart—a convenient platform accidentally stranded there—to address the crowd. The donkey, “suddenly taking fright either at the
eloquence of the orator or at the shouts of the crowd,” bolted and sent the gentleman tumbling, to the spectators’ amusement. Perhaps credit is due to that donkey—whose name, if he had one, is lost to history—for breaking the tension and preventing a clash of arms that might have touched off the Civil War six weeks early.
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In any event, the rebel flag still flew unmolested from the Berthold Mansion the next day. Thanks to it, however, the Missouri leaders meeting to decide their state’s allegiance had just caught a glimpse of the future. The consequences of secession, which had seemed like remote abstractions in bucolic Jefferson City, were now all too vividly manifest.
Isidor Bush, the only Forty-Eighter among the delegates, rose to admonish his
colleagues: “While you … only imagine the horrors of war and fancy the evils of revolution, I know them. My eyes have seen what you cannot imagine, what I cannot describe.” The next day, to Governor Jackson’s chagrin, the convention almost unanimously endorsed a resolution that “
at present
there was no adequate cause to impel Missouri to dissolve her connection with the federal Union.”
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Still, every Missourian knew that in the event of federal aggression toward a Southern state—say, a battle at Charleston or elsewhere—the “adequate cause” might very suddenly present itself.
What only a few knew was that the raising of the two rebel flags had not been some rash act of a few young hotheads. It had been a coolly plotted provocation. The Minute Men had actually hoped to spark an explosion of violence throughout the city. Amid the chaos, they thought, they could seize the choicest prize of the
Mississippi Valley, indeed, one of the choicest in the entire country: the United States Arsenal at St. Louis.
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The Arsenal was a central munitions depot for federal forts throughout the West. Its present stores could equip an entire Confederate army: 60,000 muskets, 90,000 pounds of gunpowder, 1.5 million cartridges,
and several dozen cannon—in addition to machinery for arms manufacture, of which the South had woefully little. The Buchanan administration, displaying its usual strategic acumen, had initially left only forty soldiers guarding this
bounty, the largest single arms cache in all the slave states. Thanks to some urgent string pulling by Frank Blair, the force was increased to some five hundred federal troops, still hardly enough, given the thousands of secessionist volunteers now arming themselves in St. Louis and throughout Missouri. But as winter turned into spring and the plots and counterplots multiplied, the Arsenal’s greatest asset would turn out to be one very strange little man.
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Captain
Nathaniel Lyon of the United States Army could hardly have seemed a less imposing warrior. A slight, red-bearded Yankee, he was constantly sucking on hard candies, which clicked wetly against his ill-fitting dentures. Yet Lyon embodied, in his five-foot-five frame, nearly everything that Southerners loathed and feared. He was a man of fervent, almost fanatical, Republican antislavery beliefs, which he never hesitated to
vocalize in his harsh, nasal Connecticut bray. It was not, he made clear, that he gave a damn about the slaves—in fact, he publicly professed himself “not concerned with improving the black race, nor the breed of dogs and reptiles.” No, it was mostly just that he hated the South, detested its authoritarian institutions, and tasted bile at the very thought of secessionist treason. Many tales about him circulated in the army. Perhaps the most famous was of the time
at
Fort Riley when the captain came upon one of his privates beating a dog: after knocking the soldier to the ground and kicking him in the stomach a few times, he made him get on his knees and beg the animal for forgiveness. To know that story was to know Nathaniel Lyon.
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People called him “mentally unbalanced”; no doubt present-day psychiatry has a term for his condition. Whenever an underling committed some trifling infraction, Lyon would inflict an ingeniously sadistic punishment—one favorite involved honey and stinging flies—then seek out his victim a few hours later and abjectly apologize. On meeting someone, Lyon would coax out of him some mild expression of political or religious opinion (the captain
himself was an avowed atheist), so that he might reply with a scalding shower of profanities. And yet somehow he also managed to inspire loyalty, even trust. A brother officer wrote:
If he had lived four hundred years ago he would have been burned at the stake as a pestilent and altogether incorrigible person, whose removal was demanded in the interests of the peace
of society.… There was no middle ground with him in any matter that engaged his attention, and he conceived that it was his duty to enforce his doctrines or ideas upon all with whom he came in contact, even to the point of being offensive. At the same
time he was possessed of as tender a heart as ever beat in a man’s breast.… He had in him an indomitable spirit that was always awake, a fixity of purpose that never faltered, and a courage that was never for an instant met by the slightest feeling of fear. He did not know what fear was.
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In this man’s hands rested the fate of the St. Louis Arsenal.
He had arrived in February at the head of a company of reinforcements, just eighty soldiers, and reported to his superior officer at the Arsenal, a certain
Major Hagner, who seemed not quite combat-ready, to put it mildly. (When a squad started moving howitzers across the yard, the major admonished them sharply “not to spoil his lawn.”)
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But within days of his arrival, Lyon met Frank Blair and immediately recognized a kindred spirit: one as hard-nosed and ruthless as himself. Blair had thousands of men at his command, but few weapons; Lyon commanded just a few dozen men but had access to enough weapons to arm half of St. Louis. No wonder they found each other.
There was another very important respect in which the well-connected Blair could be useful: he had the ear of the Lincoln administration. Within a week of the inauguration, he dropped a quick note to Secretary of War Cameron, and almost immediately, new orders went out to St. Louis, assigning command of the Arsenal’s troops and defenses to Captain Nathaniel Lyon, relieving the feckless Hagner.
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The armed standoff—between the
Minute Men and heavily secessionist state militia on one side, and the Arsenal troops and former Wide Awakes on the other—lasted through early April. (Blair had now renamed his forces the Home Guards.) Then came the momentous news from Charleston Harbor. Now it was the governor’s turn to act.
On the very day that word of Sumter’s surrender arrived
in St. Louis—Sunday, April 14—Jackson struck the lowest and most dastardly blow he could inflict on the German community: he orchestrated a police raid to enforce the blue laws. Squads of officers fanned out across the city, storming into saloons and beer gardens and driving the clientele into the streets. (Drinking
establishments popular among “Americans,” such as the bar at the Planter’s House hotel, famous for its mint juleps and sherry cobblers, were not disturbed. Afterward, one report had it that misdirected police came to break up a saloon
where Governor Jackson himself happened to be drinking with some cronies, but this seems too good to be true.) Forty armed policemen appeared at Henry Boernstein’s Opera House just before the evening
performance and shut down the theater; it never reopened. This was, however, only the opening salvo of a larger campaign to oppress the city’s Unionists by the arbitrary exercise of government authority. It was quickly announced that English would henceforth be the only official language of state business, and that funds for St. Louis’s public schools were being reallocated to arm Governor Jackson’s militia. Citizens were forbidden from gathering in large groups
in the streets. All assemblies of “negroes or mulattoes,” including church services, were summarily banned unless a police officer was present, and hundreds of free blacks, terrified that reenslavement might be next, flocked to the courthouse seeking official certificates of freedom.
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“Not One Word More—Now Arms Will Decide,” the
Anzeiger
’s headline announced grimly. “Every question, every doubt has been swept away,” the article continued. “The Fatherland calls us—we stand at its disposal.”
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The Fatherland’s first official call to the state of Missouri, however, failed to elicit the desired effect. When Governor Jackson received Lincoln’s April 15 order for state troops to be mustered into federal service, he replied in no uncertain terms:
Sir, … your requisition in my judgment, is illegal, unconstitutional and revolutionary in its object, inhuman and diabolical, and cannot be complied with. Not one man will the state of Missouri furnish to carry on such an unholy crusade.
Even many moderate Missourians who would have disowned their governor’s harsh rhetoric agreed in wanting no part of Lincoln’s call to arms. One man spoke for many when he wrote to a pro-Union acquaintance: “We ask nothing of the gov’t at Washington but to be left alone.” Publicly, Jackson announced a policy of “armed neutrality” for the state. Privately, he sent envoys to Montgomery to ask
Jefferson Davis for siege guns and mortars to be used against the Arsenal.
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On village squares, county fairgrounds, and fallow fields across Missouri, young men were forming militia companies to defend their state against the Yankees. They armed themselves with hunting rifles and shotguns, sharpened homemade bowie knives to a razor’s edge, and buckled on old swords cadged from neighbors who had fought in Mexico. Many years later one of these Missouri volunteers would pen
a wry account—a parody of the Civil War
memoir genre—of his company from the town of Hannibal. In his telling, the unit was little more than a dozen or so boys playing at war, fighting hand-to-paw combats against barnyard dogs and “retreating” headlong through the night from nonexistent Union patrols. But ex-Lieutenant Sam Clemens was viewing the past through the sentimental haze of a quarter century, not to mention through the satirical lens of
Mark Twain. In the
spring of 1861, the secessionist militias were in deadly earnest.
A different volunteer, making his way from the far west of the state to join the rebel forces, stopped with his comrades at a wayside inn, where the landlord’s pretty daughter entertained them with “Dixie” on the piano. “I made a promise to her that I would kill two ‘duchmen,’ ” the young man recorded.
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Across the country, in fact, many people framed the conflict in ethnic as well as racial terms—an aspect of the war that has been largely forgotten. Many white
immigrants embraced the opportunity to prove their identity as true Americans, and as they watched their adopted homeland fall unexpectedly to pieces, they looked to their own traditions for guidance. In New York, the
Irish Brigade
marched down Broadway behind a banner reading “Remember Fontenoy,” referring to a 1745 battle where Irish Jacobites fought British troops. (Although Irish soldiers have often been stereotyped as racists and unwilling conscripts, one immigrant, writing in February 1861, compared enslaved blacks to his own oppressed nation and said of the impending war: “this is Just the only effectual Speedy way of setting the Coulered population at liberty.”) In
Kansas, a young Jewish immigrant had a final conversation with his parents before riding off to join the Union cavalry: “My mother said that as a Jehudi [Jew] I had the duty to perform, to defend the institutions which gave equal rights to all beliefs.”
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And in St. Louis, a group of
German women made a flag. They stitched it together out of heavy silk, with stars of silver thread. Across its red and white stripes they painted an inscription in gold letters: “III. Regiment
MISSOURI VOLUNTEERS
.
Lyons Fahnenwacht.
”
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“Lyon’s Color Guard” was a new unit under Sigel’s command. The ladies presented their handiwork at an impressive ceremony with both Sigel and Lyon in attendance, as well as the entire regiment. Miss
Josephine Weigel stepped forward and addressed the commander in their native tongue: