Terrible Swift Sword (3 page)

But the people who were fighting one
another were most unlikely to exercise much restraint or to submit to effective
discipline. They were already beginning to take the war into their own hands,
and they were so muscular, tenacious, and impatient that they might easily give
it dimensions large enough to develop any and all of its potentialities. The
pressure for action which had compelled a reluctant general to put an unready
army into the fight at Bull Run was still rising. This was a war in which
anything could happen.

There was a young mining engineer who
raised a company of mountaineers in northern Georgia and led them off to serve
the Confederacy, only to be halted in Atlanta by the news that Georgia's quota
had been filled; the governor could not take any more recruits just now. The
mountaineers promptly mutinied—if that term can be applied to men who were not
yet members of any accredited military organization —and refused to go home. If
the governor of Georgia did not want them, they said, they would find some
other governor who did. They camped on the edge of Atlanta, a wild, spirited,
uncontrollable company which would do anything on earth but disband, and in the
fullness of time a place was found for them in an Alabama regiment; and in the
end they got, for their enthusiasm, four years of desperate fighting. After the
war their former captain wrote: "The literal truth is that the people were
leading the leaders."
¹¹

Behaving thus, the people were by no
means disagreeing with those leaders who wanted to conduct the war without
reference to the explosive issue of slavery. They simply wanted action,
responding to a reflex that ran from the emotions through the muscles, and they
showed what they wanted in various ways. From Charlottesville, Virginia, a
correspondent of the Charleston
Mercury
wrote
that "the cool western breeze which is rippling the tasselled corn into
endless waves comes laden with the hum of war from the distant
Alleghenies," and he reflected sagely: "Go where you will over this
broad land, the air is instinct with strife." A spirit less pastoral, and
also much less conventional, moved a citizen of Alabama who wrote to the
Confederate Secretary of War proposing the formation of volunteer companies of
freebooters which would make war at no cost to the Confederacy, supporting
themselves by the seizure of Yankee goods and chattels: "Such companies
propose going and fighting without restraint and under no orders, and convey
the property captured to their own private use, thereby benefiting their own
pecuniary circumstances as well as doing their country good service by
crippling the enemy." This proposal got nowhere, but the editor of the
Richmond
Examiner
called
for harsh measures, asserting: "The enemy must be made to feel the war.
They must be made to understand that there is a God that punishes the wicked,
and that the Southern army is His instrument."
¹²

The
notion that those led might get ahead of their leaders was general. Early in May,
governors of the Northern states lying west of New England met to urge vigorous
prosecution of the war, and their feelings were expressed in a letter drawn up
by Governor Alex Randall of Wisconsin and forwarded to President Lincoln.

"There is a spirit evoked by this
rebellion among the liberty-loving people of the country," wrote Governor
Randall, "that is driving them to action, and if the Government will not
permit them to act for it they will act for themselves. It is better for the
Government to direct this current than to let it run wild. So far as possible
we have attempted to allay this excess of spirit, but there is a moral element
and a reasoning element in this uprising that cannot be met in the ordinary
way. There is a conviction of great wrongs to be redressed and that the
Government is to be preserved by them. The Government must provide an outlet
for this feeling or it will find one for itself. If the Government does not at
once shoulder this difficulty and direct its current there will come something
more than a war to put down rebellion—it will be a war between border States,
which will lose sight, for the time, of the Government."
¹⁸

Using
different words, these Northerners and Southerners were all testifying to a
common belief—that this war which was going to mean fighting, pain,
destruction, and tremendous anger was destined sooner or later to go out of
control. It could not be just "a war to put down rebellion." Its elements
were too violent. Men who had never learned to endure wrongs with patience had
become convinced that wrongs were being done to them. People eternally eager to
dedicate themselves had come to feel that there were noble causes to be served.
Finally, there were enemies to be hurt in a land where the only rule about a blow
struck in anger was that it must be struck with all of the strength one had.

. . . Tornado weather: sultriest and most
menacing, as the Wisconsin governor had said, along the border—that cross
section of nineteenth-century America that ran for a thousand miles from
Virginia tidewater to the plains of Kansas, reaching from the place of the
nation's oldest traditions to the rude frontier where no tradition ran back
farther than the day before yesterday. Here was where the fighting was
beginning— along the border—and here was where the war was going to take shape.

For a long time the
shape of it would be hard to make out, partly because the pattern would be slow
in taking form and partly because it was so easy to look for it in the wrong
place. Then as now, the eye was drawn to Virginia, to the legendary country
between the Potomac and the James, the floodlit stage where rival governments
would have formal trial by combat. The Bull Run frenzy had gone to its limit
here, arrogant overconfidence blowing up at last in a froth of pride and shame
and panic; and the governments were thought to have learned something by it.
They would take their time now, organizing and equipping and drilling with
much care, moving (when it was time to move) according to professional plan and
not because of pressure raised by "Forward to Richmond!" headlines
in an overheated press. Here, it was said, was where the final decision would
be reached, and all that happened elsewhere would be secondary.

But
the border ran a long way, and eastern Virginia was no more than a fraction of
it. Beyond were Allegheny valleys and Cumberland plateau, western Virginia and
eastern Tennessee, Kentucky with its rich Bluegrass farmland going west from
the mountains all the way to the central artery, the Mississippi; and beyond
them was Missouri, stretching out to the Kansas-Nebraska vastness where the war
had had at least one of its beginnings. In each of the related segments of this
border the war had a different guise and a different meaning. Here it was a
battle in which ill-equipped armies learned their trade in blundering action;
there it was a matter of shadows in the dusk, neighbor ambushing neighbor,
hayrick and barn blazing up at midnight with a drum of hoofbeats on a lonely
lane to tell the story, or a firing squad killing a bridge-burner for a warning
to the lawless. The separate scenes were monstrous, confusing, ever-changing;
put together, they might make something planned neither in Washington nor in
Richmond.

2.
A Mean-Fowt Fight

John Charles Fremont brought to Missouri
a great reputation, a brand-new commission as major general, and a formidable
set of abilities which did not quite meet the demands that Missouri was about
to make. He entered the Civil War at the precise place where it wore its most
baffling aspect, and although he presently saw with tolerable clarity what
needed to be done he knew hardly anything about the way to go about doing it.
He was famous as The Pathfinder, the man who had charted trails across the
untracked West; he had been the first presidential candidate of the new
Republican party in 1856, helping to make another sort of trail into an even
more trackless wilderness; and now he was in Missouri, a bewildering jungle
where a trail could be blazed only by a man gifted with a profound
understanding of the American character, the talents of a canny politician, and
enormous skill as an administrator. Of these gifts General Fremont had hardly
a trace.

Perhaps nobody really understood what
was going on in Missouri, and the fault was partly Nathaniel Lyon's. Lyon was
like a sword—hard, narrow, and sharp—and he had gone slashing through the
complex loyalties of this border state so vigorously that almost everyone was
adrift. A captain in the Regular Army, exercising a highly irregular authority
and leading troops which were almost equally irregular, he had in May
surrounded, captured, and disarmed a contingent of Missouri state militia
legally camped in a St. Louis suburb, with subsequent gunfire and the killing
of sundry civilians. Then, elevated abruptly to the position of brigadier
general, Lyon had in effect declared war on the governor of the state, secessionist-minded
Claiborne Jackson, driving that functionary off toward the Ozarks and occupying
Jefferson City, the state capital. Missouri had not seceded—could not really
secede, now, because all of the machinery of state government was gripped by
the Federal power—and a majority of its people almost certainly had been
Unionists, at least to a degree, from the start. The state probably would have
stayed in the Union in any case, but Lyon took no chances. He kept thinking, no
doubt, of a fact which greatly worried hard-drinking Frank Blair, the brother
of Lincoln's Postmaster General and son of that tough activist, Old Man Blair
of Maryland: Francis
P.
Blair,
Jr., Republican leader in Missouri and Lyon's principal sponsor. Blair
complained that one big problem was the presence of a great many good men
"who liked the Union very much but did not see the necessity of fighting
for it"; men who thought that "the best way to put down the rebellion
was to make a show of force but not to use it at all." Lyon believed in
using if, did use it, with the result that Missouri was divided into factions
and sub-factions, with almost everybody in the state apparently either making
war or preparing to make war —on his next-door neighbor, as often as not.
¹

This was what Fremont stepped into when
he reached St. Louis on July 25, and he can hardly be blamed if he found it
confusing. His responsibilities were broad, his means were limited, and the
crisis seemed immeasurable. He was supposed to safeguard Missouri and all the
Northwest, and he was also expected to organize, equip, and lead an army down
the Mississippi to New Orleans, reclaiming the great valley and reopening it to
commerce and breaking off the whole western part of the Confederacy. He had
about 23,000 troops, more than a third of which were three-months volunteers
whose terms were about to expire. Governors of the Western states were sending
recruits to him, but he had hardly any arms for them, nothing much in the way
of uniforms or other military equipment, scanty rations and transportation, and
no money. As far as he could learn, every county in the state contained "a
Rebel faction
...
at least equal to
the loyal population in numbers and excelling it in vindictiveness and
energy." St. Louis struck him as "a Rebel city" whose upper
classes were unanimously secessionist; bands of night riders were despoiling
loyalist citizens all across the state, and the militantly anti-Union state
guard was alleged to have 25,000 men under arms. Worst of all, there were said
to be nearly 50,000 Confederate soldiers in Arkansas and Tennessee ready to
invade Missouri, seize its railroads, reclaim its capital, capture St. Louis,
and occupy Cairo, Illinois, at the point where the Ohio River joined the
Mississippi. If they did all of this the war in the West would be gone beyond
redemption and the independence of the Confederacy would be virtually assured.
²

The picture actually was not quite that
dark. Fremont's informants had more than doubled the size of the state guard
and had nearly doubled the strength of the Confederate armies beyond the
borders, and they had totally ignored the great difficulties the commanders of
those forces would encounter once they began a co-ordinated offensive: and
anyway St. Louis was not really as much a "Rebel city" as Fremont considered
it. But the picture was dark enough. If the Federals were to make war in the
West with any success at all they had to secure Missouri and the mouth of the
Ohio and then move down the Mississippi in great strength, and although the authorities
in Washington knew this they were not devoting much attention to it because
they were concentrating on problems nearer home. They did not exactly suppose
that the Missouri situation would take care of itself but they did expect that
Fremont would take care of it for them, and they were not going to pay detailed
attention to what he did unless he got into serious trouble. Things being as
they were, it was almost inevitable that this would happen.

It began, as so many things in Missouri
had begun, with Nathaniel Lyon. When Fremont reached Missouri Lyon was far off
in the southwestern part of the state, near the market town of Springfield,
gloomily uncertain whether he was nearing the conclusion of a triumphant
offensive or the beginning of a disastrous defeat. He had done a good deal for
the Union cause thus far. He had exiled the governor and forced the secessionist
militia to operate without a base, a war chest or an adequate legal footing,
and he had given the Unionists time to set up a state government which would
co-operate with the administration in Washington. But he had done all of this
by prodding a hornets' nest with a stick, and the turmoil he had raised
threatened now to overwhelm him.