This Hallowed Ground (7 page)

In his absence command of everything in and around St. Louis devolved on Lyon, who then got as extraordinary a set of instructions from the War Department as any mere infantry captain ever received. To maintain order and defend national property he was empowered at his discretion to enroll up to ten thousand citizens of St. Louis and vicinity in the military service. (These could be none other than Blair’s Germans, who had been zealously drilling, often with Captain Lyon’s aid, in
Turnverein
halls all winter.) In addition, Lyon was told that if he, Blair, and Blair’s committee of public safety thought it necessary he could proclaim martial law.

Decidedly, this was stretching military regulations past what would ordinarily be considered the breaking point. Old Lorenzo Thomas, lanky and crotchety adjutant general of the army, was seen coming out of a White House conference on the matter looking very grave and shaking his head dolefully. “It’s bad, very bad,” he said. “We’re giving that young man Lyon a great deal too much power in Missouri.” General Winfield Scott, older and more decayed than Thomas but much more able to see to the heart of things, took it in stride. Across the bottom of Lyon’s instructions he scribbled: “It is revolutionary times, and therefore I do not object to the irregularity of this.”
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Not long thereafter things began to happen.

Governor Jackson called out some seven hundred troops of the state
militia and put them into camp on the edge of St. Louis — for routine instruction, said the militia commander; to seize the government arsenal and take Missouri out of the Union, said Blair and Lyon. Lyon began swearing the Germans into U.S. service. It was hard to do this regularly, since in the ordinary course of things a state government formally offered troops to the Federal government; offered them, and looked after their clothing, pay, and equipment. None of this could happen in the case of the Germans, but they were sworn in anyway, larger irregularities having already been swallowed. Then Lyon reflected that Harney would sooner or later be getting back from Washington and decided that it was time to take steps.

His first step was to have a look at the state militia camp. He was an unlikely character for the part of female impersonator, but it seems that he tried it: dressed up in black bombazine dress, sunbonnet, and heavy veils (the better to hide his bristling whiskers), he rode through the camp in a rustic buggy, a basket of eggs in his lap, like any farm woman who had come in to bring some extra rations to a soldier son. Hidden beneath the eggs in the basket were half a dozen loaded revolvers, just in case. Lyon saw what there was to see, including company streets named after Jefferson Davis, Beauregard, and other Confederate heroes, and then he hurried back to the arsenal, where he called Blair and the committee of public safety into meeting. Shedding sunbonnet and bombazine and regaining the dignity of a proper army officer, Lyon announced that on his tour of the camp he had seen, through the veils and over the eggs, Missouri militiamen with weapons in their hands — weapons which, as he detected, had recently been taken by Louisiana insurgents from a government arsenal at Baton Rouge and which therefore rightly belonged to the Federal government. It was necessary, said Lyon, to occupy the camp, hold the militiamen as prisoners of war, and recover all of this government property forthwith.

This touched off an argument. Two members of the committee insisted that things ought to be done legally; if Captain Lyon wanted the munitions which were held by the militia and could show that these did in fact belong to the Federal government, let him go to court and get a writ of replevin.… But Blair and the others rode them down. The government had lost a number of arsenals in the last few weeks by clinging to legalities while men with guns in their hands went out and took what they wanted. The same thing could happen in St. Louis; if it did, the Union cause was as good as done for — and, as Lyon remarked, whatever was done had better be done quickly because Harney would be back any day now and he was unlikely to do anything at all, since he believed that a state governor had every right to camp his
militia in his own state when and where he chose.
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Winfield Scott had said it; the times were revolutionary, and there was no sense in quibbling over irregularities. So on the morning of May 10, Captain Lyon marched out with several thousand troops — a few companies of regulars, plus various regiments of the recently enrolled German guards — surrounded the militia camp, and demanded its surrender.

Things went smoothly enough at first. General D. M. Frost was the militia commander. He made formal protest and statement of innocence, then gave in to superior force. Lyon marched two companies of regulars into camp, disarmed the seven hundred militiamen, seized a number of cannon, twelve hundred muskets, twenty-five kegs of powder, and odds and ends of military equipment — some of it, he noted darkly, bearing the stamp of the Baton Rouge arsenal — and then he prepared to take the prisoners down to the arsenal where they could be paroled. What might have been done with bailiffs and a writ had been done by the soldiery and, it appeared, had been done peacefully and in good order.

The trouble began when Lyon himself was knocked down by the kicking and plunging of an unruly horse. He was not badly hurt but he was stunned and out of action for a few minutes. He had nobody in particular for staff officers, and until he was himself again the proceedings came to a halt. This was unfortunate, because a crowd began to gather: a passionately secessionist crowd, which waved sticks, threw stones, and called down curses on the heads of the German home guards. (One of these regiments called itself “Die Schwarze Garde,” which the sidewalk demonstrators translated freely as “Damned Dutch blackguards.”) By the time Lyon finally had things moving — prisoners marching in column, with files of troops on both sides and armed detachments moving ahead and in the rear — he was at the storm center of a revolving mob which was likely to break out in open violence at any moment.

Some chance spark touched it off, as usually happens in such cases. A drunk tried to force his way through the military cordon, damning the Dutch, and was bounced back with unnecessary verve. Various people had been waving pistols for some time, and one of these pistols was fired, a soldier fired in reply, and presently there was a regular riot, with shots and screams and curses and the scuffling of heavy feet on the cobblestones, smoke billowing up past the house tops — and, in the end, with twenty-eight people lying dead and many more badly hurt.
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The militia had been disarmed, the lost government property had been reclaimed, the threat to the security of the arsenal had been lifted
— and authentic civil war had gone raging through the streets of St. Louis, just as it had raged through the streets of Baltimore a few weeks earlier. There was a portent in it, a significance easy to overlook: in this war between the sections the first serious battles, producing bloodshed and corpses, were battles between soldiers and civilians, on city streets, at opposite ends of the long belt of border states. Regular troop action could come later; it all began with men in uniform fighting men not in uniform.

Harney got back to St. Louis in a couple of days and tried to pick up the pieces. He ordered the German troops out of the city, proposed to Frank Blair that they be disbanded — apparently not realizing that in this highly irregular war they had already been sworn into Federal service — and then he tried to work out a truce with the state authorities.

Commander of Missouri troops now was General Sterling Price, former governor of the state, a Virginia-born Mexican War veteran, a stout, serious-minded man of vast personal popularity. He was raising state troops, apparently for eventual use against United States troops; he was also conferring with the general commanding the United States troops, and out of this curious conference there came presently something along the lines of a cease-fire agreement. Both state and national forces would try to keep order and prevent bloodshed, the defense of the rights and property of all Missourians would be the concern of both sides, and any evilly disposed persons who tried to make trouble would be squelched; on this uneasy agreement perhaps the peace could be kept in Missouri.

But to men like fiery Nathaniel Lyon the keeping of the peace was the last thing that mattered. This truce (as Lyon saw it) had been arranged with men who favored secession — favored it, and would strike for it the moment they saw a good chance; the only possible thing to do with such people was to smite them hard and at once, and to treat with them at all was to come mortally close to recognizing the right of secession. Lyon fumed and wrote that “the Government seems unwilling to resist those who would cut its throat, for fear of exasperating them.” Blair wrote some more letters to Washington, and two documents soon after this came west — one, a brigadier general’s commission for Captain Lyon, the other a White House writ to Frank Blair giving him the power to remove General Harney if he saw fit.
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Blair saw fit, and by the end of May, Harney had been transferred away from Missouri forever, with Lyon formally taking his place. Lyon and Blair at once called a meeting with Governor Jackson and General Price to review this business of a truce. The two Missouri officials offered to disband their troops and keep all Confederate armies out of the state if, in return, the Federals would disband their home guards —
the Dutch blackguards, so offensive to southern sympathies — and if the Federals would promise not to occupy any part of Missouri that Federal troops did not already hold. In effect, they were offering at least a temporary neutrality as far as Missouri was concerned.

Lyon turned this down contemptuously. The Federal government, he announced, would move its troops where it pleased, asking permission of nobody, and it would retain in its service any and all home-guard levies it wished to keep, blackguard Dutch or otherwise; and he personally would see every man, woman, and child in Missouri six feet under the ground before he would admit that this or any other state could impose any conditions at all upon the Federal government. He had, further, one final word for Governor Jackson and General Price: they had a war on their hands and it was beginning in earnest as of that moment.
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Within two days Lyon was marching on Jefferson City, the state capital, with several thousand troops. Governor Jackson, who had gone back to the capital immediately after the St. Louis conference ended, fled as Lyon approached and tried to set up shop in Boonville, fifty miles to the northwest. Lyon drove on after him, attacked and scattered Jackson’s hastily assembled militia, and sent Jackson off to the west and south, a governor with nothing that he could govern. General Price, who had gone west to Lexington to recruit an army, fled south when Jackson went — and by mid-June the Federals were ahead of the game in Missouri. They had played it irregularly, as General Scott admitted, but they had not been bound by legalisms. In Frank Blair and Nathaniel Lyon the Lincoln government had two men who were not afraid to act like revolutionists once a revolution had begun.

The war had hardly started, yet the most momentous single decision had already been made. As far as the Federal government was concerned, it was going to be a war to the finish.

There had been street fighting in the cities, governors and legislators had been driven in flight or put under arrest, earnest home guards were tramping clumsily into state capitols, and what it all meant was that secession had been accepted as revolution. There could be no compromise with it; it would be fought whenever necessary with revolutionary weapons, which in effect meant with any instrument that came to hand. The South could win its independence only by destroying the government of the United States.

The stakes, in other words, had become immeasurable, and most of
the ordinary rules had been suspended. If the war could be ended within a few months, none of this would matter very much; but if it should go on and on — if there should be no quick and easy ending to it — anything at all could happen. The country had gone to war gaily, it was all abubble North and South with flags and oratory and bands and training camps where life beat clerking all hollow; but ahead there was unutterable grimness, not simply because a great many people were going to die but because, before the war had properly begun, it had been determined that no price for victory would be too high.

It was the Lincoln administration that had made this decision, but the country at large accepted it, instinctively and without stopping to reason about it. Of all the misunderstandings that had produced the war, no single one had more tragic consequences than this — that the men of the South had completely failed to realize how deeply the concept of nationality had taken root in the North. The great wagon trains had gone rolling west, a wilderness had been opened, new towns and farms had sprung up, limitless hopes and great sacrifices had been invested in the development of a rich new land, and out of it all had come a conviction that the national destiny involved unity. Whatever the North might do to win the war — and it would do just about anything it could lay its hand to — would be done with the conviction that this attempt at secession was morally wrong, a blind attempt to destroy something precious, a wanton laying of hands on the Ark of the Covenant. The Southerners were not merely enemies; they were traitors, to be treated as such.

And the new levies continued to come in, gay and full of high spirits, brandishing their weapons as if they were playthings for holiday use. A Connecticut regiment came cruising up the Potomac by side-wheeler steamboat, the men lining the rails to cheer every schooner, sloop, or barge that displayed the United States flag. If they met one flying no flag, the men would level their muskets and order: “Show your colors! Show your colors!” When the flag was hoisted — as it always was, with all those fidgety fingers under the trigger guards — the men would give three cheers, and laugh, and peer ahead for the next chance to enforce a display of patriotism. Girls met troop trains in upstate New York, offering kisses in exchange for brass buttons, and some regiments went off to war all unbuttoned and buttonless. Young infantry captains knelt on Boston Common and wept with emotion as little girls presented company flags; a Pennsylvania father presented his officer son with a new sword and enjoined him not to return until the weapon was “stained to the hilt,” and one of Lyon’s volunteers in Missouri looked about him and declared that campaigning was “war in poetry and song and set to music.”
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