WAR ON THE BORDER
With
the start of the Civil War in 1861, Missouri increasingly found itself a
divided state in a divided nation. Slavery was of less economic importance in
Missouri than in other slave states, but Missouri's population was
predominantly of southern stock and many sympathized with the cause of the
Confederacy. However, there also was a large and growing number of German
immigrants, primarily in St. Louis, who tended to be strongly anti-slavery and
pro-Union. The strong emotions felt by important Missouri citizens who were
tied to one side or the other quickly pulled the state apart.
Missouri itself was of vital importance to
both the Union and the Confederacy. The state's substantial pool of manpower,
its strategic geographic location on the great rivers and railways, its
resources, and its wealth were sorely needed by both sides.
Secession Crisis
The Civil War in Missouri took on three
distinct phases. When the war began, leading citizens sympathetic to the
Confederacy and those siding with the Union quickly organized militias in an
effort to gain the upper hand for their sides. The first phase of the war in
Missouri, characterized by numerous military engagements, began with an attack
on a Union home guard regiment by a pro-Southern crowd in St. Louis in May
1861. Subsequently, federal troops occupied the state's capital at Jefferson
City. They drove out the governor and the legislature, and installed a
pro-Union provisional government. A series of small bitter battles followed at
Boonville, Carthage, Wilson's Creek, and Lexington. Meanwhile remnants of the
state's elected legislature met at Neosho and voted to secede. This act was
recognized by the Confederate government and Missouri was admitted to the
Confederacy (although there are doubts today about the legality of this act).
Early in 1862, the pro-Confederate Missouri State Guard led by General
Sterling Price, Missouri's former governor, was driven from the state and
defeated by Union General Samuel Curtis at the Battle of Pea Ridge in
northwest Arkansas.
War in the Shadows
As the military war moved south for the next
two years, Missouri, instead of finding itself at peace, became embroiled in a
war more vengeful and vicious than before - a guerrilla war of revenge. This
second phase of guerrilla war sprang in part from excesses in martial law and
abuses by the military government during the occupation by Union forces.
The belief by the predominantly Northern
forces policing Missouri that its citizens were disloyal secessionists led to
harsh and often vindictive exercises of authority. This inflamed the
resentments of many Missouri natives, some of whom were stirred to open
rebellion. Guerrilla bands led by men such as William Quantrill and
"Bloody Bill" Anderson spread blood and terror across central and
western Missouri, and kept Union forces off balance and tied up for much of
the Civil War.
The Great Raid
The third and final phase of the war in
Missouri began when Major General Sterling Price, hoping to recapture control
of the state and to take the pressure off beleaguered Confederate forces
elsewhere, crossed into Missouri from Arkansas in September 1864. His was to
be a final and climactic sweep across the state.
With more than 12,000 mounted men, Price
crossed the border and headed for St. Louis. His first major objective was a
federal garrison at Pilot Knob. Three desperate Confederate charges against
the earthen fort were met by withering fire from the 1,000 Union troops. The
battle ended when the federal forces quietly slipped out at night and joined a
stronger Union force in Rolla.
Delayed and weakened, Price abandoned hope
of capturing St. Louis and marched to Jefferson City where he fought a one-day
skirmish before deciding to leave the capital. With Union forces now in
pursuit of Price's dwindling army, his troops fought battles at Boonville,
Glasgow, and Lexington before reaching the decisive battlefield at Kansas
City.
Approaching the city from the east, Price's
army pushed a federal line of militia back, first from the little Blue River
and then from the Big Blue, to what was to become the last great battle of the
war in Missouri. On Sunday, October 23, 1864, nearly 30,000 Union and
Confederate troops clashed in the Battle of Westport.
After several bloody stands by Price's
forces, the Union army under General Samuel Curtis, the victor of Pea Ridge,
finally overwhelmed the southern troops and forced them into a disorganized
retreat. Price was pushed south along the Kansas-Missouri border into
Arkansas, ending the last major
Confederate army action in Missouri.
LIVING IN TROUBLED TIMES
Citizens of few states suffered as severely
as those of Missouri during the Civil War. The conflict was fought in their
streets and pastures, from the Iowa border to the Bootheel swamps and the
Ozark hills. More than 400 battles, engagements, and skirmishes occurred
within the state, including the decisive Battle of Westport in October 1864,
the largest battle west of the Mississippi River. Most, however, were small
affairs-bitterly contested raids and ambushes with no quarter asked or given.
Only Virginia and Tennessee were more heavily fought over during the four grim
years of war.
"... all is
destroyed even the rails & trees fencing of every kind bushes & shrubs
nothing left that would hide a chicken. I never expect to witness another just
such a sight-and when we reflect that it is upon American soil & by
American Citizens it is melancholy to think upon... "
-Isaac Hockaday, Lexington Farmer, 1861
Most Missourians probably would have
preferred to remain neutral in the struggle, but they were not reluctant to
participate once hostilities had begun. The majority were neither slaveholders
nor abolitionists. They took up arms for generally abstract reasons that even
they did not fully understand-state's rights, love of the Union, loyalty to
the Constitution. While some fought for personal gain or for settling old
grudges, many Missourians fought purely for self-preservation-forced to enlist
or die at the hands of marauding Rebel bushwhackers or vengeful Union raiders.
"I never fought the North
because I hated the
North. I did not desire to be one iota freer than I was under the flag of
the union; but there was an abstract principle of States rights
and four thousand millions dollars worth of African slaves that I
thought could only be saved out of the Union.
"
-M. Jeff Thompson, Confederate General
Missourians fought on both sides. At least
40,000 served in the Confederate army, plus an unknown number of
behind-the-lines irregulars; some 109,000 were enlisted in the Union army.
Ex-slaves and free blacks provided 8,344 men of the Missouri Union regiments,
while thousands more enlisted in other states. Missouri sent more men to war,
in proportion to her population, than any other state-60 percent of the
eligible military population.
"Come with your guns of any
description that
can be made to bring down a foe. If you have no arms, come without them
...Bring blankets and heavy shoes and extra bed clothing if you
have them ...We must have 50,000 men."
-Sterling Price, Confederate General, 1861
These Missourians knew the meaning of
"civil war" better than the men of most states. At the Battle of
Athens, Missouri, in August 1861, Union Colonel David Moore led a bayonet
charge against a secessionist force that included his own two sons; at the
sieges of Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1863, and Mobile, Alabama, in 1865,
Federal Missouri boys faced old friends across the trenches in the Rebel
ranks. On the home front, men joined either Union militia companies or
Confederate guerrilla bands for protection against close neighbors of
differing political convictions.
":..there were some families in
which some were for the Union and others for the Confederacy... One feared the
other: That under such conditions all work and undertakings came to a stop can
easily be understood. "
John T. Buegel, Union Private, 1861
Even the families suffered. While the men served in uniform, their wives and
children had to work the farms and gather the crops. Often the results of
their labors were confiscated or destroyed by the marching armies or by bands
of roving marauders. A knock on the door at night might mean a visit by
bushwhackers or militia, come to search for weapons, conscript the men and
boys, or steal and burn. In the cities, crowded by streams of homeless
refugees, martial law and military occupation made life difficult while
families waited for their loved ones in uniform to return.
"...camped near the town of California, Missouri-utterly denuded and
deserted by its inhabitants. Windows and doors, of the dwellings are either
fast nailed, or smashed wholly, out, and a more melancholy exhibition in its
way I bane not seen. "
-Albert Tracy, Union Captain, 1861
"We were visited
last night about two O'clock by the bushwhackers. I was up with the baby when
they came... They got both of the guns and then went up stair, took some of my
bed blankets.. then searched the bureau drawers. They even took as small a
thing as a comb and brush "
-Mrs. Permelia A Hardeman, 1862
Many Missouri soldiers never came home. They
died of wounds, fever, dysentery, and what are now considered the diseases of
childhood, such as measles and mumps. The war claimed 14,000 in Union blue
between 1861 and 1865. Confederate dead were never accurately calculated, but
of 5,000 men who formed the 1st and 2nd Missouri Confederate Brigades at the
Battle of Pea Ridge, Arkansas, in 1862, only 800 survived the war.
"We have been in an
awful battle and our company was cut to pieces..l saw Captain Gibbs fall and
started to him when a bullet struck me...I am suffering much... I am afraid
many of the boys are hurt. I am wry
tired and can't write anymore now.
-Madison Creasey,
Confederate Lieutenant, 1861
Missourians fell in actions both large and
small: the epic battles of Vicksburg, Chickamauga, and Shiloh as well as the
nearly forgotten skirmishes of Salem, Dry Woods, Osceola, and Cole Camp. Their
graves are scattered across the United States from Virginia to the
southernmost tip of Texas, and throughout the hills and valleys of their home
state. Missourians shed a terrible river of blood in the war; the healing
process, a slow one, continues to some extent even today.
Reprinted from a pamphlet entitled "A State Divided:
Missouri and the Civil War"
by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, Division of Parks and
Historic Preservation.
