contributed by David S. Reif
Lake Ozark, Missouri
October 1995
For about 100 years after 1860 the camp followers of the victorious Union army promoted the nationalistic view of history. Nowhere are the roots of this uncritical belief more exposed than in the story of Confederate Missouri. In the 1850s Missouri was the frontier. To Southerners Missouri was the northwest outpost of their domain, a part of the Upper South, bastion of traditional civilization in an increasingly hostile world. It was rich in agricultural land, the limit of cotton cultivation, and a bonanza of mining.
The 1860 census reveals that 85 percent of Missouri's citizens were either born there or were immigrants from other Southern states, mostly Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Virginia. These immigrants brought with them their culture, values, and politics. Yet Missourians were molded especially by their borders. Surrounded by Illinois, Iowa, and Kansas, they were the constant targets of adventuring by ideologues of an aggressive new materialism developing in these neighboring states.
To Eastern aristocrats Missouri stood in the way of an expansion of their power and wealth. Southerners had colonized the virgin West and now controlled the mouth of the Missouri River: the key to the Pacific. Any expansion of eastern market monopolies had to go through Missouri. The bankers of Boston and the stock traders in New York no doubt rankled at the thought of having to deal with loathsome Southerners controlling the West from Missouri.
Not deterred by law, the Eastern establishment manipulated Kansas in an attempt to outmaneuver Missouri and the South. It undertook a campaign through the Emigrant Aid Society to recruit northern emigrants to Kansas. Good Unionists and ardent materialists colonized Kansas and helped to destabilize Missouri. By the mid-1850s armed action had taken the place of zealous oratory. Kansans and their allies from New England invaded Missouri, "jayhawking" (looting) and murdering as they went. Missouri engaged them and war commenced.
Missouri stood alone and fought the onslaught of Eastern abolitionism and materialism. Jefferson Davis was then Secretary of War in the Pierce Administration. A military man, he was well aware of what was occurring on the frontier and felt powerless to aid the Missourians whose sense of sovereignty exceeded his comprehension. Neither did he understand the implications of the border war. Meanwhile, the men and women of Missouri bled.
The action on the Kansas border ebbed, but the issue lay unresolved. The flow of political events shifted to other areas of the South. The citizens of the Lower South finally came to realize that, among other things, the events on the frontier had not been isolated. The integrity of individual states was constantly being provokedby powerful elements promoting the idea of an insoluble Union. The rest of the South finally understood what Missourians already knew.
As events unfolded elsewhere in the Greater South and states began to secede formally from the Union, the people of Missouri were at the wrong end of a lit cannon. They had elected the fire-eating secessionist governor, Claiborne Fox Jackson, who favored immediate entry into the Confederate alliance. But the lessons of the still-smoldering war with Kansas had chastened them. Knowing that they were surrounded on three sides by hostile states and smarting from a lack of outside support during that conflict, Missouri could only buy time to raise an adequate internal army by negotiating. When Governor Jackson asked for troops to defend Missouri, President Davis balked, sending only a few pieces of artillery. Davis demanded that Missouri pass a time-consuming, formal ordinance of secession before he would intervene.
Under normal circumstances, the situation would not have been difficult; however, Missourians saw what had happened in Maryland. Lincoln had invaded that state and jailed the legislature, thus preventing secession. Governor Jackson knew that Yankee General Nathaniel Lyon and his troops were in St. Louis for the purpose of forcing compliance with the Union. Missouri was not ready to fight the U.S. Army alone, but without any alternative and no help in sight, they tried. After taking steps to activate the small, but tough Missouri State Guard, Governor Jackson and GeneralSterling Price confronted the full authority of the Federal government in a dramatic scene that few outside Missouri know about.
Jackson and Price confronted General Lyon, who had orders from Lincoln to hold Missouri at all costs, at the Planter's House in St. Louis. When Governor Jackson refused to allow any Missouri troops to join the Union effort to subdue other Southern states, Lyon rose and said that he would see every man, woman, and child in the state dead before Missouri would secede from the Union. Jackson and Price left for the capital at Jefferson City, burning bridges as they went. Lyon pursued but Jackson cleaned out the capitol files, legislative records, treasury, state seal and moved the government into exile. Price began raising and equipping an army.
After many skirmishes and one major victory on 5 July 1861 at the Battle of Carthage (pre-dating First Manassas), Jackson and Price teamed up with Texas and Louisiana troops to defeat the Union army at Oak Hills (Wilson's Creek). At Oak Hills, the Confederates faced Franz Sigel, a German socialist who had been banished from his native land after the unsuccessful revolution of 1848-9 and who, like so many European "democrats," gave his sword to the Union Army. Half the Missourians showed up only with pitchforks and clubs for weapons, but Price's corps turned the tide at Bloody Hill, routed the well equipped U.S. army, and killed the would-be mass murderer Lyon in the process. Price went on to defeat another Federal force at the Battle of Lexington (Hemp Bales). With most of Missouri under his control Governor Jackson called the legislature back into session, and on 31 October 1861 he signed the Ordinance of Secession and sent it to the Confederate legislature. On 28 November the Confederate Congress admitted Missouri as the twelfth state of the Confederacy.
By January of 1862 one-quarter of the entire army at the disposal of President Lincoln was in Missouri. For political reasons he did not recognize the state's secession but branded all who opposed the Union outlaws, criminals, and traitors. Then he and his generals began a premeditated campaign of repression, terror, and murder against the civilian population a campaign that can only be called genocide.
Thousands of Missourians enlisted in the Confederate Army. Official records of Confederate pensioners show only about 40,000, but heritage groups have uncovered records of more than 100,000 Missourians in Confederate service. An imposing force of Partisan Rangers and other groups were never counted, but it took over 50,000 Yankee troops to enforce a toehold in Missouri.
During the War Missouri's soldiers distinguished themselves with such heroic conduct that the Southern press called them "the South's finest" and the elite of the Confederate service. At Elkhorn Tavern, Iuka, Corinth, Port Gibson, Vicksburg, Kennasaw, Blakely, and (oh, dear God) at Franklin, the Missourians did the impossible when called upon. They were General N. B. Forrest's personal guard. Their reputation for braverywas unchallenged, their honour beyond question.
At home the families suffered like few other civilians. The Federal government committed unspeakable acts of violence against unarmed men and women, but a hundred years of propaganda has clouded the record of war crimes to such an extent that few people know what happened. Those who do usually won't tell the real story, because the implications are too horrendous.
Even Southerners speak of an eleven-state Confederacy, as if what happened in Missouri never took place. Like Kentucky and Maryland, Missouri suffered the political, military, and social depredations of a failed Confederate alliance, and their geographical vulnerability made them easy targets for revisionism. But the Confederate flag has thirteen stars on it one for each state of the Confederate alliance. Much work remains to be done to reclaim our history.
Mr. Reif, a native of Missouri, is Chairman of the Missouri SL and makes his living as a traditional American pottery artist.