Terrible Swift Sword (4 page)

Lyon
had taken 7000 troops to southwest Missouri. By the end of July these had
dwindled to 5000, what with the loss of time-expired three-months men and the
general wastage that came of poor training, sketchy supplies and no pay, and
he was a long way from home. His enemies were gathering to pounce on
him—30,000 of them, Lyon believed: fewer than half that many in sober fact, but
still more than twice his own strength. He believed that he could neither
advance, hold his ground nor retreat without heavy reinforcements, and he had
been demanding help for weeks without getting any.
³

Fremont knew that Lyon needed help but
he did not think that he could do much for him. There were some 6000 Federal
troops in northeastern Missouri, trying to tamp down a mean guerrilla warfare;
they had their hands full and Fremont felt that he could not remove any of
them. He believed that he had to hold the railroads that fanned out west and
southwest from St. Louis; to guard the line of the Missouri River and hold
Jefferson City, and to garrison St. Louis itself; and there was very little
manpower to spare. Fremont was getting reinforcements, but for the immediate
present they were of little use; he wrote that the new regiments were
"literally the rawest ever got together . . . entirely unacquainted with
the rudiments of military exercise," and most of them had no weapons.
⁴
Worst of all, Fremont's intelligence service told him that the Confederates
were planning to move on Cairo—a fairly correct appraisal, although the move
was not nearly as imminent as Fremont's people believed—and Cairo was the most
sensitive spot of all; the one place which the Union had to hold if it was ever
to wage offensive warfare in the Mississippi Valley. Cairo at the moment was
all but defenseless. The Federal post there was commanded by Brigadier General
Benjamin M. Prentiss, who was supposed to have eight regiments but in fact had
only two and who could muster hardly more than 600 effectives for duty.

It
was against this background that Lyon's calls for help had to make themselves
heard, and they came through but dimly. Fremont found that he could scrape
together a disposable force of 3800 men, and he concluded that they were
needed at Cairo more than at any other point. At the end of July he took them
to Cairo personally, making a big parade of their departure from St. Louis in
order to impress the rebellious with the fact that the weak spot was weak no
longer. He wrote to Lyon telling him, in substance, to use his own judgment—hang
on if he could, retreat if he thought he had to— and somewhat tardily he
ordered two regiments to join him.
⁵
The regiments had a long way to
go, and Lyon never saw them. When Fremont's steamers left the wharf at St.
Louis and started downstream for the mouth of the Ohio, Lyon's number was up.

Apparently
Lyon knew it perfectly well. He was a score of miles beyond Springfield, his
advanced base, and the Confederates were threatening to side-slip and occupy
that town in his rear. If he went back to Springfield he was not strong enough
to stand a siege there, he was woefully short of supplies, and the nearest
point of safety was a town called Rolla, one hundred miles northeast of
Springfield, at the end of a railroad to St. Louis. There seemed to be nothing
for it but to retreat to Rolla, but his march would be very slow and the
Confederates—who had a great deal of cavalry, an arm of which Lyon had
practically none—would almost certainly surround and destroy him en route. He
wrote a letter to Fremont remarking, with calm understatement, "I find my
position extremely embarrassing," and he confessed that he did not know
just what he ought to do; and as a matter of fact no good choice was open to
him. He pulled back from his advanced position to the town of Springfield, and
he wrote that he would hold this place as long as he could even though this
might "endanger the safety of my entire force."
⁶
It was
a desperate sort of letter, written by a man beset, and by the time Fremont got
it Lyon was dead—victim of the decision Fremont had made, of his own
impetuosity, of the unfathomable civil war that had burst into flame along the
untamed border.

At the end of the first week in August,
Lyon was going about Springfield smoldering with glum anger, inspecting his
outposts with the air of a man who had been abandoned to the fates, breaking
out now and then with profane denunciations of the distant Fremont who was
sending no help. He was still full of fight. When a subordinate asked him when
the army would leave Springfield he snapped: "Not until we are whipped
out." He held a council of war, apparently concluded that a retreat would
ruinously dishearten the Union people of all western Missouri, and at last made
up his mind to take a long gamble. Unable to stand still or to fall back he
would attack in spite of the odds, staking everything on one throw. He drew up
his plans and got his little army in motion.
⁷

It
was an odd sort of army, wholly representative of its time and place. Lyon had,
to begin with, a handful of regular infantry and artillery, tough and
disciplined, full of contempt for volunteers, home guards, and amateur soldiers
generally, whether Union or Confederate. He also had several regiments of
Missouri infantry, principally German levies from St. Louis, short of equipment
and training, most of them grouped in a brigade commanded by Franz Sigel. Sigel
was an emigre from the German revolutionary troubles of 1848, trained as a soldier,
humorless, dedicated, unhappily lacking in the capacity to lead soldiers in
action; a baffling sort, devoted but incapable, who induced many Germans to
enlist but who was rarely able to use them properly after they had enlisted.
There were two rough-hewn regiments from Kansas and there was a ninety-day
outfit from Iowa, a happy-go-lucky regiment whose time was about to expire but
whose members had agreed to stick around for a few days in case the general was
going to have a battle. (The Iowans did not like Lyon at all but they trusted
him, considering him a tough customer and competent.)
⁸
There were
also stray companies and detachments from here and there whose numbers were
small and whose value was entirely problematic. In miniature, this was much
like the Union army that had been so spectacularly routed at Bull Run except
that it was even less well equipped and disciplined.

Yet if this army was odd the army which
it was about to fight was ever so much odder—one of the very oddest, all things
considered, that ever played a part in the Civil War. Lyon's army would have
struck any precisionist as something out of a military nightmare, but it was a
veritable Prussian guard compared to its foes. The Southerners were armed with
everything from regulation army rifles to back-country fowling pieces, a few of
them wore Confederate gray but most of them wore whatever homespun garments
happened to be at hand when they left home, and for at least three fourths of
them there were no commissary and quartermaster arrangements whatever. The
various levies were tied together by a loose gentleman's agreement rather than
by any formal military organization, and many of the men were not Confederates
at all, owing no allegiance to Jefferson Davis, fighting for Missouri rather
than for the Confederacy. The war was still a bit puzzling, in these parts.

The
core of this army (from a professional soldier's viewpoint, at any rate) was a
brigade of some 3200 Confederate troops led by Brigadier General Ben McCulloch,
veteran of the Mexican War and one-time Texas Ranger, an old pal of Davy
Crockett who looked the part, an officer who liked to sling a rifle over his
shoulder, get on his horse, and do his scouting personally. His men were well
armed, most of them wore uniforms, and they had had about as much military
training as anybody got in those days—enough to get by on, but nothing special.
There were also 2200 state troops from Arkansas, one cavalry and three infantry
regiments led by

Brigadier General N. B. Pearce. These
men had good weapons but no uniforms and little equipment—they carried their ammunition
in their haversacks for want of better containers— and they had brought along
two batteries of artillery, guns which until quite recently had reposed in the
United States arsenal at Little Rock.
⁹
And, in addition, there was
the Missouri State Guard under Major General Sterling Price.

No one quite knew how many men Price
had—between 9000 and 10,000, probably, of which number only about 7000 could be
used in action; the rest had no weapons at all. There were a few regimental
organizations, but for the most part the formations were nothing more than
bands bearing the names of the men who led them—Wingo's infantry, Kelly's
infantry, Foster's infantry, and so on. The men had no tents, no supplies, no
pay, hardly any ammunition and nothing whatever in the way of uniforms; an
officer could be distinguished by the fact that he would have a strip of
colored flannel on his shoulders, and one of the men described General Price
himself with the words: "He is a large fine looking bald fellow dressed in
common citizen clothes an oald linen coat yarn pants." None of them had
been given anything which West Point would have recognized as drill; one group,
led by former country lawyers, was called to quarters daily by the courtroom
cry of "Oyez! Oyez!" and customarily addressed its commanding officer
as "Jedge." Not even in the American Revolution was there ever a more
completely backwoods army; these men were not so much soldiers as rangy
characters who had come down from the north fork of the creek to get into a
fight. Their commissary department consisted of the nearest cornfield, and
their horses got their forage on the prairie; and a veteran of the State Guard
wrote after the war that any regular soldier given command of this host would
have spent a solid six months drilling, equipping, organizing, and provisioning
it, during which time the Yankees would have overrun every last county in
Missouri once and for all. He added that although Price's men had very poor
weapons—some of them actually carried ancient flintlocks—they knew very well
how to use them, and they did not scare easily. They were wholly devoted to
General Price, whom they always referred to as "Pap."
¹⁰

Price was in truth worthy of devotion, and
the mere fact that he was out here at all testified to the strange complexity
of the war on the border. A handsome, stalwart man in his early fifties,
Virginia born and a resident of Missouri for thirty years, Price was a good
lawyer and a good politician; had served in the state legislature, in Congress
and as governor, and had led a regiment in the Mexican War, winning a
brigadier's star for gallantry. He was no secessionist; on the contrary he had
counted himself a good Union man even after the bombardment of Fort Sumter and
President Lincoln's call for troops, and although he had not been prepared to
help destroy the Confederacy he had not been prepared to help establish it
either. He had taken to the warpath, in fact, only after Lyon compelled
everyone in Missouri to choose sides; he was definitely fighting against the
Federals now, but he was not so much fighting for the Confederacy as for the
vain hope that the war could be kept out of the front yards of the people of
Missouri. He wanted to put limits on the war, so that no one but soldiers need
be hurt. Later this fall he would sign a formal agreement with Fremont
providing for an end to guerrilla warfare, cessation of arrests for political
opinion, and a mutual pledge that "the war now progressing shall be
exclusively confined to armies in the field."
¹¹
The Federal
authorities would quickly disavow this agreement, and in the end Missouri knew
all of the horrors civil war could bring, but nobody could say that Price had
not done his best.

In a military sense Price was an orphan,
serving a government which was adrift in no man's land, and although he was a
major general and Ben McCulloch was a brigadier, McCulloch's commission came
from Jefferson Davis, a full-fledged President, and Price's came from Claiborne
Jackson, who was only a fugitive; if Price and McCulloch were to go to the wars
together it would have to be on McCulloch's terms. Price learned this a few
days before his troops, Pearce's Arkansans and McCulloch's brigade made camp
together by a stream called Wilson's Creek, ten miles southwest of Springfield.
Lyon had just moved back into Springfield, and it was obvious that the combined
force ought to attack him immediately. But McCulloch had a poor opinion of
Price and a worse one of Price's troops, and he was not entirely sure that he
himself ought to be in Missouri at all: the Confederate government, he had been
informed, did not want to wage aggressive warfare on foreign soil, which
seemed to include Missouri, and he had visions of disaster. Price had a hot
argument with him, threatening to attack Lyon unaided, telling him: "You
must either fight beside us or look on at a safe distance and see us fight all
alone the army you dare not attack even with our aid."
¹²
In
the end Price won the argument by putting himself and his entire command under
McCulloch's orders; and McCulloch at last ordered that on the night of August 9
the combined force take to the road and crush Lyon's army.

Defective military equipment can modify
tactics. It rained that night, and McCulloch—reflecting that the men had no
proper ammunition boxes but carried their paper cartridges in cloth haversacks,
where they would almost certainly get soaked on a march in the rain—canceled
the orders.
¹⁸
It made little difference, in the end, because at the
same time Lyon issued his own orders for an attack on the Confederates, and on
the morning of August 10 the two armies collided in a remarkably bloody battle
at Wilson's Creek.