Terrible Swift Sword (5 page)

Lyon's
plan was bold—the sort of plan that is called brilliant if it works and
foolhardy if it fails. His troops plodded out of their camp in the evening
drizzle. Sigel, with 1200 men, swung south on a wide flanking march, to come in
on the Confederate right and rear. His men were ragged, wearing gray shirts
trimmed in red, many of them shoeless, some of them lacking pants; they looked,
indeed, much like the Arkansas and Missouri soldiers, which led to a good deal
of confusion during the fight. While Sigel was moving, Lyon with the rest of
the troops—4200 men, or thereabouts—marched straight ahead to fall on the
Confederate center and left. Lyon apparently shared McCulloch's feeling:
Price's Missourians were so poorly trained and armed that he could attack
despite their advantage in numbers.

Just
before the columns moved, Lyon rode down the lines on his dapple-gray horse,
telling the men they were about to go into battle, urging them to fire low, and
repeating: "Don't get scared; it's no part of a soldier's duty to get
scared." As an inspirational eve-of-battle speech, it was not a success;
Lyon looked exhausted and spoke in a monotone, and one of the Iowa
irrepressibles was heard to mutter: "How is a man to help being skeered if
he
is
skeered?"
¹⁴
Some time after midnight the men halted for a rest. At daylight they moved on
and the battle was begun.

Just at first things went well for the
Federals. Sigel got into position, wheeled up his artillery, and routed a camp
of Confederate cavalry, then led his men forward across an open valley to
press bis advantage. But this move was made slowly and inexpertly; McColloch
saw that the force was not large, and put on a sharp counterattack; Sigel's men
broke and fled, abandoning five guns and streaming away so incontinently that
the battle saw them no more, Sigel himself going all the way back to
Springfield, the private soldiers going off every which way.
¹⁶
Lyon,
meanwhile, drove in the pickets in his front and got into a savage fight on a
low ridge, an open meadow and a strip of timber, where he quickly learned that
he had been mistaken about Pap Price's militia. The ridge became known that day
as "Bloody Hill."

It
was a small battle but a very hard one, devoid of tactical subtleties once
Sigel's flanking move dissolved. It came down to simple head-on slugging, on a
battlefield hardly more than half a mile wide—the smallest major battlefield in
all the war. A Confederate officer said about all that needs to be said of it
when he called it "a mighty mean-fowt fight." Now and then, inexplicably,
silence would fall on the field, while the two armies caught their breath; then
the fighting would flare up again, deep smoke settling on the ground, the
opposing lines no more than fifty yards apart. Pap Price kept riding to the
front to see what the Federals were up to, his men calling to him to get back
out of danger; on the Federal side, Lyon was twice wounded and his horse was
killed, and he confessed to an aide that he feared the day was lost. Strange
little pictures survive: the 1st Iowa holding its fire and calling on its neighbors
not to shoot while a mounted Texan galloped boldly out into an open field, in
point-blank range, to retrieve a fallen flag; a Federal soldier, crouching
alone, his rifle pointed straight up at the sky, feverishly firing, reloading
and firing again as fast as he could, valiant as a man could be, harming no
one; a Confederate colonel telling his men to shoot the Yankees in the belly
because a man dying of such a wound died slowly and so had time to prepare to
meet his Maker; one of Price's Missourians, carried to the rear with a broken
thigh, struggling and demanding that he be put down, crying: "I want to
kill more Yankees!"
¹⁶
Participants remembered many scenes like
these; they do not seem to have recalled seeing very many men on either side
running off in panic.

It
lasted most of the morning; an amazing battle, in which raw recruits fought
like veterans, disorganized Missourians and time-expired Iowans going to it as
steadily as the regulars themselves, providing an odd refutation of the Bull
Run lesson and its teaching about the dreadful folly of putting armies into
battle before they are ready. Perhaps it was Lyon and Price personally who made
the difference, or perhaps the difference lay in the men in the ranks; or,
possibly, it was just that this happened in Missouri rather than in Virginia.
Anyway, the battle ended in no rout. It ended, logically enough, when Nathaniel
Lyon got killed; the fighting died down when the naming fighting spirit died.
Somewhere around eleven o'clock in the morning a part of the Union line seemed
to be giving way, and Lyon (remounted now, carrying on in spite of his wounds)
galloped over to get things in order. He waved his hat, got laggards back into
action, moved the line forward, and then was shot from his horse with a bullet
in his heart. The line held, and after a time the fighting came to an end. The
Federals discovered that their highest-ranking officer then available on the
field was Major Samuel D. Sturgis of the regulars, and so Major Sturgis took
command of the army. Sensibly enough, he led it back to Springfield. The
Confederates made no pursuit. As the man said, it had been a mighty tough
fight.
¹⁷

The figures show it, as far as figures
can. The Federals had roughly 5400 men on the field and lost approximately 1300
in killed, wounded, and missing; just about 25 per cent of the total number
present, a high figure for any battle. Probably more than 10,000 Confederates
were present, but thousands of them never got into action; the casualty
list—Missourians, Arkansans, and McCulloch's brigade, all together—ran to
slightly more than 1200. All in all, the battle put at least 2500 men out of
action.
¹⁸

Near
the place where one of the Confederate batteries had been posted there was a
farmhouse, and during the battle the farmer's wife had taken refuge in the
cellar. She came out after the battle ended and found a party of soldiers
helping themselves to apples from her trees. An officer rode up and told the
men to stop it, but the woman assured him that she did not mind; there were
plenty of apples, everybody had had a pretty bad morning, let them take all
they wanted. Then, looking at the boys fresh from the battle that had been
raging at her own doorstep, she asked, as an afterthought, a question which
might have been asked by the harassed Missouri majority, the farm people on
whose homesteads the fighting and the marauding were taking place and who stood
to be plundered and fought over no matter which army was present. "Are you
Lincoln's folk, or Jeff Davis's folk?" she inquired. Jeff Davis's folk,
the boys said.
¹⁹

3.
The Hidden Intentions

Lyon had done more than was immediately
apparent. He had lost a battle and he had lost his life, but he had won the summer—the
crucial ten weeks in which Missouri's fate rested on a knife's edge—and the
Lincoln administration would in the end win the state. Late in July, while the
campaign around
Springfield was coming to a climax, a state convention met in Jefferson City
with Unionists in full control—a thing which Lyon's offensive made possible.
The convention promptly deposed secessionists by declaring all state offices
vacant; then it filled those offices with solid loyalists, naming Hamilton R.
Gamble as provisional governor, and the Confederate cause in Missouri
thereafter was a losing cause. The machinery by which the state could impose
taxes, collect money, organize troops and then arm, feed and support them had
passed forever into the hands of the Confederacy's enemies; which meant
that General Price and his amazing militia, along with any other Missourians
who wanted to go forth and fight for the South, could never make their weight
felt. They were waifs and waifs they would remain, and the handicap was too much
for them.      

More
than three months later General Price explained the handicap in a long letter
to Jefferson Davis, an epistle which sounds a little bit like the Apostle Paul
tabulating his woes. Most of the people of Missouri, he said, favored the Confederacy,
but they were in an almost impossible position. They were "without any
military organization and but few military men; without arms and without an
army; overrun by Federal armies before a blow on our side could be stricken;
pursued as fugitives from the state capital at the moment when the governor
called our people to arms; fleeing with a handful of men to the extreme
southwestern corner of the state . . . having to fight for the arms we have and
to capture nearly all the appliances of war with which we are now supplied;
with a powerful foe extending his lines across the state, so as effectually to
cut off our succor and recruits from the north side of the Missouri River, our
metropolis all the while in the hands of the enemy, thus giving him control of
the railroads and rivers as well as the banks and channels of commerce and
centers of intelligence, the war being waged as well upon the people of the
country and private property as upon the army." His soldiers, he went on,
were no more than "half fed, half clothed, half supplied with the
necessary means of subsistence and comfort." They had never been formally
recruited and organized; they were simply men "caught up from the woods
and the fields—from the highways and byways, by night and by day—without an
hour's or a day's preparation." He believed that he could add 20,000 men
to his force if he just had some backing; Missouri, he was sure, could take
care of herself, "once the Confederate government renders us such
assistance as to make our force available."

The
pressure was on him; the war was changing, and he was changing with it. In the
beginning he had opposed secession and had wanted to do no more than to keep
the war out of Missouri; now he was a militant Confederate, declaring that he
had "placed home and comfort and property and family and life on the altar
of my country's safety," pledging his state to make war to the end if the
Confederacy would give the proper help.
¹

There
was a pressure on General Fremont, too. Like General Price he would in the end
commit himself to a cause which had not been his when he got his commission.
The news from Wilson's Creek sounded like sheer catastrophe—Lyon dead, his
crippled army in full retreat, armed Rebels rampaging about unchecked, a big
Confederate offensive imminent —and St. Louis itself seemed no better than an
echoing cave of the winds. There were soldiers without weapons or supplies,
military contracts going unfulfilled for lack of money, and a dismaying lack of
the administrative firmness that could remedy these defects. Placed in a
position where he was bound to make a certain number of mistakes, General
Fremont had the unhappy knack of making exactly the kind of mistakes that would
get into the headlines and offend the very people whose support he needed most.

It began with headquarters itself—with
the look of it, the atmosphere that pervaded it, and the people who were
visible there. Headquarters had been housed in a good three-story dwelling that
lay behind a pleasant lawn enclosed by a stone wall, at Chouteau Avenue and
Eighth Street, rented for $6000 a year. The building was not actually too big
and although the price was high it perhaps was not really excessive, in view of
the fact that this was one of the most important military departments in the
United States; but somehow the place seemed a little too imposing. Fr6mont had
guards all over the premises, and there were staff officers to sift his callers
—the unending stream of people who simply had to see the general, most of whom
had no business getting within half a mile of him—and presently people were
muttering that the man lived in a vast mansion and surrounded himself with the
barriers of a haughty aristocracy.

Many
of these complaints reflected nothing more than the inability of a young
republic to understand that an overburdened- executive must shield himself if
he is to get any work done. (After all, this was the era when the White House
itself was open to the general public, so that any persistent citizen could
get in, shake the hand of the President and consume time which that harassed
official could have used in more fruitful ways.) But it is also true that
Fremont brought a great many of these complaints on himself by his inability to
surround himself with the right kind of assistants.

Fremont had a fatal attraction for
foreigners—displaced revolutionists from the German states, from Hungary and
from France, fortune hunters from practically everywhere, men who had been
trained and commissioned in European armies but who knew nothing at all about
this western nation whose uniform they wore and whose citizens they irritated
with their heel-clickings and their outlandish mangling of the American idiom.
Fremont was taking part in a peculiarly American sort of war—Price's backwoods
militia was wholly representative—and Missouri had felt from the beginning that
the German-born recruits from St. Louis were a little too prominent. Now
headquarters had this profoundly foreign air, and when a man was told that he
could not see the general —to sell a load of hay or a tugboat, to apply for a
commission, to give a little information about Rebel plots, or just to pass the
time of day—he was given the bad news in broken English by a dandified type who
obviously belonged somewhere east of the Rhine. It was all rather hard to take.
²