Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

risk their slave property on the shaky chances of a rebellion. Second, in both states, slavery was not nearly as powerful an institution as in the Deep South, and slaveholding and strong Unionist sentiments often existed hand in hand.

Missouri quickly became a case in point. Although Missouri had been a slave state since the days of the Missouri Compromise in 1820, slavery had actually flourished in Missouri only along a fairly narrow belt of counties stretching across the center of the state. In St. Louis, Missouri’s principal Mississippi river town, the population was increasingly taking on a free-soil flavor from immigrants from across the Mississippi River in Illinois, and from a flourishing community of German refugees and exiles who had found a home there after fleeing political oppression in Germany in the wake of the revolutions of 1848 and who had no sympathy at all with slavery. As the Deep South began to secede from the Union, the pro-slavery governor of Missouri, Claiborne F. Jackson, strong-armed a special session of the state legislature into calling a secession convention. “The destiny of the slave-holding States of this Union is one and the same,” Jackson insisted.

.… The identity, rather than the similarity, of their domestic institutions; their political principles and party usages; their common origin, pursuits, tastes, manners, and customs; their territorial contiguity and commercial relations—all contribute to bind them together in one sisterhood. And Missouri will in my opinion best consult her own interests, and the interests of the whole country, by a timely declaration of her determination to stand by her sister slave-holding States, in whose wrongs she participates, and with whose institutions and people she sympathizes.7

But the report of the convention backed away from secession for Missouri, and it adjourned in March 1861 leaving Missouri still in the Union. Lincoln’s call for volunteers after Sumter set off another demand for a secession convention in April, and as an extra measure to support secession, Governor Jackson called out the state militia, established a training camp near St. Louis (named Camp Jackson), and prepared to seize the Federal arsenal in St. Louis. As it turned out, Jackson had not reckoned with either the strength of the Missouri Unionists or the boldness of the arsenal’s commander, Captain Nathaniel Lyon, a onetime Democrat whom the Kansas-Nebraska bill had converted into an ice-cold opponent of slavery. On May 10, Lyon surrounded the state militia encampment with 7,000 regulars and pro-Union volunteers, capturing the entire encampment without a shot. But when Lyon attempted to parade his prisoners through the streets of St. Louis to the arsenal, he was attacked by a pro-slavery mob and his men opened fire. Twenty-eight people, including many innocent bystanders, were killed.8

Jackson hoped that this would be understood as the signal for the state legislature at last to act and “place the State at the earliest practicable moment in a complete state of defence.” As Jackson realized, though, Lyon’s preemptive strike had also rendered the secessionist movement in Missouri militarily powerless. After a month of fruitless political jockeying between himself and Lyon, Jackson fled to southwestern Missouri with a pro-slavery remnant of the legislature, and there declared Missouri out of the Union. The rest of the legislature remained firmly pro-Union, and Jackson’s rump assembly never really amounted to more than a government in exile. A provisional Unionist governor, Hamilton Gamble, was appointed in July. Although Missouri would be repeatedly invaded by Confederate forces loyal to Jackson, and large areas of the backcountry were turned by Confederate guerillas under William Quantrill, Cole Younger, and “Bloody Bill” Anderson into no-go areas for Federal troops, they never seriously threatened the hold that Missouri Unionists retained on St. Louis and the strategic dock and riverbank areas along Missouri’s stretch of the Mississippi and its confluence with the Ohio River.

The story in Kentucky was fundamentally the same. The governor, Beriah Magoffin, was pro-slavery and called the Kentucky legislature into special session to arrange for a state secession convention. When the legislature met on January 17, 1861, it turned down Magoffin’s request and instead chided the Southern states for reacting too hastily to Lincoln’s election. A Unionist mass rally in Louisville on April 19 warned that if Kentucky seceded, “all is lost. There will then be no breakwater, but instead, Kentucky will be the battle-ground—the scene of a conflict between brethren—such a conflict as no country has yet witnessed.” Magoffin again begged the legislature in May to call a secession convention; again the legislature refused, but it did allow Magoffin to resort to the unusual expedient of declaring Kentucky neutral on May 20: in “the deplorable war now waging between the United and Confederate States I solemnly forbid any movement upon Kentucky soil, or occupation of any post or place therein for any purpose whatever, until authorized by invitation or permission of the legislative and executive authorities.” Both Lincoln and Davis were anxious not to push the Kentuckians too hard. Davis, like Lincoln, wanted “to treat Kentucky with all possible respect,” while Lincoln promised Kentucky congressman Garrett Davis that he would send no troops into Kentucky “unless she or her people should make it necessary by a formidable resistance of the authority and laws of the United States.”9

So for several months both the Union forces on the other side of the Ohio and Confederate forces below the Kentucky border fumed and waited. A convention of border state representatives met in Frankfort, Kentucky, on May 27, chaired by the venerable compromiser John J. Crittenden. The convention pledged that Kentucky and Missouri would “purpose to take no part in this war… our sense of honor and of duty requires that we should not allow ourselves to be drawn or driven into a war in which other States, without consulting us, have deliberately chosen to involve themselves.” On August 5, however, the Kentucky legislative elections gave a resounding majority to pro-Union delegates.10

Reading what he presumed was Union-slanted handwriting on the wall, the Confederate commander in western Tennessee, Major General Leonidas