1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [138]
But it was not yet Grant’s or Sherman’s Civil War in the spring of 1861. During this opening act, the two future titans were fated to watch from offstage. It was not yet time for the clashes of great armies, for columns of conscripts trudging across the ruined landscape of the South. Instead, the struggle for Missouri was a civil war in the truest and rawest sense, resembling those fought in our own time in such places as Beirut and Baghdad: gun battles in the streets, long-simmering ethnic hatreds boiling over, and wailing mothers cradling slain children in their arms. It was also quite literally a revolution—but with the Union side, not the Confederates, as the rebels.
The Union revolutionaries, who would soon fight the battle for Missouri, were drilling clandestinely by night in beer halls, factories, and gymnasiums, barricading the windows and spreading sawdust on the floor to muffle the sound of their stomping boots. Young brewery workers and trolley drivers, middle-aged tavern keepers and wholesale merchants, were learning to bear and aim guns, to wheel squads left and right in the proper American fashion. Most of the younger men handled the weapons awkwardly, but quite a few of the older ones swung them with the ease of having been soldiers once before, in another country, long ago. Sometimes, when their movements hit a perfect synchrony, when their muffled tread beat a single cadence, they threw caution aside and sang out. Just a few of the older men would begin, more and more men joining in until dozens swelled the chorus, half singing, half shouting verses they had carried with them from across the sea:
Die wilde Jagd, und die Deutsche Jagd,
Auf Henkersblut und Tyrannen!
Drum, die ihr uns liebt, nicht geweint und geklagt;
Das Land ist ja frei, und der Morgen tagt,
Wenn wir’s auch nur sterbend gewannen! *
There were two distinct Missouris in 1861: an old and a new.
The old flourished in the central counties of the state, in the rich alluvial lands between the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers. Here, in the early decades of the century, had come settlers from the seaboard South: enterprising young Marylanders and Virginians who had forsaken the exhausted acreage of their ancestral plantations, rounded up the able-bodied field hands, and marched them in shackled droves through the Cumberland Gap. Others made the journey from Kentucky and Tennessee, moving southwestward with the frontier, as their mothers and fathers had done before. Land could be had for twenty-five cents an acre, and, after the slaves had cleared it, there were abundant yields of cotton, tobacco, and hemp. These earliest settlers had agitated for Missouri’s admission as a slave state, and after the Compromise of 1820 settled the matter, more followed. Although there were few large plantations, the region became known as Little Dixie.38 Planters and small farmers sent their crops to market in nearby St. Louis, a frontier town of wood-frame houses that the early French colonists had built.39
As the Civil War began, Little Dixie still flourished as it had for the past half century. But St. Louis, in that time, had changed beyond all recognition. Here and there, a quaint French colonial house still tottered picturesquely, but most had given way to block after block of redbrick monotony: warehouses, manufacturing plants, and office buildings, stretching for miles along the bluffs above the river. Each year, more than four thousand steamboats shouldered up to the wharves, vessels with names like War Eagle, Champion, Belle of Memphis, and Big St. Louis. The smoke from their coal-fired furnaces mingled with the thick black clouds belching from factory smokestacks, so that on windless days the sun shone feebly through a dark canopy that hung above the entire city.40
More and more Northerners were coming to this new Missouri, attracted by the opportunities of booming industry—both wealthy businessmen and poor but hopeful laborers. So alarmed were the “old” Missourians by the influx that one Virginia-born