1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [151]
Still, every Missourian knew that in the event of federal aggression toward a Southern state—say, a battle at Charleston or elsewhere—the “adequate cause” might very suddenly present itself.
What only a few knew was that the raising of the two rebel flags had not been some rash act of a few young hotheads. It had been a coolly plotted provocation. The Minute Men had actually hoped to spark an explosion of violence throughout the city. Amid the chaos, they thought, they could seize the choicest prize of the Mississippi Valley, indeed, one of the choicest in the entire country: the United States Arsenal at St. Louis.94
The Arsenal was a central munitions depot for federal forts throughout the West. Its present stores could equip an entire Confederate army: 60,000 muskets, 90,000 pounds of gunpowder, 1.5 million cartridges, and several dozen cannon—in addition to machinery for arms manufacture, of which the South had woefully little. The Buchanan administration, displaying its usual strategic acumen, had initially left only forty soldiers guarding this bounty, the largest single arms cache in all the slave states. Thanks to some urgent string pulling by Frank Blair, the force was increased to some five hundred federal troops, still hardly enough, given the thousands of secessionist volunteers now arming themselves in St. Louis and throughout Missouri. But as winter turned into spring and the plots and counterplots multiplied, the Arsenal’s greatest asset would turn out to be one very strange little man.95
Captain Nathaniel Lyon of the United States Army could hardly have seemed a less imposing warrior. A slight, red-bearded Yankee, he was constantly sucking on hard candies, which clicked wetly against his ill-fitting dentures. Yet Lyon embodied, in his five-foot-five frame, nearly everything that Southerners loathed and feared. He was a man of fervent, almost fanatical, Republican antislavery beliefs, which he never hesitated to vocalize in his harsh, nasal Connecticut bray. It was not, he made clear, that he gave a damn about the slaves—in fact, he publicly professed himself “not concerned with improving the black race, nor the breed of dogs and reptiles.” No, it was mostly just that he hated the South, detested its authoritarian institutions, and tasted bile at the very thought of secessionist treason. Many tales about him circulated in the army. Perhaps the most famous was of the time at Fort Riley when the captain came upon one of his privates beating a dog: after knocking the soldier to the ground and kicking him in the stomach a few times, he made him get on his knees and beg the animal for forgiveness. To know that story was to know Nathaniel Lyon.96
People called him “mentally unbalanced”; no doubt present-day psychiatry has a term for his condition. Whenever an underling committed some trifling infraction, Lyon would inflict an ingeniously sadistic punishment—one favorite involved honey and stinging flies—then seek out his victim a few hours later and abjectly apologize. On meeting someone, Lyon would coax out of him some mild expression of political or religious opinion (the captain himself was an avowed atheist), so that he might reply with a scalding shower of profanities. And yet somehow he also managed to inspire loyalty, even trust. A brother officer wrote:
If he had lived four hundred years ago he would have been burned at the stake as a pestilent and altogether incorrigible person, whose removal was demanded in the interests of the peace of society.… There was no middle ground with him in any matter that engaged his attention, and he conceived that it was his duty to enforce his doctrines or ideas upon all with whom he came in contact, even to the point of being offensive. At the same time he was possessed of as tender a heart as ever beat in a man’s breast.… He had in him an indomitable spirit that was always awake, a fixity