1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [152]
In this man’s hands rested the fate of the St. Louis Arsenal.
He had arrived in February at the head of a company of reinforcements, just eighty soldiers, and reported to his superior officer at the Arsenal, a certain Major Hagner, who seemed not quite combat-ready, to put it mildly. (When a squad started moving howitzers across the yard, the major admonished them sharply “not to spoil his lawn.”)98 But within days of his arrival, Lyon met Frank Blair and immediately recognized a kindred spirit: one as hard-nosed and ruthless as himself. Blair had thousands of men at his command, but few weapons; Lyon commanded just a few dozen men but had access to enough weapons to arm half of St. Louis. No wonder they found each other.
There was another very important respect in which the well-connected Blair could be useful: he had the ear of the Lincoln administration. Within a week of the inauguration, he dropped a quick note to Secretary of War Cameron, and almost immediately, new orders went out to St. Louis, assigning command of the Arsenal’s troops and defenses to Captain Nathaniel Lyon, relieving the feckless Hagner.99
The armed standoff—between the Minute Men and heavily secessionist state militia on one side, and the Arsenal troops and former Wide Awakes on the other—lasted through early April. (Blair had now renamed his forces the Home Guards.) Then came the momentous news from Charleston Harbor. Now it was the governor’s turn to act.
On the very day that word of Sumter’s surrender arrived in St. Louis—Sunday, April 14—Jackson struck the lowest and most dastardly blow he could inflict on the German community: he orchestrated a police raid to enforce the blue laws. Squads of officers fanned out across the city, storming into saloons and beer gardens and driving the clientele into the streets. (Drinking establishments popular among “Americans,” such as the bar at the Planter’s House hotel, famous for its mint juleps and sherry cobblers, were not disturbed. Afterward, one report had it that misdirected police came to break up a saloon where Governor Jackson himself happened to be drinking with some cronies, but this seems too good to be true.) Forty armed policemen appeared at Henry Boernstein’s Opera House just before the evening performance and shut down the theater; it never reopened. This was, however, only the opening salvo of a larger campaign to oppress the city’s Unionists by the arbitrary exercise of government authority. It was quickly announced that English would henceforth be the only official language of state business, and that funds for St. Louis’s public schools were being reallocated to arm Governor Jackson’s militia. Citizens were forbidden from gathering in large groups in the streets. All assemblies of “negroes or mulattoes,” including church services, were summarily banned unless a police officer was present, and hundreds of free blacks, terrified that reenslavement might be next, flocked to the courthouse seeking official certificates of freedom.100
“Not One Word More—Now Arms Will Decide,” the Anzeiger’s headline announced grimly. “Every question, every doubt has been swept away,” the article continued. “The Fatherland calls us—we stand at its disposal.”101
The Fatherland’s first official call to the state of Missouri, however, failed to elicit the desired effect. When Governor Jackson received Lincoln’s April 15 order for state troops to be mustered into federal service, he replied in no uncertain terms:
Sir, … your requisition in my judgment, is illegal, unconstitutional and revolutionary in its object, inhuman and diabolical, and cannot be complied with. Not one man will the state of Missouri furnish to carry on such an unholy crusade.
Even many moderate Missourians who would have disowned their governor’s harsh rhetoric agreed in wanting no part of Lincoln’s call to arms. One man spoke for many when he wrote to a pro-Union acquaintance: “We ask nothing