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The retaliation began that night. Crowds of secessionists gathered in front of the Planter’s House as impromptu orators railed against the Black Republicans and Hessian mercenaries. At last the mob decided to wreck the Anzeiger print shop; storming down Main Street, they smashed the window of Dimick’s gun store and began grabbing shotguns and rifles. Fortunately for Boernstein’s paper, some quick-thinking Home Guards blocked the street and fended off the attack with fixed bayonets. For the next twenty-four hours, though, Germans foolish enough to appear in public were chased down and beaten, stoned, sometimes lynched. One of the reserve regiments was ambushed by secessionists firing from behind the pillars of a Presbyterian church; in the ensuing confusion, several soldiers unlucky enough to become separated from their comrades were seized and executed with shots fired point-blank to the head. Rumors began reaching the city of similar reprisals across the state; in towns too small to have any Germans, Republicans were slain or “abolitionist” churches burned.124

Meanwhile, in the wealthier neighborhoods of St. Louis, it was said that the “Dutch” were about to sack and burn the city. “The ‘upper ten,’ the rich, proud slaveholders,” as Boernstein called them, loaded up draymen’s wagons with mahogany furniture and chests of linen and fled by the thousands, crowding aboard ferryboats, seeking the safety of the Illinois shore.125

But Captain Lyon’s sights were now set beyond St. Louis. He had accomplished everything he needed to do there.

Within a matter of weeks, Lyon, Blair, Sigel, and their German volunteers were marching toward central Missouri in hot pursuit of Governor Jackson, who by this point had unilaterally declared war on the United States and called for 50,000 volunteers to defend against Yankee invasion. (Boernstein and his men stayed behind to guard St. Louis.) Jackson fled Jefferson City at the troops’ approach, accompanied by most of the prosecession legislature and the Missouri state troops. Lyon caught up with them fifty miles away, at Boonville, where he dealt them a quick but decisive defeat. After just a few casualties on each side, the state troops broke ranks and fled, hotly pursued by the German regiments, into the far southwestern corner of the state. Missouri would never again be in serious danger of falling into rebel hands.126

While Thomas Starr King and Jessie Frémont may not have saved California for the Union, it is reasonable to say that Nathaniel Lyon, Frank Blair, and the Germans did save Missouri. Somehow, the strange, almost accidental alliance of two outsize egotists (one of them possibly psychotic) and several thousand idealists had carried the day.

Grant himself would believe for the rest of his life that but for them, the Arsenal—and with it St. Louis—would have been taken by the Confederacy. Some historians have argued that the militia at Camp Jackson, even if reinforced, could never have posed any serious threat by itself, which is perhaps true. But by seizing the initiative, by transforming the Wide Awakes into soldiers and moving against the secessionists before they could properly organize, the “damn Dutchmen” had sent their enemies reeling, never to regain balance. In effect, a small band of German revolutionaries accomplished in St. Louis what they had failed to do in Vienna and Heidelberg: overthrow a reactionary state government. And they had done it in a matter of weeks, while in the East the armies were stumbling toward a war of attrition that would last almost four years. If the Union in 1861 had just had a few more Lyons and Blairs in charge of its troops, its conquest of the South might have played out very differently.127

But even swift victory did not come without a price. For the rest of those four years, Missouri would be the scene of atrocities unlike any seen elsewhere: ceaseless guerrilla warfare that erased distinctions between soldier and civilian almost entirely; violence with no greater strategic purpose than avenging the violence that had come before;