Coming Fury, Volume 1 (63 page)

Returning to Jefferson City, Governor Jackson tried to pick up the pieces. He began by issuing a proclamation telling the
people of Missouri that the Blair-Lyon team proposed to reduce the state “to the exact condition of Maryland.” He called out 50,000 militia, and although he asserted that Missouri was still a member of the Federal Union, he insisted that its citizens were “under no obligations whatever to obey the unconstitutional edicts of the military despotism which has introduced itself at Washington, nor submit to the infamous and degrading sway of its wicked minions in this State.” He concluded: “Arise, then, and drive out ignominiously the invaders who have dared to desecrate the soil which your labors have made fruitful and which is consecrated by your homes.”
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The war was taking a fantastic shape. Missouri was still in the Union, lying outside of the direct line of fire between the two sections, a majority of its people (as far as anyone could tell, in this state of profoundly mixed sentiments) still loyal to the Union; yet its government and the national government were fighting one another. Governor Jackson’s appraisal was accurate enough. Things were indeed following the pattern that had been set in Maryland, and there was no Constitutional precedent for anything that was happening. State governors do not ordinarily negotiate with foreign nations for arms with which to seize Federal arsenals, nor do regular-army officers commonly set out to destroy a legally constituted state militia. Now these things had happened, and because they had happened they would make other things happen, equally extraordinary.

Lyon lost no time. He was impetuous and intolerant, driving on to enforce his own will, the will of Frank Blair, and ultimately the will of the determined President in Washington, of whom skeptical patriots had said, only a short time before, that they feared he lacked iron. Lyon put his troops on the march while Governor Jackson was still drafting his proclamation, and on June 14 he moved into Jefferson City, seizing the machinery of state government and sending Jackson and Price off in hasty retreat. With hardly a pause, Lyon pushed on fifty miles to Boonville, which was the concentration point for the state militia—the militia that, if given time to assemble, organize, and equip itself, would be a powerful force for the Southern Confederacy. On June 16 there was a brief fight at Boonville, in which some 1700 men led by Lyon met a
smaller contingent of state troops; a hard little fight between untrained forces, with a good deal of shooting but very few casualties, which ended in the complete rout of the militia. Lyon’s little army occupied Boonville, while Jackson and Price headed for the extreme southwestern corner of the state to make an effort to rally new forces. Lyon halted to organize and outfit his troops for further adventures; he notified Washington that he would hold Boonville, Jefferson City, and the line of the Missouri River, and that he himself would presently move on to Springfield, far to the south.

This fight at Boonville, the slightest of skirmishes by later standards, was in fact a very consequential victory for the Federal government. Governor Jackson had been knocked loose from the control of his state, and the chance that Missouri could be carried bodily into the Southern Confederacy had gone glimmering. Jackson’s administration was now, in effect, a government-in-exile, fleeing down the roads toward the Arkansas border, a disorganized body that would need a great deal of help from Jefferson Davis’s government before it could give any substantial help in return. In Missouri as in Maryland, the Lincoln administration had taken the important first trick; had taken it by displaying an uncomplicated readiness to disregard all of the ancient rules of the game. Ardent Southerners might still believe that the Yankees would not really fight, but they were at least beginning to see that the Yankees had a government that knew exactly what it wanted and would stop at nothing to get it.
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The Confederate government also knew exactly what it wanted, as far as that was concerned, and it would pay the ultimate price to get it, if necessary, but it was playing a very different sort of game. It was fighting to conserve, not to destroy; far from engaging in revolution, it was taking the most ancient rules and giving them a literal interpretation, and everything that it did would be done in the strictest observance of those rules. Its very existence was justified by the belief that the states which composed it had a legal and moral right to do what they had done. It was this government’s first article of faith that it was completely and eternally Constitutional—Constitutional, not by the writ devised at Montgomery, but by the older Constitution which Lincoln said that he was making war to preserve. The very essence of secession was the
desire to maintain unaltered a society, an order of things, which the world was threatening to change, and no government on earth had a more sincere and dedicated desire to uphold the established formulas. Strict constructionists had made secession in the first place; having made it, they could not be other than what they had always been.

In the early stages—in the canvassing and negotiating which led up to secession, and in the time when the existence of the new nation was being proclaimed—this had been an immense advantage. Men who persuasively say and obviously believe that they are religiously following the most hallowed laws do not look dangerous, and even men who disagree with them will not quickly prepare to fight against them. But now, with war on the land, this scrupulous insistence on Constitutionality was a handicap. It ruled out flexibility of action. The ruthlessness which would strike quickly, cunningly, beyond the law, was not possible, because the new government was legalistic, and in a situation where irregular action was imperative, it had to follow the forms. Furthermore, it was naturally bound to assume that the rival government, the one at Washington, would also follow the forms; to believe otherwise would be to admit a revolutionary situation existed, in which case the argument that the Confederacy was Constitutional rather than revolutionary would fall to the ground. One result of all this was that the Confederacy had lost Missouri.

Missouri, in any case, was very far away from the center of Jefferson Davis’s interest just now. The fatality which beset both governments so much of the time was keeping his attention centered principally on the East; on Virginia, the most powerful and welcome of new states to join the Confederacy, and on Richmond, Virginia’s capital and now, by vote of the Confederate Congress and seemingly by the common consent of all Southerners, the capital of the Confederacy as well.

The Confederate Congress adjourned on May 21, after voting to make Richmond the new capital: a move which was both a gesture of defiance and a sign of confidence. To put the center of the new government a scant hundred miles from the center of the old government was to invite invasion. The Confederacy would function on its most exposed frontier; at the time the move
was made, there was very little to keep Federal warships from steaming up the James River and bombarding the capital, and invading Yankees would find Richmond ever so much nearer than Montgomery—or, for that matter, Atlanta, which had hoped it might be chosen. But in a way the move was forced. Howell Cobb explained it, in a speech at Atlanta, saying that Confederate troops had already gone to Virginia and that the government wanted to follow them: “In the progress of the war further legislation may be necessary, and we will be there, that when the hour of danger comes we may lay aside the robes of legislation, buckle on the armor of the soldier, and do battle beside the brave ones who have volunteered for the defence of our beloved South.” The Montgomery
Weekly Advertiser
had protested that the move was preposterous, “utterly at variance with the dictates of prudence and sound policy,” but it confessed that it was probably necessary for President Davis to be near the front, so that he might take command of the armies in person if need be; and, anyway, Virginia was the state above all others whose secession had given the Confederacy an appearance of breadth and permanence, and to go to Richmond was to indicate full reliance on Virginia’s solidity.
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The real trouble with the move was not so much that it put the Confederate capital on the firing line as that it compelled the Confederate government, over the long pull, to see the whole war in terms of military action in tidewater Virginia. The enormous importance of the West, of the Mississippi Valley, of Missouri and Kentucky and Tennessee, would be inevitably diminished, in the government’s eyes, by the tremendous battles that would be fought within a day’s ride of the capital. The focus of vision would be narrowed, and a price would be paid for it.

Meanwhile, on May 23, Virginia formally voted to secede. Inasmuch as the state had actually gone to war as soon as its convention passed the ordinance of secession, the verdict finally registered at the polls (overwhelmingly for secession, throughout most of the state; strongly against it, in the thirty-nine counties west of the Alleghenies) made little practical difference, except that it at last pushed the Federal government into direct action. Willing to cut across restraints elsewhere, Lincoln had abided by all of the rules in respect to Virginia. Not until the voters themselves had ratified
secession would he move. Once ratification came, however, he moved quickly. Long before dawn on the morning of May 24 he sent eight regiments across the Potomac to seize Alexandria and Arlington Heights and to establish a firm bridgehead on secession soil. The first invasion of the South was under way. It was not much of an invasion and it did not occupy much of the South, but it was a symbol. A great many young men must die before it was finished.

Much would die with them; including a way of looking at life and seeing nothing but its freshness and the fact that it was made to be spent, a special notion of how things might be with the spirit when the ultimate challenge is faced, a feeling for the overtones that can haunt a man’s hearing as he goes down the long pathway into the dusk. This also was symbolized, as Federal troops first put their feet on Virginia soil. Among the eight regiments that went across the river (it was two o’clock in the morning and there was a big moon to shimmer on the water and to put mysterious shadows under the dark trees) there was a rowdy, untamed, and not too noteworthy outfit known as the New York Fire Zouaves: a regiment of amateurs led by an amateur, going down to the Alexandria wharves by boat in search of a war that would be all youth and flags and easy valor and rewarding cheers; not destined to be hardened by fire into the company of the elect. The colonel was luckier than the rest. He was named Elmer Ellsworth, and he would die before the illusion had a chance to fade, leaving a name that would live longer than the cold facts required.

Ellsworth was twenty-four; an odd young man, by profession a Chicago patent attorney (it seems the last job on earth for this particular man) and by chosen avocation a drill-master of irregular troops, a wearer of bright uniforms, a dedicated play actor; remembered now because death met him very early, and because there was something in him that had won the affection of Abraham Lincoln. He had trained a patent-leather militia company before the war, winning plaudits, and he had come east on the same train with Lincoln, half bodyguard and half pampered nephew-by-election; when war came, he had helped to recruit a new regiment from among the New York volunteer firemen, had seen it clothed in the brilliant uniforms copied from the French Zouaves—baggy red
knickers, russet leather gaiters, short blue jacket over a big sash, a red fez for the head, and a go-to-hell grin for the face—and now he was leading the first invasion of the South, taking his men in to occupy Alexandria.

Before the regiment started out, Ellsworth had written a final letter to his parents. (A romantic, off for the wars, would write a “final letter” before any move whatever, casting an innocently calculated shadow for posterity and for himself.) He felt, he said, that “our entrance to the city of Alexandria will be hotly contested,” but he was unworried: “thinking over the probabilities of the morrow and the occurences of the past, I am perfectly content to accept whatever my fortune may be.” The entrance, as it turned out, was not contested at all. Such Confederate troops as had been in and around Alexandria had decamped, and the invading host got in unopposed; but Ellsworth’s own fortune was not diminished thereby. Leading his men down the empty streets, Ellsworth came to a hotel, the Marshall House, and on top of this there was a flagpole flying the Confederate flag. A challenge, obviously; and Ellsworth, followed by soldiers, went inside, hurried to the roof, and with a knife borrowed from a private soldier cut down this emblem of rebellion and started back for the street with the flag tucked under his arm.

In a shadowy hallway he met the proprietor of the inn, a solid Virginian named James T. Jackson, who perhaps had not the clearest conception of what war might mean but who knew that he was not going to be pushed around by any bright young man in red pants; and Jackson produced a shotgun and killed Ellsworth by sending a charge of buckshot through his body, being himself killed a few seconds later by one of Ellsworth’s Zouaves, who first shot the man and then, for good measure, ran his bayonet through him. All of these deeds were final; that is, Ellsworth and Jackson stayed dead, and the flag stayed down from the flagpole; and the North suddenly found itself with its first war hero. Ellsworth’s body lay in state in the White House, mourned by President Lincoln, and a rash of editorials, poems, sermons, speeches, and quick-steps enshrined him as well as might be.
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The war was new. The two deaths were utterly meaningless, although Ellsworth had precisely the end he would have chosen for
himself. He died while the day was still bright, a flag under his arm, his name and his uniform still bright. It was a springtime of symbols. Ellsworth meant little alive, much in his coffin, symbolizing a national state of mind, a certain attitude toward the war that would quickly pass and would never return. And so, for that matter, did the innkeeper, Mr. Jackson.
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