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ChaPter 1. [No chapter title] In order to afford the reader a clearer understanding of the events of the last three years of the war, west of the Mississippi, it will be useful to review briefly the occurrences of 1861 and ’62. Missouri, the most populous of the States west of the Mississippi , although peopled largely by emigration from the slaveholding states of Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee , and deeply sympathizing with the people of those states in their war against abolitionism, were yet so strongly attached to the Union that all the efforts of her State Government, thoroughly Secession in its tendencies, was unable to carry the State out of the Union.1 Her legislature, however, after the formal secession of some of the southern states, fearing the aggressive tendencies of the Federal Government, passed a law for the thorough organization of the state militia,2 and the Governor [Claiborne Jackson], the constitutional commander in chief of the state forces, immediately took measures to carry the law into effect, by establishing throughout the state encampments for military organization and instruction.3 A camp of this character was established in the suburbs of St. Louis, called Camp Jackson, under the command of 1. Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee accounted for 52 percent of all American-born residents of Missouri in 1860. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population of the United States in 1860; Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1864), 301. 2. The Military Bill of May 10, 1861, gave the state governor total control of the state militia and required every man in the state to serve (William E. Parrish , Turbulent Partnership: Missouri and the Union, 1861–1865 [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1963], 24, 41). 3. Governor Jackson, thoroughly sympathetic to the southern cause, tried to use the state militia to oust Federal troops from Missouri. See Russell K. Brown, “Jackson, Claiborne Fox,” in David S. and Jeanne T. Heidler, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2000), 1055–56. 37 38 � Greyhound Commander Brigadier General [Daniel M.] Frost, a soldier by profession, and formerly an officer in the United States Army.4 Entertaining well grounded apprehensions that the ultimate effect of this movement would be to carry the state out of the Union, since the well known sentiments of the State Government, and Legislature were in entire accord with those of ultra-southern statesmen, Captain [Nathaniel] Lyon, of the United States Army, stationed at Jefferson Barracks near St. Louis, determined to strike a blow at incipient secession by the capture of General Frost and his eight hundred militiamen at Camp Jackson.5 This was effected without resistance [on May 10, 1861], and Gen. Frost and his men were marched through the city in triumph for confinement at the United States Arsenal.6 The force effecting this capture was mostly German volounteers of St. Louis, hastily mustered into the service of the Government for this special service. It was a duty peculiarly agreeable, since the militia of Camp Jackson were of the higher classes, and consequently most odious to these radical foreign democrats.7 4. Camp Jackson, named for the governor, was about three miles west of downtown St. Louis, on the present-day campus of Saint Louis University. Frost, a New Yorker, was a member of the U.S. Military Academy’s class of 1844 and was a brigadier general in the Missouri state militia. See Ezra J. Warner, Generals in Gray: Lives of the Confederate Commanders (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1959), 94–95. 5. Nathaniel Lyon, a Connecticut native and member of the West Point class of 1841, commanded the St. Louis arsenal in 1861. See Ezra J. Warner, Generals in Blue: Lives of the Union Commanders (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964), 286–87; Christopher Phillips, Damned Yankee: The Life of General Nathaniel Lyon (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990). Jefferson Barracks, about eleven miles southwest of downtown St. Louis, was the largest military post west of the Mississippi before the Civil War (William E. Parrish , “Jefferson Barracks,” in Howard R. Lamar, ed., The New Encyclopedia of the American West [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998], 571). 6. The May 10 capture and subsequent events are examined in Parrish, Turbulent Partnership, 22–24. Lyons’s larger force of ten thousand convinced Frost, with fewer than one thousand men, to surrender...

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