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2 Young Walter A large part ofvirtue consists in good habits. -William Paley. British theologian The Civil War reduced the economic station of the Williams family from middle-class to poor, as it did most of Boonville.' The fighting was intense, and it was local: two significant battles and numerous raids and skirmishes were fought in the immediate region of Boonville, draining the manpower and the economy of the town and the spirits of those who were left there to cope as best they could with adversity, shortage, and, often, despair. When Walter Williams was born in 1864, the war had already been going on for three years-longer than that, if one counts the wildcat violence associated with the proslavery Missouri Bushwhackers, who were known to have launched terrorist attacks on abolitionist strongholds in Missouri and Kansas as early as 1856. Retaliatory strikes by Kansas layhawkers turned the Missouri-Kansas border into a bloody battleground over slavery long before there was a Confederate States of America, much less a rebel army and an Emancipation Proclamation. On April 12, 1861, hostilities officially commenced when Confederate artillery shelled Fort Sumter, a tiny island outpost strategically positioned just outside the entrance to Charleston harbor. Weeks later, a land battle, one of the earliest of the Civil War, would be fought for control of another port: the river town of Boonville, Missouri. After months ofanguished debate, Missourians had opted against secession. But considerable proslavery sentiment existed throughout the state, and after the Fort Sumter attack, federal forces headquartered in St. Louis moved swiftly, if clumsily, to rid the Missouri River valley of the threat that might be posed by Southern sympathizers. A secondary objective, but far more important for the long pull, would be to show the U.S. flag and make certain that I. This assessment, along with a few other details about his early years, is from an unpublished manuscript written by Walter Williams and found among his papers in the Western Historical Manuscript Collection, University ofMissouri. The undated typewritten manuscript, seven pages long, is clearly a tentative and preliminary start on an autobiography, a project presumably begun late in his life, and one which he soon abandoned. The works of Robert Dyer, notably Jesse James and the Civil War in Missouri (University of Missouri Press, 1992), contain the best modern account of Boonville's history. 18 Young Walter 19 Missouri remained in the Union. The clearing party was headed by Generalonly a month before he had been a captain-Nathaniel Lyon, described by one historian as "a little man, hard-bitten of feature, red of hair and beard, with the burning eye of the zealot."2 Meeting with practically no organized resistance as they marched up the valley ofthe Missouri, Lyon's forces drove the state government, rife with Confederate sympathizers, from the capital at Jefferson City. On June 17 they advanced a few miles north, to the hills below Boonville, where, for the first time, they ran into a fight. It came from an untrained volunteer militia, then thirteen hundred strong, that Missouri Governor Claiborne F. Jackson had hurriedly assembled to defend what he thought were the state's interests and autonomy. The rebel forces fought gamely, but they were poorly armed and only half-organized, and were soon overwhelmed. The battle began at 6 A.M. and ended a few hours later when the town mayor, James H. O'Brian, surrendered Boonville to General Lyon. Though there was ferocious shooting and unnumbered wounded on both sides, only one person was killed: Dr. John Walter, a gentle soul tragically miscast as a fighting man, the Sunday school teacher for whom Walter Williams was named.3 ThedefeatedMissouri militiamen beatahasty withdrawalfrom therichriver valley toward the Ozarks to the south. The secessionist cause in general, and the governor's prestige in particular, had been dealt a punishing blow. There would be arematch, ofsorts, farther south seven weeks later at Wilson's Creek; resurgent rebel forces, better prepared, won this one, and General Nathaniel Lyon, a brave man if a driven one, was killed. Throughout the months that followed, the people of Boonville lived in dread that their town, now occupied by Union forces, would become another battleground. On October 8, 1863, it did. The invading rebel force, eight hundred Missouri cavalry supported by only two small cannon, was under the command ofColonel Joseph O. Shelby. Less an army than a large raiding party that moved swiftly and lived off the land, Shelby...

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