Damned Yankee: The Life of General Nathaniel Lyon (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Damned Yankee: The Life of General Nathaniel Lyon. By Christopher Phillips. (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1990. Pp. xvi, 287. $26.00.) The name of the first Union general to fall in combat during the Civil War, Nathaniel Lyon, was a byword across the divided nation in 1861. The extended carnage which followed his death in August of that year, coupled with the failure of historians to appreciate the importance of the Trans-Mississippi theater, relegated his fame (and notoriety) to the relative backwaters of historiography. Christopher Phillips's excellent biography thus stands as a welcome corrective, demonstrating that Lyon had a profound impact on political and military developments in a region which the North could not lose without losing the war itself. With meticulous documentation and well-crafted prose, Phillips builds a life-long psychological portrait of his subject with a view to explaining the controversial campaign that culminated in Lyon's attack on a numerically superior Confederate force at Wilson's Creek. The author finds the origins of Lyon's fiercely independent and compulsively domineering personality in his Connecticut childhood, a reflection of the boy's relationship with his father. Quoting extensively from Lyon's letters, Phillips traces the complex process by which Lyon ultimately rejected conventional religion and mores but came to see himself as God's chosen instrument, particularly for the purposes of punishment. And punish Lyon did. A West Point graduate and career soldier, he developed "a nearly psychopathic appetite for inflicting pain" (91). His cruelty toward enlisted men was notorious. Lyon considered himself a divinely sanctioned judge, jury, and executioner in relation to political events, and particularly secession, a point crucial to Phillips's revisionist analysis of the general's impact on events. The author contends that Unionist sympathy in Missouri was so strong that the state would have remained in the Union under almost any circumstances. Far from saving Missouri for the Union, Lyon's obsession with punishing secessionists led to unwise and often counter-productive actions. Not satisfied with his highly creditable protection of the federal arsenal in St. Louis, Lyon captured a portion of the legally-constituted state BOOK REVIEWS67 militia. This frightened the largely pro-Union state legislature into passing a military bill which allowed pro-secessionist Governor Claiborne F. Jackson to raise State Guard forces en masse. Lyon responded by declaring war on the State Guard. In a swift, brilliant campaign, he captured the state capital, Jefferson City, and soon gained control of the river and rail systems of central Missouri. But although no military objectives made it worth the risk, Lyon then moved into southwestern Missouri to confront not only the State Guard, but Confederate troops from Arkansas. His decision to attack rested more on his desire to punish traitors than on any rational military evaluation of the situation. Phillips argues that the actions that sprang from Lyon's obsessive behavior polarized a populace that had little desire to participate actively in the Civil War on either side. Lyon "provided guerrilla bands with a cause célèbre for which they subjected large areas of Missouri to three years of rampant bushwacking. . . . more than any other single individual, Nathaniel Lyon bore responsibility for this fratricidal tragedy" (263). Although convincing in his evaluation of Lyon's motivations, Phillips blames the general too heavily for Missouri's war-within-a-war, the complex nature of which is best explored in Michael Fellman's Inside War: The Guerilla War in Missouri During the American Civil War (1989). His account of the battle of Wilson's Creek covers a scant five and one-half pages, providing little analysis of Lyon's performance as a field commander during the greatest (and last) professional challenge of his career. The failure to include maps of either the battle or Missouri is baffling and a severe handicap to the reader. It is refreshing, however, to see reference notes placed uncompromisingly at the foot of each page, and the book is well-illustrated. Damned Yankee constitutes a thought-provoking, and largely convincing , challenge to the standard interpretation of Lyon and his role in history. Essential to understanding the war west of the Mississippi...