Civil War St. Louis (review)

This model study of "the nation's great inland city and a citadel of free labor in a slave state" (5) focuses on the sectional conflict rather than urban history. Chronologically organized, Gerteis covers an impressive variety of subjects in essentially topical chapters (women, slavery, and race relations, the naval war fought largely by the gunboats of engineer James B. Eads) with minimal repetition. Dozens of colorful figures are skillfully portrayed in a fast-paced narrative: from national leaders like Thomas Hart Benton and Jessie Frémont to local personalities like Unitarian minister William Greenleaf Eliot and Union nurse Emily Parsons. The volume is well written and will interest historians as well as general readers.

Gerteis argues that the capture of Vicksburg would have been far more difficult without St. Louis as a staging area, and moreover that the city was the linchpin for the Union effort in the West, especially before the capture of New Orleans. Specialists who typically focus on the East will ignore this volume at their peril.

Gerteis provides background and context for the heart of his book: the first three chapters and one hundred pages cover the city's antebellum decades, including battles of Whigs and Democrats, and the Dred Scott case. He asserts, "The metropolitan ambitions of St. Louis," which became one of the ten largest cities in 1850 and held that status for a century, "never meshed smoothly with the political culture of Missouri" (37), a state that had a Little Dixie, though only twenty residents had more than fifty slaves and but 365 had more than twenty. Compared with the Northeast, Missouri lagged in building transportation infrastructure, especially railroads and schools. By the 1840s, despite continued ties to Baltimore and New Orleans, St. Louis was moving closer to northeastern cities. Almost half of the native-born arrivals in the 1840s came from New England, New York, or Pennsylvania. The 1850s was a critical period for residents, partly because New Yorkers and Bostonians did not think St. Louis could achieve its true destiny in a slave state.

The coverage of the secession crisis is particularly dramatic and detailed, featuring not only Nathaniel Lyons and Frank Blair Jr., Claiborne Jackson, and Sterling Price but also interest observers like Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. Southern sympathizers consistently underestimated their Union opponents, who repeatedly outmaneuvered and overcame them with superior organization, resources, and grit. To the author's credit there is quite a bit of military history from 1861 on, with coverage of battles fought hundreds of miles away, including Wilson's Creek and Pea Ridge, Shiloh, Forts Henry and Donelson, and Vicksburg. The capture of the last city would have been far more difficult without St. Louis as a base.

Parts of the two final chapters take the story into Reconstruction, and even down to the turn of the century when the last of the wartime actors finally died. Gerteis provides a comprehensive bibliography that will be useful to specialists and others. The twenty-one illustrations are well chosen.

Gerteis disagrees with the conclusions of some other scholars, especially about the causes and nature of Missouri's guerrilla war and actions of unionists. He takes issue with William E. Parrish and Michael Fellman for seeing Union sympathizers as leading a coup d'etat through military action that caused the state to degenerate into lawlessness. Gerteis argues for a more limited and complicated picture. The treatment of Lincoln is sympathetic, reaffirming the findings of Mark E. Neely Jr. that the president relied on local authorities to handle sensitive issues and did not employ a strong, centralized effort against dissent. Overall, the perspective of the book is also refreshing because readers experience the war from St. Louis rather than Washington.

There are some small problems with the book. In the Dred Scott case, Gerteis confusingly spells the defendant Sanford's name correctly, not as the court reporter did...