From These Honored Dead: Historical Archaeology of the American Civil War

2. Archaeology of the First Battle of Boonville, Missouri, June 17, 1861

2 archaeologyoftheFirstBattleofBoonville,missouri,June17,1861 Douglas D. Scott, Steven J. Dasovich, and Thomas D. Thiessen Early in the morning of June 17, 1861, several thousand men fought a brief battle a few miles east of Boonville, Missouri, an engagement that resulted in strategic consequences far beyond the scale of the engagement or its resultant low cost in human life and blood. The First Battle of Boonville, as it has been called, pitted a force of about1,700Unionsoldiersagainstasfewas600,or perhapsasmanyas4,000, men of the newly formed Missouri State Guard, a pro-Southern army under the direction of Governor Claiborne Fox Jackson and commanded by Maj. Gen. Sterling Price. Estimates of the State Guard’s strength vary widely. The Union force was commanded by an energetic and capable officer, Brig. Gen. Nathaniel Lyon, who was given command of Union forces in Missouri shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War. The Missouri State Guard’s commander, Gen. Price, was ill at the time and so was not present at the scene. However, Missouri’s pro-secession governor, Claiborne F. Jackson, was at hand and ordered the State Guardsmen to confront Lyon’s approaching force. The Battle of Boonville: A Short History Eyewitness accounts of the battle are few, probably because the engagement ended so ignominiously for the State Guard and the scale of the battle was small. The Boonville engagement was relatively well reported by the press: at least 10 newspaper correspondents either personally witnessed the action or arrived at Boonville in the days following the battle and received information about the fight from participants. In addition, at least 5 reporters accompanied Lyon’s column as it advanced on Boonville from Jefferson City, and possibly 3 were with Lyon’s forces as they advanced on land. Of these, the accounts left by Lucien J. Barnes (who usually signed his reports simply “B.”) of the Daily Missouri Democrat (St. Louis) and Thomas W. Knox of the New York Herald are the most detailed and useful for understanding how the action unfolded (figure 2.1). Another correspondent, who signed simply as “L.D.I.” for the Scioto (Ohio) Gazette, also wrote a relatively detailed, but questionable, account of Archaeology of the First Battle of Boonville, Missouri, June 17, 1861 27 the battle that was published on August 13, 1861, nearly two months after the action took place. “L.D.I.” is likely Corporal Lorenzo Immell, Battery F, 2nd U.S. Artillery, who was from Scioto County, Ohio. Immell received the Medal of Honor for gallantry at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, Missouri (U.S. Senate 1927: 239). The Battle of Boonville has often been characterized as a skirmish by historians (McElroy 1913: 107; Barnes 1929: 601; Brownlee 1958: 15; Catton 1961: 387; Parrish 1973: 24; Rorvig 1992: 127; Brooksher 1995: 90; Piston and Hatcher 2000: 47, 76, 179, 233). The engagement was brief, estimated at from 20 minutes to one hour and 10 minutes (Scott et al. 2009: 2–3). With light casualties on both sides, the poorly equipped and largely untrained State Guard was routed. The disorganized retreat back to Boonville and beyond was sometimes sarcastically labeled “the Boonville Races” by later commentators. The First Battle of Boonville is sometimes regarded as the first significant Civil War land battle to take place in Missouri (Barnes 1929: 601). The battle resulted in a Union victory that left control of the Missouri River in Northern hands for the remainder of the Civil War, thus denying the Confederacy the wealth and manpower of northern Missouri, especially the wealthy “Little Dixie” counties along the river, where pro-South sentiment was strong. It also resulted in Governor Jackson’s cabinet becoming a government in exile, forced to flee Missouri for the relative safety of Arkansas, which had seceded from the Union on May 6. Figure 2.1. A sketch of the Battle of Boonville from the Federal side from Thomas Knox’s Campfires and Cottonfields (2011 [1864]). Knox was an eyewitness to the battle, and this sketch generally depicts the terrain well. Douglas D. Scott, Steven J. Dasovich, and Thomas D. Thiessen 28 On May 11, 1861, the day following the Camp Jackson “Massacre,” Missouri’s state legislature passed what was called the “Military Bill.” This law authorized the governor to disband the existing state militia, which had performed largely social functions and was poorly armed, and form a new military organization called the Missouri...