The Civil War in Missouri: A Military History

Introduction

1 Introduction This is a work of traditional military history: it focuses on strategy, tactics, and terrain; on the organization, movement, and deployment of troops; and on the victories and defeats experienced by armies in the field. It requires some familiarity with the historiography of the Civil War in Missouri and with the lingering ideology of the Lost Cause to appreciate why, in the second decade of the twentyfirst century, such a traditional military history is needed. The historiography of the Civil War in Missouri is nicely summarized in the recent edition of the nation’s leading textbook on the Civil War and Reconstruction . In a map of the principal campaigns of the war appearing in the front of Ordeal by Fire (2009), James M. McPherson and James K. Hogue depict Missouri as a blank slate. The authors discuss the Battle of Wilson’s Creek (August 1861), they mention the Battle of Lexington (September 1861), and they briefly comment on the defeat of Confederate General Sterling Price at the Battle of Westport (October 1864). Overall, however, the authors concluded that conventional warfare in Missouri was “peripheral to the principal military campaigns of the war.” While organized Union and Confederate armies clashed elsewhere, Missouri experienced a continuation and expansion of the vicious antebellum Border War between proslavery Missourians and Free State settlers in Kansas. McPherson and Hogue concluded that irregular warfare overwhelmed the state: Missouri suffered “more than any other state from raids, skirmishes, and guerrilla actions.” Missouri sank into an abyss of undifferentiated guerrilla attacks and Federal retaliations. The state was brutalized but marginalized in relation to the mainstream of Civil War military history.1 There is no reason to dispute the significance of guerrilla warfare in Missouri. But, the impact and significance of conventional warfare in the state requires reconsideration. McPherson’s and Hogue’s characterization of the Civil War in Missouri arises from a scholarly and popular historiography that has overemphasized the role of guerrillas. This was not always the case. The first military histories focused on conventional warfare and were written by participants who chronicled the battles and campaigns they experienced in the Union and Confederate armies.2 John N. Edwards, who served as Confederate General Jo Shelby’s adjutant during the war, led the way. His Shelby and His Men (1867) contributed to the early military history of the war. But the fiery and partisan tone of his 2 The Civil War in Missouri: A Military History work suggested that Edwards was motivated by purposes that diverged from the pride and nostalgia of a veteran soldier. A journalist by trade, Edwards became a leading figure in the construction of the ideology of the Lost Cause. His singular contribution was the creation of the mythic Jesse James, whose resistance to the tyranny of invaders during the war gave rise to social banditry in the postwar years. Edwards found a highly receptive popular audience for his celebration of a defiant and indomitable southern spirit and by the early twentieth century Jesse James and other guerrilla warriors-turned-bandits became legendary figures.3 The ascendance of Jesse James in popular memory invested guerrilla warfare with greater valor than conventional warfare. Academic historians resisted the tendency to romanticize the guerrillas, but they too made guerrilla warfare central to the war in the West. Richard S. Brownlee led the way with Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy (1958), a sometimes chilling account of guerrilla warfare. Michael Fellman’s Inside War (1989) made guerrilla warfare the central wartime experience in Missouri. Fellman brought the horrors of guerrilla warfare to the forefront as never before, but he did so without distinctions of chronology, region , or social identity. In Fellman’s portrayal, guerrilla warfare engulfed the state. Fellman’s portrait of Missouri guerrillas sought to reverse the mythology of the Lost Cause. The guerrillas were driven, he argued, by a deep ideological hatred of the forces that eroded slavery and the way of life it sustained in Missouri. T. J. Stiles, a recent biographer of Jesse James, emphasized this ideological divide as he debunked Edwards’s Jesse James mythology. More recently, the historian Mark W. Geiger linked Missouri guerrillas to wider kinship networks and to specific financial interests that gave them good reason to resist Federal authority and attack their enemies close to home. Nevertheless, the tendency to give greater emphasis to guerrilla actions than to conventional warfare persisted. In this historiographical environment Edwards ’s popular mythology of guerilla valor lived on. As audiences learned...