Glory Road Began in the West

GLORY ROAD BEGAN IN THE WEST Bruce Cotton st. Louis is not MEBELY in the center of the great middle west, the heart of America itself; it is also in the middle of the great decisive theater of the Civil War, looking down the immense historic valley where the outcome of the war and the future of America were actually determined. No section of the United States has better reason than the middle west to look back on that terrible war with pride, with a feeling of direct personal involvement, almost with a feeling of personal possession. What Stephen A. Douglas used to call, with stout pride, "the great northwest," had a great deal to do with the way the war came out. It also had to pay a great part of the price for it. In Missouri, as much as anywhere, the character of the war first began to take shape. The first, experimental, ineffective step toward emancipation of the slaves was taken in Missouri; there, too, unhappily, guerrilla warfare reached perhaps its worst and most costly development. If the whole country suffered tragically from divided loyalties during the war, that suffering was nowhere more poignant than it was in that area. From the great states of the Ohio and upper Mississippi valleys came the troops whose battles and campaigns finally meant victory for the Union; from the great states just to the south of them came the troops who opposed them so heroically and so long; and from the old northwest , too, came not merely the leaders who directed the nation's victorious effort but the unwavering response from plain citizens whose determination and endurance made that leadership effective. To understand trulywhy the warwent the way it did go and what it finally meant there is no better vantage ground for one's study than in the Valley of the Mississippi. Asauthor offive bestsellers on the Civil War (including the recently published Grant Moves Souths), Editorial Advisory Board member Bhuce Catton needs little introduction to students of the period. This article was adapted from a speech given at the National Civil War Centennial Assembly in St. Louis, May 5-6, 1960. 229 230BBUCE CATTON Ordinarily we tend to look on the Civil War as something that took place principally in Virginia. That was the center of the stage, with the brightest spotlights focused on it. The rival capitals lay only one hundred miles apart, and the country between them was fought over for four years. What happened there takes the eye and holds it. When Richmond fell, the end of the war was in sight; when Robert E. Lee at last was compelled to surrender the glamorous Army of Northern Virginia , both North and South agreed that the war was to all intents and purposes over. But the real decision was not reached in Virginia; it was reached in the Mississippi valley. The final doom of the Confederacy was written in the west rather than in the east; that haunting scene at Appomattox— the ending of so much, the beginning of so much—was the last chapter in a story which began at Cairo and went down the great central river valley to Vicksburg. The enormous battle of Gettysburg was indeed one of the great events in our history, but the capture of Vicksburg was the wound which the Confederacy found truly mortal. Thus, a fresh look at the story of the conflict is justified. Begin, if you like, on May 10, 1861, in St. Louis. On that date Captain Nathaniel Lyon of the United States Army led troops out to a militia camp on the edge of the city, disarmed some 700 state troops who had been put there by Governor Claiborne Jackson, and marched them off as prisoners, confiscating the arms and equipment which they possessed. On the way downtown crowds of civilians strongly sympathetic to the state troops surrounded Lyon's forces, jeering and shouting, jostling the soldiers, and perhaps throwing a few bricks. The thing developed into a full-dress riot, Lyon's soldiers opened fire, and twenty-four men were killed and a great many more wounded. Here, actually, was one of the...