1861: The Civil War Awakening by Adam Goodheart

Author:Adam Goodheart
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Social Science, Slavery, United States, historical, Biography & Autobiography, History, Civil War Period (1850-1877)
ISBN: 9780307596666
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2011-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

THE CONVENTION TO DETERMINE Missouri’s course in the national crisis assembled in St. Louis on March 4. Although this was also, by chance, the day of Lincoln’s inauguration, it dawned unpropitiously for the local Unionists. They awoke to find two secessionist flags flying above their city. One floated from the staff atop the courthouse dome; unguarded, it was easily removed. The other would be a good deal trickier to deal with. It wasn’t much to look at: a dark blue cloth hastily stitched with a crude patchwork of secession emblems, from the palmetto and star to the Southern cross to the state arms of Missouri. But it hung from the front porch of the Berthold Mansion, which was very well guarded indeed.90

Before long, a large and angry crowd—mostly Germans—was filling the streets for several blocks in each direction, shouting for the flag to be taken down. Each window of the mansion bristled with loaded muskets: clearly the Minute Men were prepared to defend their banner at all costs. (The protesters didn’t know it, but the defenders also had a swivel gun, loaded with musket balls and tenpenny nails, aimed from the inside at the front door.) Soon, drumbeats were heard approaching through the streets: the Wide Awakes were coming, and they too were armed.91

The two sides faced each other across the narrow porch. A thousand miles away, the Black Republican president was taking his oath of office. Everyone knew that this standoff on Fifth Street might erupt at any moment into a bloodbath—and they knew what such a bloodbath could mean, not just for their state but for their country.

Somehow violence was averted that morning. One eyewitness account says vaguely that “after many entreaties by the thoughtful and intelligent of the Unionists, the rank and file accorded obedience.” Another, more specific, describes a civic elder who climbed atop an Italian fruit vendor’s small donkey cart—a convenient platform accidentally stranded there—to address the crowd. The donkey, “suddenly taking fright either at the eloquence of the orator or at the shouts of the crowd,” bolted and sent the gentleman tumbling, to the spectators’ amusement. Perhaps credit is due to that donkey—whose name, if he had one, is lost to history—for breaking the tension and preventing a clash of arms that might have touched off the Civil War six weeks early.92

In any event, the rebel flag still flew unmolested from the Berthold Mansion the next day. Thanks to it, however, the Missouri leaders meeting to decide their state’s allegiance had just caught a glimpse of the future. The consequences of secession, which had seemed like remote abstractions in bucolic Jefferson City, were now all too vividly manifest. Isidor Bush, the only Forty-Eighter among the delegates, rose to admonish his colleagues: “While you … only imagine the horrors of war and fancy the evils of revolution, I know them. My eyes have seen what you cannot imagine, what I cannot describe.” The next day, to Governor Jackson’s chagrin, the convention almost unanimously endorsed a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.