Firebrand in a Powder Keg: Nathaniel Lyon in St. Louis

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Blood boiled along the border spanning Kansas and Missouri. Clashes had occurred between antislavery Free-Soilers and pro-slavery Missourians ever since the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act let voters decide slavery’s future in Kansas Territory. By early 1861, Kansas had finally joined the Union as a Free State. But Kansas ‘Jayhawkers’ and Missouri ‘Bushwhackers’ continued to kill each other, while Missouri increasingly felt the pull of the Confederacy.

For six years Nathaniel Lyon had felt the region’s rising tensions. A Union man to the core, Lyon had grown increasingly sympathetic to the Free-Soil cause. As the violence in Kansas increased, so did his hatred of the pro-slavery faction. By late January 1861, when the slightly built, 42-year-old U.S. Army captain was ordered to St. Louis to buttress the defenses of the city’s federal arsenal, Lyon was determined to smash Missouri’s pro-secessionist forces.

Born in Ashford, Conn., on July 14, 1818, Lyon entered West Point on July 1, 1837. He hardly looked the part of a soldier: William T. Sherman, who was a year ahead of him, described Lyon as a ‘lymphatic boy, who didn’t seem to have energy enough to make a man.’ But his four years at the academy hardened Lyon into a driven soldier. Lyon thrived as a cadet, and in 1841 he graduated from West Point ranked 11th in a class of 52. His vicious temper and singularity of view would torment those around him for years to come.

In September 1841, Lyon embarked upon a career destined for controversy. After chasing Seminole Indians in Florida with Company I of the 2nd U.S. Infantry, he was transferred north to Sacketts Harbor, N.Y. A harsh disciplinarian, Lyon was court-martialed for knocking a drunken private silly with the flat of his sword, then hogtying him and throwing him in jail. Suspended for five months, Lyon returned to service, only to be arrested twice more by 1846.

After five years the volatile lieutenant had had enough of the Army. But as he mulled over resigning his commission, the Mexican War erupted and saved his career. Lyon saw action in several battles as a company commander, suffering a slight leg wound during the fight for Mexico City. Bumped up to first lieutenant, he was then promoted to brevet captain ‘for gallant and meritorious conduct in the Battles of Contreras and Churubusco.’

Following the war, Lyon supervised construction of new Army barracks in California, then in 1850 led an expedition that slaughtered up to 500 innocent Pomo Indians at Clear Lake, Calif. This appalling incident showcased Lyon’s ability to lead a combat force, as well as his extraordinary zeal for punishing an enemy. For his efficient brutality, Lyon received the highest praise from his superiors and a promotion to full captain.

Early in 1854 Lyon left California’s sunshine for the unpredictable elements of Kansas. Upheaval characterized the social landscape he entered. While the Compromise of 1850 had temporarily halted the nation’s slide toward war, a new crisis erupted with the Kansas-Nebraska Act’s provision that slavery would be decided by voters in the territory. Even worse to Free State partisans, the bill repealed the Missouri Compromise — the 1820 act that had prohibited slavery north of latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes and was by that time considered sacred by many.

Lyon was still settling into his quarters at Fort Riley when news of the Kansas-Nebraska Act shocked and angered him. The door to slavery in the Western territories now stood wide open. But economics rather than compassion drove Lyon’s abhorrence of slavery. ‘We oppose slavery in the territories,’ he wrote before the war, ‘not for a love of the Negro but the white man, whom we would save from the condition, either as an arrogant slaveholder, or as degraded by him, in which we find him in the slave states.’

Soon land-hungry settlers from the Ohio Valley, antislavery New Englanders and pro-slavery Missourians began to fill Kansas by the wagonload. Tempers heated up until May 1856, when three events set the territory ablaze for years. On May 21, angry ‘Border Ruffians’ raided the Free State stronghold at Lawrence, destroying presses and the Free State Hotel. The following day on the floor of the U.S. Senate, South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks pummeled Massachusetts’ abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner senseless with his cane. A 56-year-old antislavery Kansas settler named John Brown, driven to near-hysterics by these pro-slavery outrages, vowed retaliation. During the night of May 24-25, Brown and a handful of his sons dragged five pro-slavery men from their Kansas homes and hacked them to death. Guerrilla warfare swept the Kansas plains.

Rotated between federal outposts, Lyon remained in Kansas as the territory slowly turned into a battleground, and his views on slavery and the Union hardened. As the secessionist movement gathered steam, the obscure Army captain made a name for himself. In a series of political essays he wrote during the summer of 1860 for the Western Kansas Express, Lyon made his support for Abraham Lincoln and the Free State cause clear. By then Kansas had been’saved’ and would join the Union as a Free State on January 29, 1861. Two days after that, the Army ordered Lyon to protect the U.S. arsenal in St. Louis.

Nowhere in the Union were the questions of secession and slavery more hotly debated. St. Louis was a Republican oasis in a Democratic state, a hotbed of political and social unrest. The city did contain a vocal pro-secession bloc, whose disciples displayed their Southern leanings unabashedly. These Confederate sympathizers took heart that their governor, Claiborne Fox Jackson, was an avowed secessionist. But half of the city’s population was composed of immigrants, mostly Germans, who had little patience for anyone who threatened their adopted home. One of several German publications in the city, Anzieger des Westens, declared the Germans to be ‘an opponent of slavery, and the German is always unfailingly there when free labor is being defended through law and Constitution against the pressure and dominance of slavery and the despotic principles of government it brings with it.’ German support of the Republican Party was all but absolute.

The elections of 1860 had boosted two prominent St. Louis Republicans into the Washington, D.C., inner circle. President-elect Abraham Lincoln picked former St. Louis mayor Montgomery Blair to be his postmaster general. Blair’s 39-year-old brother, Francis Preston (’Frank’) Blair Jr., was elected to Congress and later became one of Lincoln’s few competent ‘political generals,’ serving as a major general under Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman.

Frank Blair found a strident ally against Missouri’s secessionists in Lyon, who rode into St. Louis on February 7, 1861, accompanied by 80 blue-coated infantrymen. The high-strung veteran’s shabby and dusty uniform contrasted with fiery red hair that suited his persona. From the moment of his arrival in St. Louis, Lyon was fighting a political war on two fronts — one against Missouri’s secessionist leaders, and a second against U.S. Department of the West commander Brig. Gen. William Harney, whose headquarters was located in the city. Lyon believed Governor Jackson might threaten to lead the state into the newly formed Confederacy, and therefore authorize an assault on the arsenal. Lyon and Blair favored taking aggressive action to prevent either scenario, while the older Harney opposed forcing Jackson’s hand in any way.

Lyon, who had few friends outside his immediate circle of colleagues, formed a natural partnership with Frank Blair, based on their shared vow to repel any threat to the arsenal and keep Missouri in the Union. Blair had already organized the city’s Committee of Safety and begun mobilizing German volunteers, for whom Lyon promised to try to procure arms. Blair, meanwhile, urged his Washington connections to rid Lyon of the interfering Harney and Major Peter Hagner, who claimed authority at the arsenal over Lyon by virtue of his own brevet rank.

Missouri continued to remain neutral during this period. A secession convention got underway in early March but ended with a resolution declaring that ‘at present there was no adequate cause to impel Missouri to dissolve her connection with the Federal Union.’ The decree meant little to Confederate sympathizers roaming the streets of St. Louis. Certainly Lyon and Blair put no stock in it. After all, in his inaugural speech just two months earlier, Governor Jackson had made it clear that Missouri’s ‘honor, her interests, and her sympathies point alike in one direction, and determine her to stand by the South.’ Moving ahead with his duties, Lyon set to work improving the arsenal’s defenses. Soon the refurbished post was bristling with mines, new artillery emplacements and sandbagged walls.

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Tags: 19th Century, American Civil War, Civil War Times, Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures, Politics

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