Booknotes: Massacre at St. Louis

New Arrival:

• Massacre at St. Louis: The Road to the Camp Jackson Affair and Civil War by Kenneth E. Burchett (McFarland, 2024).

A couple of McFarland titles arrived just as I was beginning a short summer break, so let's get to the first one.

Every study of the 1861 fighting in Missouri up to and including the climactic Battle of Wilson's Creek, and there are quite a few of them, includes background information (often quite extensive) on political and military events between Lincoln's election and the outbreak of the shooting war in the state. A pretty consistent narrative has emerged from all that, with variation in interpretation primarily found in discussions of the character and motivations of two principal antagonists, Missouri Governor Claiborne Jackson and U.S. Captain (later Brigadier General) Nathaniel Lyon.

From the description: "In 1861, Union Brigadier General Nathaniel Lyon marched through the divided slave state Missouri en route to St. Louis. Lyon was to arrest a state militia unit at Camp Jackson that planned to raid a federal arsenal in the city. Upon capturing the men, Lyon's troops encountered crowds of hostile citizens and, after a gun shot, they fired on the mob, killing at least 28 civilians in what is now known as the Camp Jackson affair, or the St. Louis massacre."

Stretching back to some of the earliest origins of the sectional divide, Kenneth Burchett's Massacre at St. Louis: The Road to the Camp Jackson Affair and Civil War fleshes out those preliminaries mentioned in the first paragraph considerably. I've mentioned before [in this post] that this new book is part of a trio of works from Burchett that will recount events in Missouri leading up to the Battle of Wilson's Creek.

The book covers an extended length of time. In the Preface, Burchett notes that the book "is in ten parts; each part links a series of events that took place over a period of four decades" (pg. 1). In those parts, "the author describes partisan activities leading to hostilities, promotes awareness about the history of slavery in America, and explores political divisions still evident in American culture." The description offers some hints in regard to new information, noting that "(p)reviously unpublished materials about Governor Claiborne Jackson are included, as well as the role of Montgomery Blair in the fight for Missouri, an analysis of the number of arms in the St. Louis Arsenal and the unknown total number of casualties of the St. Louis massacre."