Review - "Massacre at St. Louis: The Road to the Camp Jackson Affair and Civil War" by Kenneth Burchett

[Massacre at St. Louis: The Road to the Camp Jackson Affair and Civil War by Kenneth E. Burchett (McFarland, 2024). Softcover, maps, photos, illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:x,256/334. ISBN:978-1-4766-9465-8. $49.95]

Kenneth Burchett's The Battle of Carthage, Missouri: First Trans-Mississippi Conflict was published back in 2012. While it is unstated whether the author has any current plans in place to go forward from that point in time and address the Battle of Wilson's Creek and beyond, his current research and writing project goes back to the very beginning and addresses in two volumes the historical events that led up to that July 5 running battle around Carthage fought between Union volunteer forces and the Missouri State Guard. The first of the pair is the recently released Massacre at St. Louis: The Road to the Camp Jackson Affair and Civil War. The second book, Nathaniel Lyon's River Campaign of 1861: Securing Missouri for the Union, is scheduled to follow sometime next year.

The military aspects of Union general Nathaniel Lyon's 1861 campaign in Missouri are well established in the literature, as are the social and political contexts that inform them. The early chapters of Burchett's book follow in those footsteps by (a) considering Missouri's complicated part in the antebellum period's growing sectional schism between North and South, (b) recalling the ways in which 1850s "Bleeding Kansas" radicalized regional and national politics, (c) reminding readers how the heavy and sustained influx of German immigrants into Missouri during the decades immediately leading up to the war transformed the social and political structure of the state, and (d) tracing the development of the desire on the part of many Missourians to counter extremism by crafting a unique Western identity distinct from purely sectional entanglements. Even though political moderation was still the order of the day after the contentious 1860 election put the first Republican president in the White House, polarizing elements on both ends of the spectrum sought to influence and guide Missouri's course of action in response to southern secession. Burchett covers all of that and more over the first third of the book, expanding his reach further afield than most in also exploring more generally the impact of slavery on the continent since Colonial times.

As is the case with essentially every book covering this period, secession-sympathizing Governor Claiborne Jackson and the politico-military alliance between Lyon and the unconditional Unionist Blair family form the principal antagonistic structure of the narrative. Burchett's descriptions of the character and motivations of each of those agents will be broadly recognizable to those already steeped in the relevant literature, though one might have wished the author had made more explicit exactly where the Jackson-related "(p)reviously unpublished materials," as touted in the publisher's description, were incorporated into the narrative. Perhaps it is made clearer somewhere in the notes.

Biographers and popular observers alike tend to explain Nathaniel Lyon's rash employment of military solutions to every problem by emphasizing his almost messianic fanaticism in defense of the perpetuation of the Union and constitutional self-government as he saw it, the principal enemies of those things in Lyon's mind being slavery and secession. Burchett's impression of Lyon is much like those that came before him, although he does rate the spiritual practice of mesmerism as having a stronger place in the officer's outlook on life (the source being Ashbel Woodward's 1862 biography of Lyon). If memory serves, Lyon's most recent biographer, Christopher Phillips, does not make much of that.

Of course, the physical location that drew the most attention from opposing sides in Missouri was the U.S. arsenal at St. Louis. Estimates of the number of shoulder arms collected there at the time are wildly variable, somewhere between 20,000 and 60,000 muskets and rifles. Assessing the many different claims made during that time and ever since, Burchett (in step with most modern research) favors the lower end of the spectrum.

It was tradition for some of the older state militia companies to hold a muster at St. Louis, but the greatly larger 1861 affair was unusual for its size and time of year. All political persuasions on the issue of secession were present in the militia ranks (and a large number of Unionist officers and men defected early on, leaving around 700 men at Lindell's Grove when Lyon advanced upon it). Most ominous to those who might have supposed it an innocuous gathering, the Southwest Battalion and its component artillery battery were summoned to the encampment to join a core of five companies of pro-southern Minute Men. Burchett properly infers, one thinks, that the common knowledge of the immense strength of Lyon's command in combination with the much improved defenses of the arsenal rationally precluded further thought of either direct assault or siege. It seems reasonable to suggest that the encampment was maintained as a means of counterbalancing federal control and influence in the city.

One factor that is suggestive of Jackson and militia commanding general Daniel Frost abandoning hope of capturing the arsenal was the detachment of the militia's best trained and armed unit, Joseph Kelly's Washington Blues company. Kelly's company left the encampment with a large store of powder and munitions to distribute among newly formed caches dispersed throughout the state's interior. Lyon, of course, could only guess their underlying motives. Burchett holds Lincoln administration dithering (primarily the very odd and disruptive decision to relieve then reappoint loyal U.S. general and political moderate William S. Harney, whom Lyon and the Blairs viewed as an untrustworthy ideological enemy, as head of the Department of the West) to have played a major role in creating unnecessary confusion and fostering tragedy. As the author suggests, Harney's impending return likely played a key part in expediting Lyon's determination to march upon the militia encampment at Lindell's Grove.

State provocations also played an instigating role. As Burchett explains, the aid that the Confederacy sent to the Missouri Militia did more harm than good. The donated war material itself was practically useless yet its mere presence in the encampment only bolstered politico-legal cover for Lyon's proposed actions. As explained in the text, Lyon's legal advisors pointed out that the impulsive officer could act against the state's lawfully assembled state militia body by serving camp authorities with a writ of replevin for the return of munitions illegally seized earlier from the Baton Rouge arsenal.

When Lyon did finally act, he displayed uncommon organizational skills. At this earliest of moments when all of the volunteers were green recruits with only rudimentary training, Lyon's multi-column march from the arsenal to Lindell's Grove (as meticulously retraced in the book) proved to be a marvel of coordinated precision. Burchett even goes on to suggest that the planning and execution of the march revealed a mind capable of considerable tactical genius. While there is no detailed map provided of the area between the arsenal and Lindell's Grove, the author makes the complicated movement more comprehensible by superimposing marching routes and unit positions over 1870s street maps of the city. Burchett's highly positive assessment of Lyon's initial plan and its execution, however, is quickly downgraded during the post-surrender pause. In a decision that the author deems to have been a "callous military blunder" (page 231), Lyon, who had clearly witnessed the growing crowds of angry and fearful civilians pressing against his men, opted to march the prisoners directly through the gathering unrest. In the author's view, one of Lyon's biggest mistakes was not planning ahead for contingency. By Burchett's understanding, the self-assured Lyon simply assumed the captured militiamen would accept paroles and disperse, so when they didn't he was forced to improvise. That led to lengthy delays, the most unforeseeable one being Lyon getting kicked in the chest by an aide's horse. That alone stopped proceedings for a period of time some estimates placed at nearly two hours. As a result, the civilian crowds got larger and more volatile.

The entire truth can never be known for certain, but Burchett does what he can to determine where, when, and by whom initial and subsequent bursts of violence occurred. Gamely attempting to bring some narrative order to what was erupting chaos that produced a mass of conflicting eyewitness accounts, Burchett vividly breaks down the sequence of events as best and as fully as he can. Shooting clashes broke out at the front, middle, and rear of the column (in that order), with the federal troops (nervous and angry at the constant stream of taunts and insults hurled from the crowd) firing warning shots first at the front. It was at the rear where the greatest tragedy unfolded. There, Lyon's men responded with deadly force to a flurry of pistol shots. According to Burchett's interpretation of the sources, the largest concentration of pistol fire came from a group of men situated around a construction site. The reply, principally from the Second and Third regiments, was to fire indiscriminately into swirling, panic-stricken crowds of predominantly unarmed men, women, and children. Claims that officers ordered their men to fire volleys into the crowd were hotly disputed by eyewitnesses. It appears that many of the volunteers intentionally aimed high. Though the author opines that that might help account for the high proportion of head shots inflicted, those isolated acts also spared the citizenry from an even greater casualty list. Order was quickly restored by Lyon and his chief subordinate John Schofield, and it was all over in minutes. However, the damage was done.

Later chroniclers along with contemporary partisans offered a range of different casualty figures, many of which are sampled in the text. When it comes to the death count, the best official figures from county coroner records are twenty-five civilians (including three women and at least five individuals under sixteen years of age), three of Lyon's volunteers, and three of the captured militiamen. Noting that the coroner report only counted the dead discovered on or just after the day of the event, Burchett's research strongly suggests that at least twenty more fatal gunshot victims emerged later. These persons were either discovered deceased in public spaces days later or passed away from their wounds at home over the ensuing days and weeks. Thus, Burchett suggests a grand total of at least fifty dead and many more wounded. Though the word is provocatively placed in the title, the book itself avoids entering the quagmire of what constitutes a "massacre" and whether the tragedy in St. Louis should be properly considered one.

In stark contrast to the arguably overlong prologue sections of the book, the weighty consequences of the bloody Camp Jackson Affair are relegated to a comparatively brief epilogue. Some of the lingering violence across the city is mentioned, but one might wish for a more thorough examination of events there along with detailed assessment of the popular mood in St. Louis during the days and weeks following the May 10 clash between soldiers and civilians. In an important turn of events, previously successful legislative opposition to Governor Jackson's desire to expand, reorganize, and arm a new state army (what would become the Missouri State Guard) under his own personal control melted away once news of the mass civilian deaths in St. Louis spread. Additionally, Lyon's rash application of military force drove a great many pro-Union men into the opposing camp. In the author's view, Lyon's actions in charge of Union forces in Missouri compared unfavorably with how fellow pro-Union civilian and military leaders in charge of Kentucky handled that key Border State's difficult governor and large pro-secession minority during the same period. It's a brief consideration worthy of further development, though it's derailed by the incredible summary statement on page 256 that "(n)ot a single Civil War battle took place on Kentucky soil" (a mistake so out of character that one might charitably assume it to have been a mental block of some sort that escaped correction in final editing).

Massacre at St. Louis's background chapters arguably drag a bit, but the narrative picks up handsomely over the final two-thirds, where fresh pieces of information abound in regard to the arsenal itself, the dramatic capture of the Missouri Militia at Lindell's Grove, and the tragic mass shooting of civilians that followed it. Indeed, while it may be the case that the Civil War context of those places and events will be broadly familiar to readers, the historical geography and details associated with them are presented in Burchett's book at unprecedented clarity and depth.

The volume ends with the pending return of General Harney to a city in turmoil. Presumably, Burchett's next volume, Nathaniel Lyon's River Campaign of 1861: Securing Missouri for the Union, will pick up directly from there.