Chapter 4

The Boys Feel Very Proud of the Flag

While the Iowans moved west, the Union troops raised in Kansas moved east. No one had to convince Kansans that the conflict facing them was about slavery. Although both Kansans and Missourians committed atrocities during the so-called Bleeding Kansas period, which began in 1854, the free-state settlers in Kansas faced such sustained and often violent interference from proslavery Missourians that they were able to establish a government based on the principles of majority rule only after the greatest difficulties. As the struggle also became torturously enmeshed in national politics, it was ironic that the secession crisis itself largely overshadowed the entry of Kansas into the Union as a Free State on January 29, 1861.¹

The war had real immediacy in Kansas, in part because most of the prewar Army Regulars garrisoning the west were sent east. From the Kansans’ point of view, this left the state vulnerable to two types of savages: Native Americans and Missourians. Although many of the Kansans’ experiences were unique, others demonstrate the strong links with community and social values that marked a commonality among the volunteer soldiers of both the North and the South.

When Lincoln called for volunteers in April 1861, Kansas had no state militia and little money. But as a result of almost six years of turmoil leading up to statehood, a high percentage of the state’s adult white males had some previous military experience. Certainly the average white male Kansan was thoroughly familiar with firearms, something not true, for example, of Iowans. According to one source, most of the First Iowa had never fired a gun prior to enlisting. Regardless of their relative merits as soldiers, the enlistment fever that swept Kansas following the bombardment of Fort Sumter surpassed even that experienced in Iowa. Less than a week after Lincoln’s call for volunteers, more than sixty companies had begun to organize, including the Capital Guard, composed exclusively of members of the state legislature at Topeka.²

Throughout the communities of Kansas men gathered to go to war, some assuming positions of leadership and others, the more humble role of private. Most had unremarkable backgrounds. Traveler Robert Schuler was so anxious to enlist that he joined the Union Rifles in Leavenworth rather than return to his hometown of Burlingame, where his father was a judge. In nearby Lawrence, Lewis T. Litchfield, L. L. Jones, and Caleb S. Pratt kissed their wives and children good-bye, joining the Oread Guards. They knew the unit well, having served in it during the troubles of the 1850s. Nicknamed “the Stubbs” because so many of the men were of short stature, the company had earned a reputation for dealing sharply with Missouri “border ruffians.” Jones was a thirty-five-year-old native of New York who had earned a reputation locally as a public speaker. Pratt, a Bostonian, was an early settler in Lawrence, where he established a literacy society for young men. Now the town’s leading merchant, he was also a clerk in both the city and county government. Farther south, at Emporia, Charles S. Hills left the A. G. Proctor Company to enlist in the Emporia Union Guards. His fellow soldiers there included H. H. Shuttle, who had been working in a furniture store, Michael Myers, who had a farm just outside of town, and Edward Trask, a local gunsmith.³

Some of the men who rushed to the colors were either politicians already or joined with an eye to political gain as a by-product of service. Samuel J. Crawford resigned from the state legislature to raise and captain the Kansas Guards in Anderson County. Ambitious John H. Halderman was from Kentucky, where his father, a physician and state senator, had known Abraham Lincoln. After teaching school and studying law, he was admitted to the bar. Moving to Kansas in 1854, he became private secretary to Andrew H. Reeder, the first territorial governor. Halderman was a stalwart free-stater despite his Southern birth and eventually settled in Lawrence, where he was twice elected mayor. When the war broke out he was a probate court judge, but he soon won a major’s commission in the First Kansas. Unknown to him at the time, his older brother had just enlisted in the Confederate army as a surgeon. Atchison mayor George H. Fairchild organized the All Hazard company, which elected him captain. They met for drill in front of the office of the Freedom’s Champion, which gave both the company and Fairchild considerable press coverage in the months to come. When Pennsylvania native Powell Clayton founded the Leavenworth Light Infantry in May 1861, he could not guess that seven years hence he would be the carpetbag governor of Arkansas. (The Southern army he faced at Wilson’s Creek included four future Arkansas governors: Harris Flanagin, Thomas J. Churchill, James P. Eagle, and Daniel W. Jones.) Graduate of a small military academy in Pennsylvania, Clayton also had a degree in civil engineering and had served as city engineer in Leavenworth since 1859. Clayton was not the only man with previous military training. Camille Angiel joined the All Hazard company as a private but was elected first lieutenant. He had graduated from a military school in Lexington, Kentucky, and soon earned a reputation among his men as a strict disciplinarian but a “kind and sympathizing officer.” William F. Cloud, who had been a sergeant in the Ohio militia during the Mexican War, was elected captain of the Emporia Union Guards, whereas Jack Merrick, a private in the Governor’s Guards of Elwood, had served in the British army, losing an eye in the Crimean War at the Battle of Inkerman.⁴

They came from across the state, selecting and retaining throughout their service the distinctive company names signifying links with their home communities. Some chose names that described their location: Wyandotte Volunteers, Topeka Rifles, Leavenworth Fencibles, Olathe Union Guards. Others selected more dashing or imaginative names, honoring a concept or an individual: Phoenix Guards, Kansas Rangers, Union Rifles, Steuben Guards, Shield’s Guards, Scott’s Guards. Their organization became caught up in an ongoing political struggle between Governor Charles Robinson and the fanatical Senator James H. Lane, who desperately sought military distinction. In the end Kansas had two regiments, neither commanded by Lane. In May the governor accepted ten companies of three-month volunteers, thereby fulfilling the state’s quota under Lincoln’s call. As no more ninety-day units could be received, the men in ten additional companies voted to enlist for three years. But because of their dates of mustering into Federal service, the ninety-day troops became the Second Kansas while the three-year enlistees became the First Kansas.⁵

The First Kansas, which mustered in at Fort Leavenworth on June 3, was commanded by Colonel George Washington Deitzler. A Pennsylvanian who had tried his hand at harness making, medicine, and gold mining, Deitzler moved to Kansas in 1855. He prospered as a farmer and land broker, then became the mayor of Lawrence in 1860, donating his salary to the local schools. His chief interest was the antislavery movement. He had worked with Charles Robinson and the New England Emigrant Aid Society to arm free-state settlers with Sharps rifles, spending four months in jail on a trumped-up charge of treason for his efforts. A Republican, he served as both a senator and as speaker of the house in the territorial legislature prior to Kansas statehood.⁶ Governor Robinson’s appointment of Deitzler to command the First was a defeat for the pro-Lane forces, and the new colonel’s friendship with the governor apparently benefited the regiment. Although it took some time, Deitzler’s men received the blue fatigue blouses and trousers worn by the U.S. Regulars, and some companies were issued modern rifles rather than outdated smoothbore muskets.⁷

Robert Byington Mitchell, an Ohio native, became colonel of the Second Kansas, which mustered in on June 20. An officer in a volunteer regiment in the Mexican War, he served as mayor of a small town in his home state before moving to Kansas in 1856. There he espoused the free-state cause as a member of the territorial legislature and was elected to the convention that wrote a constitution for the new state. Mitchell was a Democrat, but he opposed Lane, which is apparently what mattered to Governor Robinson. One must wonder, however, whether there was a connection between Mitchell’s Democratic affiliation and the fact that during its three months of service the Second Regiment received no uniforms other than blue four-button army fatigue blouses. As was the case in their sister regiment, some companies in the Second carried rifles while others made do with antiquated smoothbores.⁸

Because of gaps in the records of some companies, any social analysis of the Second Kansas must be incomplete. But a comparison of extant data suggests no significant difference between that regiment and the First Kansas, whose records have survived intact. The no men of Captain Job B. Stockton’s Leavenworth Fencibles of the First Regiment were representative of the other Kansas companies. Twelve percent were members of the professional classes, 47 percent were skilled laborers, and the remainder were unskilled laborers or small farmers. The unit included artists, blacksmiths, carpenters, masons, printers, a cigar maker, a confectioner, a cook, a stone mason, and a college professor. The youngest enlistee was seventeen, the oldest fifty-one, while the average age was twenty-six. Officers and noncommissioned officers (sergeants and corporals) were generally older and more likely to be married.⁹

The only real surprise to emerge from a social study of the Kansas troops relates to ethnicity. Over 90 percent of the personnel of the First Kansas can be identified by nativity. Only one member of the regiment was actually born in Kansas, which is hardly surprising given the state’s frontier status. But previous historians have failed to recognize the strong ethnic character of this unit. Eighteen percent of the men were German. Most of these were enlisted in Captain Gustavus Zesch’s Steuben Guards of Leavenworth (named for Baron von Steuben of Revolutionary War fame) and Captain Fairchild’s All Hazard company of Atchison. Twenty-five percent of the men were Irish. Most of them were in Captain William Y. Roberts’s Wyandotte Volunteers, Captain Peter McFarland’s Phoenix Guards of Leavenworth, and a second Leavenworth company, the Shield’s Guards, commanded by Captain Daniel McCook. Though no other ethnic groups were represented in large numbers, the regiment also included men born in Austria, Canada, Denmark, England, France, Holland, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland, and Wales. In all, 48 percent of the members of the First Kansas were foreign born. The remainder of the personnel came from across the nation. Most were from the North. Connecticut, Illinois, Ohio, Massachusetts, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin were all represented. Six percent of the regiment came from the South, including every Confederate state except Mississippi.¹⁰

Unlike so many other volunteer troops that fought at Wilson’s Creek, the Kansans were not uniformed by their home communities. The reason is unclear. No one had bothered with uniforms during the border wars of the 1850s, of course. The state had a white population of merely 106,000. There were only ten towns with more than 500 inhabitants, Leavenworth, with 5,000, being the largest. The effort of manufacturing uniforms was probably beyond the capacity of most communities. In any case, the men of the First and Second Regiments expected to receive uniforms from the Federal government at Fort Leavenworth, their designated rendezvous.¹¹

But if Kansas villages and counties did not send their men off to war in the sorts of distinctive uniforms worn by the Iowans, they shared the same pride and interest in “their” companies as did other communities, North and South. Rivalries existed as well. Following Lincoln’s call for volunteers, the Freedom’s Champion counseled its readers, “Atchison should not be behind her sister towns in this matter, but should let the world know that she is true to the Government.” Atchison took pride not only in the company it contributed to the First Kansas, but also in the fact that its local brass band became the regimental band. The Fort Scott Democrat noted that the town was “among the first to respond to the call. . . with the pride and boast of our county, our gallant young men.” The Lawrence Weekly Republican was equally gratified, proclaiming: “We doubt whether any town has more reason to be proud of the patriotic men who have responded to their country’s call.”¹² Community rivalries persisted after the regiments were organized. Two days after the First Kansas mustered in at Fort Leavenworth, a soldier from Atchison assured readers of his hometown paper that “there is but one company on the ground that can in any way compete with ours, either in numbers, average weight, or height, and that is Company H, of Lawrence.”¹³

Almost every Kansas company left its hometown with a flag made by the local womenfolk and presented during a public ceremony. The ladies of Emporia, for example, made a considerable effort for Captain Cloud’s men. Mrs. Anna Watson Randolph recalled: “[The] flag was made of a cloth called then ‘wool delaine’ much like the fabric now known as challis. They either bought the red and white at a local store, or sent to Lawrence for it. They were unable to get any blue for the field, and Mrs. Edward Borton gave them enough blue cashmere from a dress pattern which her mother had sent her.”¹⁴

On May 23, the day before their departure, the Emporia Union Guards assembled to receive their banner. Ceremonies such as this gave women a rare opportunity to speak in public to a mixed audience. By all accounts Miss Fannie Yeakly, who made the formal presentation, gave a stirring patriotic address. This was followed by a sermon from “Father” Fair-child, an aged and greatly respected Methodist minister well known on the frontier.¹⁵

The importance of such ceremonies in cementing community and company ties cannot be exaggerated. They reveal tremendous commonalities among the volunteers, North and South, because whether fashioned by “fair hands” in Kansas, Louisiana, Arkansas, or Iowa, company flags were the physical manifestation of a social contract between the soldiers’ company and the community it represented. The citizenry pledged to support the soldiers and care for their families while they were gone. In return, the soldiers pledged to uphold the good name of their hometown. Reid Mitchell notes: “The flag, made by the women of the community, was something to be protected much as they thought their wives and mothers should be protected. If the men left their communities to protect their homes, as many of them insisted they did, they brought something of their homes with them into battle. The flag was the physical tie between the homelife they had left and fought for and the war into which they were plunged.”¹⁶

Kansas provides clear examples of the relationship between flags and communities. A man in the Union Rifles of the Second Kansas wrote home to Leavenworth about his company’s banner, “The boys feel very proud of the flag, and fully appreciate the patriotic motives of the ladies who entrusted it to their care.” Every man was determined “to defend it to the last extremity and bear it off the battle field without a single stain of dishonor, or die beneath its folds.” Similarly, a soldier used the Atchison newspaper to assure the women who had made the All Hazard company’s flag that “it is by far the best in the camp. You may rest assured that we will never allow it to be dishonored.” He was specific about the cost of this promise, for he continued, “We shall either return it with the laurels of victory, or it shall pass into the hands of the foe, dripping with the last drop of blood in our veins.” Recalling this pledge twenty years later, a veteran of the same company wrote: “Right nobly were those words made good. That pledge was sacredly kept. . . . but more than one of the All Hazard Boys’ gave his blood and his life to defend it.”¹⁷

Texas provides an example from the other side of the conflict. A soldier from Marshall wrote home that the town’s “Texas Hunters,” now a part of Colonel Greer’s South Kansas-Texas Cavalry assembling in Dallas, were “considered by many the finest company they have seen in the State.” He continued: “We possess the handsomest, and the finest flag, and it is admired by all. Every ‘Texas Hunter’ looks upon it as a treasure, for it brings to mind many recollections of the past—of the fair donors, whose hands assisted in making it, and whose hands we grasped with affectionate ‘good-bye’ when we left home. . . . When we forsake and dishonor this banner, then we may despair of an incentive to arouse the spirit of a ‘Texas Hunter.’”¹⁸

Soldiers spoke and wrote of upholding the honor of their flags because honor was at the core of the relationship between the soldiers of individual companies and the communities they represented. In his study of honor in the prewar South, Bertram Wyatt-Brown begins by emphasizing the importance of the concept of honor in nineteenth-century American society at large. “At the heart of honor,” he writes, “lies the evaluation of the public.” Honor begins with an individual’s conviction of self-worth and ends with “the assessment of the claim by the public, a judgement based on the behavior of the claimant. In other words, honor is reputation.” Concern for reputation powerfully affected men’s behavior. In a study of the cultural values that motivated and influenced the men of 1861, Gerald Linderman concludes: “‘Death Before Dishonor’ might ring today in many quarters as no more than a hopelessly hackneyed line from hoary stage drama, but for Civil War soldiers it had both vivacity and pertinence.”¹⁹

Although Linderman writes of individual honor, the process of raising, supporting, and dispatching troops demonstrates that honor was also important in a corporate sense. Honor, pledged during company departure ceremonies and constantly present as embodied in the banners they bore, bound the soldiers together, allowing them to suffer greatly for the sake of the community’s reputation. Again emphasizing the individual, Linderman links the concept of honor to that of courage on the battlefield. He argues that “the single most effective prescription for maintaining others’ assumption that one was a man of honor was to act courageously.” The public display of courage “was thus the best guarantor of an honorable reputation.”²⁰ This was just as true of the reputation of a company and, by extension, the community it represented. The men who survived the battle at Wilson’s Creek understood and evaluated their experiences not only as individuals, but also in terms of how their behavior reflected on their company and home community.

After occupying a series of camps in the vicinity of Fort Leavenworth, the Kansans “invaded” Missouri in mid-June, taking up quarters in buildings in Kansas City. Like most new soldiers, they grumbled about their training, the weather, and army rations. Most of all, they were anxious to come to grips with the “rebels.” Although Deitzler was an avowed abolitionist, it is unclear how many of his fellow Kansans would have labeled themselves such. In his own regiment Captains Francis P. Swift and Samuel Walker had taken up arms for the free-state cause in the 1850s, as had Captains Joseph Cracklin and Samuel N. Wood in the Second Regiment.²¹ But the free-state movement had championed the rights of white men, not black men. As in the case of the Iowans, the Kansas soldiers wrote of the need to preserve the Union, punish traitors, and restore national honor, yet made little mention of slavery. An examination of the more than fifty extant letters written by Kansas soldiers during the 1861 campaign reveals not a single expression of sympathy for the plight of African Americans.²² Indeed, following the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, when Stockton’s Leavenworth company discovered an African American in its ranks passing for white, it successfully petitioned for his discharge. “We have no objection to endure all the privations we may be called upon to endure,” their petition read, “but to have one of the company, or even one of the regiment, pointed out as a ‘nigger’ while on dress parade or guard, is more than we like to be called upon to bear.”²³ Some of the Kansans were obviously as committed to white supremacy as the Southerners they were eager to kill.

When they moved into Missouri, the Kansans came under the command of Samuel Sturgis, who had been breveted to major for his success in escaping from Fort Smith, Arkansas. On June 17 Sturgis had been ordered to march south and join Lyon in the vicinity of Clinton, Missouri, and now that the Kansans were fully organized and armed he was ready to move. The first units of his force, which numbered about 2,200 men, left Kansas City on the twenty-fourth. In addition to the two Kansas regiments, Sturgis had a substantial number of Regulars. As the prewar army was largely a constabulary, almost none of them had fired a shot in anger, but their drill and discipline were superior to that of the volunteers. There were four companies of infantry, plus 255 enlistees who had just arrived from Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. Originally meant as reinforcements for units in New Mexico, they were now assigned to Sturgis, who organized them into two companies. Although sometimes referred to as “rifle recruits,” they were armed with smoothbore muskets.²⁴ Sturgis also had four companies of cavalry and one of dragoons, armed with efficient Sharps and Maynard carbines, and one light battery with six guns. The battery now included two officers who had escorted the recruits west, Lieutenants George Oscar Sokalski and John Van Deusen Du Bois, both of whom would render invaluable service in the days to come.²⁵

From a military point of view, the march was uneventful, although difficult because of heat and heavy rain. The Kansans named one stopping point “Camp Dismal,” as their tramping had churned the prairie into a muddy swamp. While breaking camp one day, they discovered and promptly appropriated a number of dragoon sabers abandoned by the Regulars. Their posturing with these became a source of amusement to the Regulars, who particularly laughed at a Kansas officer possessing “tin-foil shoulder straps sewn on with black thread.” The Regulars naturally resented the volunteers’ lack of discipline. Theodore Albright, a member of Company C, First U.S. Cavalry, recalled that the Kansans “kept their camp in an uproar all the time, which was a nuisance and annoyance to us.” The Regulars tended to be picky in their judgments of everyone, however. When Sturgis abandoned his regulation plumed, dress headgear for a practical but “odd-looking, fuzzy, broad brimmed, unmilitary slouched hat,” some of the men made fun of it for the remainder of the campaign.²⁶

On July 2 Sturgis’s force reached Austin, where between three hundred and four hundred Missouri Unionists joined them as a Home Guard. New Yorker James H. Wiswell, one of the Regulars’ new recruits, wrote his sister that the area around Austin was “the best country that I ever saw.” The local populace, “Union to the back bone,” sold them eggs and butter at low prices. The few “rebels” in the area had fled, abandoning their property. When this tempted two of the Regulars to theft, Sturgis had one of them whipped and the other drummed out of camp in his underwear.²⁷

After establishing camp, Sturgis rushed two companies forward to Clinton to secure the crossing of the Grand River just south of that village. The remaining force arrived at Clinton on July 4, naming the camp after George Washington. There, as one soldier put it, the troops celebrated Independence Day “as well as a lot of hungry, worn, dirty, careworn soldiers could do.”²⁸

But most of the Kansans were soon in no mood to celebrate, for they ran afoul of Sturgis’s standards of discipline. According to one of the Regulars, once they halted at Clinton, members of the First Kansas “robbed or plundered all, or nearly so, the farmers within a circle of five miles from camp.” Although that may have been an exaggeration, deprivations unquestionably occurred, despite Deitzler’s attempts to prevent them. When a group of some eight to ten men from Captain Walker’s Scott’s Guards were caught, Sturgis held them under guard. Accounts of subsequent events differ considerably. Captain Walker, who was Deitzler’s friend, stated that the colonel called a meeting of company officers at which they determined, for the sake of good discipline, to have the men punished by Sturgis rather than within the regiment. They never anticipated the severity of Sturgis’s response and were startled shortly thereafter when the enlisted men rose up in near mutiny. Word spread through the camp that the miscreants were receiving fifty lashes apiece while tied across a gun carriage. By the time Deitzler could intervene with Sturgis and halt the punishment, most of the prisoners had already been whipped. According to another report, however, Deitzler sanctioned the punishment over the protests of his subordinates.²⁹

Regardless of the sequence of events, the Kansas soldiers blamed Sturgis for the whippings and Deitzler for not preventing them. Such brutal punishment, which was perfectly legal under army regulations in 1861, might be fit for the Regulars, but its application to volunteers they considered an outrage. A witness reported that “the flogging was done with a large black snake whip, giving each from forty-five to seventy-five lashes, the blood flowing halfway to their knees.” The Kansas volunteers understood the need for discipline, of course. A few days earlier one company punished a member who had been absent without leave by having him run naked through a gauntlet of his comrades, who whipped him with switches. But this was child’s play compared to Sturgis’s actions. Rumors soon floated about that the major was secretly a Secessionist, and when he visited the Kansans’ camp on July 8, he was greeted with a chorus of groans. This was too much for Sturgis, who lost his temper and began cursing them. Several men started yelling “shoot him! shoot him!” and Colonel Mitchell had to step in to prevent violence. After hearing many threats against Deitzler and Sturgis, one Kansas soldier concluded, “I should not like to occupy their positions in a battle.”³⁰

Given the strong links between Kansas communities and “their” companies, it is not surprising that condemnation of Deitzler and Sturgis swept the state. The Atchison Freedom’s Champion proclaimed: “Major Sturgis should be hung from the first tree, and Col. Deitzler deserves the execrations, scorn, and contempt of every man in Kansas.” Of Sturgis, the Emporia News declared: “There are five hundred men who have sworn to shoot him the first opportunity, and we shall have no regret on hearing that they have carried their threat into execution. He and Deitzler had both better resign and leave the army.” In contrast, the commander of the Second Kansas won praise. The Lawrence Weekly Republican reported: “Col. Mitchell is represented as having exhibited the feelings of an honorable man, though powerless, and as having rebuked the dastard with proper spirit.”³¹

The enlisted men drew up petitions condemning Sturgis and forwarded them to the War Department. Indeed, some of them asserted that had Lyon not arrived with his column from Boonville, they would have refused to march any farther under Sturgis’s command.³² It is ironic that the Kansans welcomed Lyon, an actual sadist, in preference to Sturgis, who had merely applied Regular Army discipline to volunteers.

The Kansans were soon distracted by another tragedy. On July 8 Joseph N. Cole of the Leavenworth Fencibles got into an argument with a fellow soldier of the First Kansas, Michael W. Stein, and knifed him to death. By one account Cole simply stabbed Stein in the back. By another, the two agreed to settle their differences in a fistfight, but after a few moments Cole drew a knife and dispatched his opponent. Although Cole tried to run, he was easily caught and his punishment was swift. Courtmartialed the next day, he was sentenced to death and shot on July 14—the first military execution of the Civil War. The proceedings were traditional. The First Kansas formed a hollow square while Cole, blindfolded, knelt by his grave. A firing squad, selected by lot from the men of the regiment, did its duty efficiently. Cole died instantly and was buried in a blanket, his grave apparently unmarked. Unfortunately, some women from the surrounding country, in camp to visit the soldiers and not understanding the ceremony, witnessed the whole thing.³³

While the Kansans struggled to adjust to military service, the Iowans remained largely idle at Boonville, waiting for Lyon to assemble the supplies and transportation needed to march to Clinton. The regiment moved from its temporary quarters on steamboats into a tented camp, but conditions hardly improved. In his correspondence to the Dubuque Herald, Franc Wilkie described the heat as “almost intolerable—the country parched for want of rain—the dust deep.” Heavy rains soon brought additional discomfort without dispelling the heat. But an even greater hardship was the severance of the ties that had kept the men so well supplied by their home communities. Now there was nothing to eat but hardtack and pork. Wilkie particularly detested the latter, writing “[O]h ye gods, how I do loathe that cursed pork—its unclean stench clouds one’s nostrils at every hour of the day as its smoke rises from a hundred huge frying pans—its scrofulous, greasy, foul-looking slices cover every platter—it reposes in superlative nastiness in every barrel!”³⁴

In his memoirs Eugene Ware of the Burlington Zouaves left a vivid record of this period of boredom. The men either labored to construct fortifications to defend Boonville or drilled incessantly. They were also issued fresh ammunition, and as ammunition was scarce, they were charged ten cents—a significant sum in 1861—for any cartridge they lost or damaged. There were numerous inspections and dress parades, but these were no substitute for active campaigning and the men filled their time with drinking or other mischief. At least some of this was innocent, as when an Iowa soldier attempted to prevent a mule from braying at night by tying a sandbag to its tail. The resulting tumult disturbed the entire camp and landed him in the guardhouse. He refused, Ware noted, to name his comrades who had tricked him into the effort.³⁵

Some men failed to measure up to even this stationary soldiering. According to Ware, some of the Burlington Zouaves were so distressed by the incompetence of their captain, George F. Streaper, that they presented him with a petition calling for his resignation. When Streaper responded by vowing revenge on the signers, some of them threatened to kill him during the first battle. A few days later Streaper appeared to be drunk on parade and ran off after a hog with his sword. Although this was reported to Colonel Bates, the commander of the First Iowa took no action. Streaper was eventually ordered back to Keokuk. Ware recalled that Lyon himself intervened to cashier the captain. A neutral observer, Horace Poole of the Governor’s Grays, wrote at the time simply that Streaper had been arrested and would face a court-martial.³⁶

In all probability Lyon did not concern himself with the misbehavior of an Iowa captain—not that he ignored discipline. While at Boonville he published an order reminding his soldiers that proper conduct and discipline were essential. Officers were “required” to “visit offenders with vigorous punishment.” Despite this notice Lyon was either too busy to take a personal interest in inflicting pain on his command or realized wisely that Regular Army standards were not well suited to volunteers. The officers in the First Missouri did gain a reputation for the severity of their discipline, but whipping was apparently confined to the Regulars. No love was lost between the professional soldiers and the volunteers. One of the Regulars recalled “a mutual feeling of unfriendliness and aversion.” He believed that this “scant civility and offishness was not confined to the ranks; officers shared it to a greater degree than the soldiers, and harbored it more tenaciously.” Eugene Ware claimed that the volunteers made a distinction between the professional officers based on their age and experience. “We greatly despised the young regular army officers,” he remembered, as they were “snobs of the first order” who affected “jaunty and effeminate ways.” On the other hand, the men much admired Captain James Totten for the style in which he directed his battery. His drill commands were invariably punctuated with profanity: “Forward that caisson, G—d d—n you, sir” and “Swing that piece into line, G—d d—n you, sir.” Ware claimed that his comrades would walk half a mile just to listen to Totten for five minutes.³⁷

Ware also recalled that most of the Iowans remained aloof from the largely German regiments from St. Louis, believing that Lyon treated them with overt favoritism. Because of that, Ware noted, “we did not take very kindly to him.” Indeed, views of Lyon differed. A Muscatine soldier wrote home that “the General expressed the opinion that there was too much levity among us for so solemn a mission.” Nevertheless, he believed that the First Iowa was “rapidly gaining favor with Gen. Lyon.” In the short time since the Camp Jackson affair and the Boonville skirmish the Connecticut Yankee’s reputation had skyrocketed to the point where another Iowa soldier, Horace Poole, could write to his father: “I was very much disappointed in the appearance of our famous General—as I had pictured Gen. Lyon in my mind as a second Washington or Scott; but instead of that, I see a short, thick set, sandy haired (I might say red) and whiskered man, with a long linen coat and straw hat, looking about as much like a military man as I do a Catholic priest.” Poole nevertheless concluded not to judge by appearances, as he was convinced that in the forthcoming campaign Lyon would “become one of our most distinguished military men.”³⁸

For Lyon’s column the campaign finally began on July 3, more than a week behind schedule. According to one source, the general had spent $20,000 purchasing horses and mules in the Boonville vicinity. Lyon, of course, had no legal authority to spend the government’s money, issue contracts, or confiscate property, but he did all three and tried to suppress newspapers that criticized his actions. He was desperately short of wagons and finally moved with only half the transportation he deemed necessary. One observer thought that the Federals’ hodge-podge baggage train, which included every sort of wheeled vehicle imaginable, resembled “the tatterdemalion recruits of Falstaff.” Yet where other commanders would have been paralyzed by such difficulties, Lyon forged ahead. When the column trudged out of Boonville in the mud, citizens lined the roads to cheer them on, while little boys wearing military caps and using sticks for toy guns followed them for a mile. After leaving a garrison behind, Lyon had 2,354 men. In addition to the Iowa and Missouri volunteers, his force included Company D of the Second U.S. Infantry, Totten’s Battery, and over one hundred recruits for the Regulars not yet assigned to a specific unit. He also had detachments of pioneers, more properly called “sappers and miners” in military parlance. Commanded by Captain John D. Voerster, they carried Sharps rifles in addition to their traditional shovels, picks, and axes. Lyon needed such engineering troops to assist his crossing of Missouri’s rain-swollen rivers. Although Lyon continued to dress “like a farmer,” he now had a bodyguard of ten men—German Americans from St. Louis—who wore turned-up gray slouch hats with white plumes. These stalwarts followed him everywhere. Riding ahead was Lyon’s chief “spy and scout,” a man named Wells who was originally from Chelsea, Massachusetts. Wells had apparently lived in Missouri for some time, as in the days to come he had no difficulty passing himself off among the locals as a farmer, minister, or drover.³⁹

The trek was arduous. Private Daniel Matson of the Burlington Zouaves stated in his memoirs that on one occasion the temperature reached 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. He may have exaggerated for dramatic effect, but there is no question that heat made the trip difficult. Although the country they traversed appeared to be sparsely settled, as soon as the column halted for the night local farmers wandered in with produce for sale. They took advantage of the soldiers’ cravings, selling pies, melons, fruit, and buttermilk at inflated prices, but occasionally the soldiers had their revenge. “One old fellow with a load of stuff refused to take Iowa State paper,—silver or no sale,” Matson recalled. “On attempting to move his wagon, the wheels came off in a mysterious way. The obliging Hawkeyes rushed to the rescue, but by the time the wagon was in running order, the contents had disappeared.”⁴⁰

When Lyon’s force arrived at Clinton on July 7, after hard marching on backcountry roads that avoided most towns, he received an eleven-gun salute from Lieutenant Du Bois, to whom Sturgis had given command of a section of his guns. There was indeed much reason to celebrate. The time of preparation was over, and the road ahead beckoned. No one doubted that the road would lead to battle. Many of the volunteers feared only that it might not come before their short terms of enlistment expired. A member of the Second Kansas wrote to his friends in Leavenworth that “the boys are absolutely spoiling for a fight. They are getting tired of marching all the time, and want to try their hand on a fight.”⁴¹