Carthage

Near the town of Carthage, Missouri, opposing forces clashed on July 5, 1861, in what came to be called the Battle of Carthage, sometimes referred to as the Engagement near Carthage, one of the earliest confrontations of the American Civil War. Leading 1,100 Federal troops determined to hold Missouri in the Union was the seasoned Colonel Franz Sigel. Opposing him stood the Missouri State Guard, personally led by Governor Claiborne F. Jackson and boasting a force exceeding 4,000 men under Sterling Price, a veteran celebrated for his exploits in Mexico. An additional 2,000 soldiers accompanied the Guard without weapons and took no part in the fighting.

Background

Before the war reached Missouri, the state's loyalties were already split down the middle. In St. Louis and the counties around it, sentiment leaned toward the Northern states, largely because commerce there tied the region economically to the North. Slaves were scarce in that part of the state, and a sizable German immigrant community, mostly opposed to slavery, added to the pro-Union tilt. Elsewhere, opinion was fiercely divided, and the governor, Claiborne F. Jackson, favored the Southern cause. Though Jackson kept up a public pretense of neutrality, Union supporters suspected him of quietly maneuvering the state militia toward seizing the Federal Arsenal in St. Louis.

The bombardment of Fort Sumter in April 1861 prompted President Lincoln to call on every state for troops to put down the Confederacy, and Missouri was asked to furnish four regiments. Jackson turned down the request outright. Instead he mobilized the Missouri State Militia, a move that may have been aimed at capturing the St. Louis Arsenal. Whatever his intent, it ran into an obstacle in Captain Nathaniel Lyon of the 2nd U.S. Infantry, who had just taken command of the arsenal.

Lyon brought with him a reputation as an abolitionist, forged during an earlier posting in Kansas Territory. After his arrival in February 1861, he aligned himself with St. Louis's "Unconditional Unionist" faction. Sharing the fears of many Unionists in the city, he worried that Jackson might turn to the secessionist Minutemen paramilitary group and the Missouri Volunteer Militia to seize the arsenal by force.

Acting on Lincoln's orders, Lyon began enrolling four regiments of Federal Missouri Volunteers on April 22, 1861, drawing many recruits from the ranks of Republican Wide Awake marching clubs and arming them with weapons taken from arsenal stores. Lincoln then directed that most of the remaining arsenal weapons be shipped to Illinois, a transfer accomplished quietly overnight between April 24 and 25, 1861.

Tensions escalated further when Confederate siege artillery reached the militia's encampment at Camp Jackson on May 8 and 9, 1861. Given evidence of a treasonous scheme unfolding there, Lyon led his regulars and newly formed volunteers to the camp, surrounded it, and compelled the militia to surrender. As the captured men were marched through St. Louis, the episode erupted into violence, an incident remembered as the Camp Jackson Affair.

Missourians reacted with outrage, and city representatives from St. Louis went so far as to ask Lincoln to remove Lyon from command. Even so, Lyon found backing among most of the city's Unconditional Unionists, among them Congressman Francis P. Blair Jr., whose brother Montgomery served as Lincoln's Postmaster General. Through the Blair brothers' influence, Lyon was elevated to brigadier general. Meanwhile, persistent unease among Unconditional Unionists over General William S. Harney's willingness to work with state officials, in his role commanding the Department of the West, resulted in his removal from that post on May 31, 1861.

Prelude

At the Planter's House hotel in St. Louis on June 10, 1861, Lyon sat down with Governor Jackson and Missouri State Guard Major-General Sterling Price, hoping this final conference might resolve the clashing assertions of state and federal authority. The talks went nowhere, since neither side would budge from demands the other found intolerable, and after four hours Lyon cut the meeting short. Jackson and Price then withdrew toward Jefferson City, having railroad bridges destroyed in their wake.

Federal forces under Lyon's command boarded steamers and pushed up the Missouri River from St. Louis, aiming to seize the capital at Jefferson City. Meanwhile Colonel Franz Sigel led a separate column out of St. Louis toward the southwestern part of the state, intending to block any Missouri State Guard units that might try to flee south once Lyon's advance began. Beginning on June 12, Sigel set his First and Second Battalions in motion toward Springfield, accompanied by five infantry companies, two rifle companies, and a battery of artillery.

Rather than hold Jefferson City, the Missouri State Guard fell back to Boonville, and it was there, on June 17, that a decisive clash occurred. Lyon seized the town without much trouble and pursued the fleeing Guardsmen southward, though supply troubles kept him from closing the gap. Word of the loss at Boonville also reached State Guard forces stationed at Lexington under Price, prompting them to head south as well. Sigel's column, for its part, reached Springfield, occupied it swiftly, and readied itself to press on toward Carthage in hopes of overtaking the retreating Guard.

By July 3, the commands of Jackson and Price had converged at Lamar and begun consolidating their strength. Fresh recruits swelled Jackson's ranks to roughly 6,000 as the march continued southward, though most of these men carried nothing sturdier than hunting rifles, shotguns, and knives, and some had no arms whatsoever. Sigel, meanwhile, reached Carthage on July 4 with a force of 1,100 men, and by that same day he had learned that the Guard was encamped near Lamar, some eighteen miles to the north. That night, skirmishers from the State Guard ran into Sigel's picket lines outside Carthage, leaving neither army in doubt about how close the other had come.

Battle

Once word reached Governor Jackson that Sigel had set up camp at Carthage, he assumed personal command and began plotting a strike against the Union force, which though smaller carried better weapons. His inexperienced troops set out southward on the morning of July 5. Ten miles north of Carthage the two armies converged, and the State Guard hoisted a pair of Confederate stars and bars banners at opposite ends of a line stretching more than half a mile. On the Union side, Sigel's soldiers made a striking show of force, arranging themselves in battle formation and advancing to within 800 yards of the waiting Guardsmen.

Sigel struck first, opening with artillery fire before pressing forward, and Jackson answered in kind with cannon of his own. From there Jackson and his Guardsmen took up pursuit, driving Sigel's brigade backward for ten miles until the outskirts of Carthage came into view. Along the way Jackson split his men in an effort to encircle the retreating brigade, and fighting continued at a steady pace throughout the day until the two sides finally converged on the town square, where skirmishes broke out. It was then that Sigel received word of a substantial body of Guardsmen, in truth nothing more than unarmed recruits, slipping into the woods to his left just beyond town. Worried this movement threatened his flank, he gave the order to fall back. Though the State Guard gave chase, Sigel managed his withdrawal skillfully, holding off pursuers with an effective rearguard. By nightfall he had returned to Carthage itself, and once darkness settled in, he pulled his men back further still, all the way to Sarcoxie.

Significance

Coming just after Lincoln's July 4, 1861 message to Congress invoked "the war power" instead of a formal declaration of war, the engagement at Carthage carried weight both in strategy and in tactics as the conflict's first large clash. It stands as the sole instance of a sitting U.S. state governor commanding forces on a battlefield, doing so in opposition to the very Union his state belonged to. At the front of Governor Jackson's force rode a company of 150 independent partisan rangers, led by Captain Jo Shelby, a farmer from Missouri. Maneuvering under fire from Sigel's artillery and later pushing hard on his withdrawal toward Sarcoxie, Shelby's horsemen effectively pulled triumph away from Sigel just as it seemed within reach, giving Confederate sympathizers across Missouri their earliest cause for celebration. Years of continued fighting emptied out mineral-rich Jasper County and left Carthage in ruins, circumstances that later opened the way for the town's rebuilding during the Victorian era.

Aftermath

Victory at Carthage fell to the Missouri State Guard, a result owed largely to fresh combat methods brought to the field by independent partisan rangers under Captain Jo Shelby. The engagement carried weight beyond the battlefield itself, shaping Missouri's wartime path by fueling enlistment into Confederate ranks. Among those who took part was Robert Wells Crawford, an attorney and one of the county's founders, who afterward won election as Lieutenant Colonel of the 13th Missouri Cavalry Regiment and 5th Missouri Infantry. Crawford went on to recruit for the Confederate States Army within Missouri, a role secured through the backing of Waldo P. Johnson, once a United States Senator from the state, who put forward his name in a letter addressed to exiled Missouri governor Jackson on October 24, 1862.