The Battle of Carthage, also known as the Engagement near Carthage, took place at the beginning of the American Civil War on July 5, 1861, near Carthage, Missouri. The experienced Colonel Franz Sigel commanded 1,100 Federal soldiers intent on keeping Missouri within the Union. The Missouri State Guard was commanded by Governor Claiborne F. Jackson himself and numbered over 4,000 soldiers led by a hero of Mexico, Sterling Price, along with 2,000 unarmed troops who did not participate in the battle.
Political views in Missouri were divided before the American Civil War. St. Louis and its surrounding counties generally sympathized with the Northern states because that region was connected economically with the North. The area also had few slaves and contained a large German immigrant population, most of whom opposed slavery. Missouri Governor Claiborne F. Jackson was pro-Southern, and the rest of the state was very heavily divided. Publicly Jackson tried to stay neutral, but he was suspected by the Union men of secretly preparing the state militia to seize the Federal Arsenal in St. Louis.
In April 1861, after the firing on Fort Sumter, President Abraham Lincoln called for troops from all of the states to defeat the Confederacy. Missouri was asked to send four regiments. Governor Jackson refused the request. Instead, he called up the Missouri State Militia, possibly to seize the St. Louis Arsenal. If this was his intention, it was thwarted by the newly appointed commander of the arsenal, Captain Nathaniel Lyon of the 2nd U. S. Infantry.
Lyon had previously been stationed in Kansas Territory and had developed well-known abolitionist views. Arriving in February 1861, Lyon quickly became associated with the "Unconditional Unionist" faction in St. Louis. Lyon, like many St. Louis Unionists, feared that Governor Jackson would employ the city's secessionist Minutemen paramilitary organization and the local Missouri Volunteer Militia to capture the Arsenal.
Beginning on April 22, 1861, on the orders of President Lincoln, Lyon mustered in four regiments of Federal Missouri Volunteers (mostly former members of Republican Wide Awake marching clubs), issuing them weapons drawn from the Arsenal stocks. Lincoln followed up with orders to remove most of the Arsenal's remaining weapons to Illinois, a transfer which was carried out in secret on the night of April 24–25, 1861.
The crisis grew worse when a shipment of Confederate siege artillery arrived at the state Militia encampment, Camp Jackson, on May 8–9, 1861. Presented with proof of treasonous plotting at Camp Jackson, Lyon marched the Federal regulars and his new Missouri Volunteers to the camp to arrest the militia. Surrounding the camp, Lyon forced the militia's surrender and marched the prisoners to and through St. Louis, leading to the deadly and riotous Camp Jackson Affair.
The American Civil War (1861–1865) was the deadliest conflict in American history, killing an estimated 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers and an unknown number of civilians. The Confederate States of America, formed by eleven seceding Southern states, faced the Union in four years of warfare across 23 states and territories. Major engagements included First and Second Bull Run, Antietam (the bloodiest single day in American history, September 17, 1862), Chancellorsville, Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), Vicksburg (surrendered July 4, 1863), and Sherman's March through Georgia and the Carolinas (1864–1865). President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, transforming the war's stated purpose to include the abolition of slavery and enabling the enlistment of approximately 180,000 Black men in the United States Colored Troops. Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. The war resolved the question of secession and ended American slavery, though Reconstruction would face sustained resistance in its attempt to secure civil rights for formerly enslaved people.
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