August anniversary

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cruces
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August anniversary

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You can fight this one in the Ozark Campaign game. Tough little battle.

We Bled in the Corn’
By RANDALL FULLER

Source: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... ore-102193

Writing about the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, the Civil War’s second major battle, from the perspective of a common foot soldier, Herman Melville described the conflict this way: “We fought on the grass, we bled in the corn—.”


Library of Congress
The Battle of Wilson’s Creek. (photos at the site)

The battle took place in southwest Missouri on Aug. 10, 1861, just 20 days after the Battle of Bull Run. The two armies — 12,000 Confederates against 5,400 Federals — fought in the fields and on the oak hills bordering a meandering stream called Wilson’s Creek, producing extremely high casualties. Although the battle is more or less forgotten today, it was immensely important: not only did it help shape the course of the war’s first half, it confirmed fears that the scope and magnitude of the conflict would be much greater than anyone had expected.

Indeed, even though southwest Missouri was almost 1,000 miles from the fields of Northern Virginia, the battle and its significance made front pages everywhere. Missouri, after all, was well known as a cauldron of Union and Confederate sympathies. Within months of Abraham Lincoln’s election, rival militias had formed in Missouri. Possession of the state was considered vital to military success by both sides. Sharing borders with Union and Confederate states, Missouri included waterways critical to the transportation and communication of both armies. Losing it, Lincoln declared early in his administration, would simply be “too much for us.”

Yet losing Missouri was a very real possibility for the Union. The issue of slavery had deeply divided the state since the Missouri Compromise of 1820. That debate extended into the era of “Bleeding Kansas,” a fierce struggle that began in 1854 to determine whether Missouri’s western neighbor would be a free or slave state. In March 1861, shortly after Lincoln took office, state delegates in Missouri rejected secession. But when the war started a month later, Gov. Claiborne Fox Jackson, a Southern sympathizer, began secretly planning to ally Missouri with the Confederacy. Tacitly allowing pro-secessionist militia to camp outside St. Louis, he hoped they might seize the Federal armory and secure the state for the South.


Into this tinderbox stepped Nathaniel Lyon, a Union officer and stern abolitionist, assigned that spring to oversee the armory in St. Louis. Lyon was fanatical in his hatred of the Southern “traitors” to the Union. He promptly secured the surrender of the pro-Confederate militia units just outside the city, but created a riot in the streets of St. Louis when he marched his captives through the city as a lesson to recalcitrant Southern sympathizers. Twenty-eight citizens were killed or mortally wounded in the unrest.

Lyon secured St. Louis, but not the state. And so, over the course of the summer, he marched his army across Missouri and then south, where Southern forces were amassing in hopes of still winning the state for the Confederacy. By early August they had camped along Wilson’s Creek, a bucolic source of water marred only by the mosquitoes, wrote one survivor of the battle, “the remembrance of which made all other annoyances … seem slight.” Lyon and his men finally caught up with them in early August.

The battle began on a broiling hot morning, 10 miles southwest of Springfield, and lasted some seven hours. Seized with missionary zeal, Lyon attacked the encamped Confederates even though his troops were greatly outnumbered. The audacity of the move seemed to work, at first. Surprised by the artillery fire, the Southern forces quickly unraveled. Adding to the confusion was the fact that neither side had standard uniforms; unable to see more than a few feet through the heavy pall of smoke and uncertain who was in front of them, men from both sides fired on their fellow soldiers.

Eventually, however, Confederate forces regrouped and gained the advantage. By afternoon, Union forces were in retreat. During the brutal fighting Lyon was struck by a bullet to the chest, becoming the Union’s first general killed in the war.

Both sides promptly declared victory, and almost overnight Lyon’s image and actions became the subject of countless engravings, paintings and poems in the North. As the first nationwide martyr to the Union cause, his body was returned to his native Connecticut by a well-publicized railroad cortege — an event that would receive its mirror image at the end of war, when the remains of an assassinated Lincoln were shipped westward to Illinois.

Nevertheless, from a military standpoint, the battle at Wilson’s Creek was a victory for the South. The Union force lost 24 percent of its command in the battle, while Confederate losses totaled 12 percent. On Bloody Hill, where the heaviest fighting took place, there were over 1,700 total casualties — some 20 percent of the men who fought there. More significant than the body counts, though, was the failure of Lyon’s force to dislodge, let alone destroy, the Missouri confederates.

Still, the Southern victory was not decisive enough to tip the balance of power in the state. In fact, despite having achieved a tactical victory, the Confederates did not pursue their advantage but instead withdrew from Missouri, traveling to Arkansas, where their defeat at Pea Ridge the next year ensured that Missouri remained in the Union.

Wilson’s Creek also underlined a point that Bull Run had first made clear: that the war would not be easy or quick, and that for all the lofty rhetoric on both sides, the reality was that the war would be agonizingly brutal. On a blistering morning during the war’s first summer, men had fought one another for principles that had sounded glorious and noble back home. In pristine meadows and verdant woods, in the shallow waters of Wilson’s Creek, these same men had twisted bayonets into one another, had fired squirrel guns and Enfield rifles, blown holes in young flesh with rifled minié balls and explosive artillery. During and after the battle, homes in the region would be plundered and burned, the countryside pillaged, buildings and bridges destroyed. Harvest fields were scarred with shallow trenches that served as mass graves, and the efforts to exhume and identify and repatriate these hastily buried bodies would take years.

By the end of the day at Wilson’s Creek, the battlefield was thick with the dead, with torn and discolored bodies that swelled and turned black in the heat. Bodies were sprawled in every conceivable position, arms and legs flung awkwardly. A strange stillness had settled on their faces. Many looked upward, eyes still open, as if wishing to confront the afterlife as clearly and frankly as possible. Once again, silence had returned to the Missouri countryside.

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Randall Fuller is a professor of English at Drury University, in Springfield, Mo., and the author of “From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature.”
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