Missouri State Guard

• 1. Introduction

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  The Missouri State Guard was born on the 11th of May 1861, not in a battlefield but in a legislative chamber, when the Missouri General Assembly passed what it called the Military Bill. Within days, a state that had not yet formally left the Union was arming tens of thousands of men to resist the federal government. That tension between official neutrality and armed defiance is what makes the Missouri State Guard so peculiar. It never formally belonged to the Confederate Army, yet it fought beside Confederate troops, served under Confederate officers, and helped trigger Missouri's shadow secession. Who was behind it, how did raw men carrying farm tools become a fighting force of close to 40,000, and what happened when the Union finally pushed back?

• 2. The Military Bill

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  The day before the Military Bill passed, the Camp Jackson Affair had convulsed St. Louis. That single episode drove the General Assembly to act with unusual speed. The final version of the act, approved on the 14th of May, gave Governor Claiborne Fox Jackson the authority to dissolve the existing Missouri Volunteer Militia and rebuild it as the Missouri State Guard. The stated purpose was to resist a feared Union invasion of the state. The bill also banned any militia organization that the Guard's district commanders had not authorized. That prohibition had a specific target: Unionist Missourians who were already trying to form Home Guard companies beyond the St. Louis metropolitan area. Among those shut out were the German United States Reserve Corps regiments mustered in St. Louis, which had been assembled in numbers beyond what the Federal Militia Act of 1792 required from Missouri. The law did permit the creation of local Home Guards under the Guard's own umbrella, but with a catch. Membership was restricted to boys aged 14 to 17 and men aged 45 and older, keeping the fighting-age population out. Most pointedly, the act specified that all spoken military commands had to be given in English. That language clause was aimed directly at ethnic Germans, who made up much of the Unionist population in Missouri, and it was understood by everyone as such.

• 3. Structure and Command

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  Sterling Price, a former governor of Missouri and one of the most influential men in the state, was the first to be commissioned Major General and given field command of the Guard. The act that authorized his appointment passed on the 15th of May, just four days after the Guard itself was created. Below him, the state was divided into nine Military Districts built around the existing Federal Congressional Districts. Each district was called a division on paper, though in practice each one functioned along brigade lines. Men between 18 and 45 were eligible for service unless their occupation or office exempted them. Every district division was to be commanded by a brigadier general who lived in that district and was elected by the commissioned officers there. A key figure in trying to impose order on this quickly assembled force was Adjutant General Lewis Henry Little, a Maryland native and career Army officer. Price relied on Little to push discipline into an organization that arrived for duty carrying, in many cases, only farm implements or antiquated hunting weapons. Training and organization were carried out at Cowskin Prairie, a former livestock auction site in the southwest corner of Missouri.

• 4. First Battles and Early Retreats

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  Recruits began assembling in Jefferson City in mid-May, but the Price-Harney Truce on the 20th of May, struck between Price and Federal department commander William S. Harney, brought that mobilization to a halt. The truce did not last. On the 30th of May, Harney was relieved and Nathaniel Lyon took command of the department. A meeting on the 11th of June to settle remaining disagreements collapsed instead, sending Price and Governor Jackson fleeing St. Louis for Jefferson City. The next day, Jackson called for 50,000 volunteers to defend the state, and thousands responded by enlisting in their home districts. The embryonic Guard suffered its first real setback at Boonville on the 17th of June, losing a skirmish that forced a retreat toward the far southwest of the state. Two days later, a local infantry and cavalry battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Walter S. O'Kane reversed the momentum by decisively defeating and capturing the Benton County Home Guard at Cole Camp. A further victory on the 5th of July at the Battle of Carthage bought Price the time he needed to train his recruits. It was a modest window, but enough to matter before the bigger engagements ahead.

• 5. Wilson's Creek and the Hemp Bales

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  On the 10th of August 1861, Price fought alongside Confederate regulars and Arkansas State Troops against a smaller Union force under Nathaniel Lyon at Wilson's Creek. Lyon was killed in the fighting, and his army driven back. That victory opened the way north. On the 1st and the 2nd of September, Price led 10,000 men against a 600-man battalion of Kansas volunteer cavalry under Senator James Lane at Big Dry Wood Creek and defeated them. Then came Lexington. Price besieged and captured 3,600 Federal troops at the First Battle of Lexington, a clash also called the Battle of the Hemp Bales, in mid-September. By October, however, the initiative had shifted. On the 25th of October, a bold mounted charge by Major Charles Zagonyi's vanguard routed local Guard troops waiting in ambush at the First Battle of Springfield. The broader Union offensive under Frémont was recalled before it reached the main southern force, but only because Frémont himself was relieved from command on President Lincoln's order. In the southwest Missouri town of Neosho, exiled elements of the Missouri legislature convened and claimed to have passed an Ordinance of Secession on the 30th of October, with the Governor-in-Exile Jackson signing it on the 31st of October 1861. The Confederate Congress made it official on the 28th of November 1861, admitting Missouri as the 12th Confederate State.

• 6. Dissolution and Legacy

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  During the winter encampment that followed, Price began enrolling many of his Guard soldiers into the regular Confederate service. Two brigades of the Missouri State Guard took part in the Battle of Pea Ridge, also known as Elkhorn Tavern, where Brigadier General William Y. Slack, the former commander of the 4th Division, was mortally wounded. On the 17th of March 1862, Price formally merged the Missouri State Guard into the Confederate Army of the West. Former Guard troops later formed the core of the Army of Missouri, which conducted Price's Missouri Expedition in 1864 in a bid to recapture the state. A small number of Guard units refused to merge and continued fighting independently until the war ended in 1865, operating in the Trans-Mississippi Theater under generals Mosby M. Parsons and James S. Rains. In 2007, the leading authorities on the Guard estimated that at least 34,000, and probably close to 40,000, Missourians served in it at some point. Peak strength ran between 23,000 and 28,000 in September 1861, with roughly 5,000 of those men in M. Jeff Thompson's First Division, operating independently in Southeast Missouri while the main body gathered near Lexington.

• 7. A Flag Before the State Had One

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  Missouri had no official state flag in 1861. On the 5th of June 1861, Price filled that gap with a direct order. Each regiment was to carry a flag of blue merino cloth, six feet by five feet, bearing the Missouri coat-of-arms in gold gilt on each side. Mounted companies would carry a white merino guidon, three feet by two and a half feet, marked with the letters M. S. G. in gilt. Pikes for the colors and guidons were to run nine feet long including the spear and ferrule. Infantry companies were assigned one drum and one fife each. Mounted companies were to have two bugles or trumpets. Where these items could not be obtained locally, the order directed that requisitions be made on the quartermaster-general of the state. Price's flag order stands as one of the earliest instances of Missouri defining its visual identity in a military context, a detail that outlasted the Guard itself.