BORDER OPERATIONS
During the long period of strange inactivity in those parts of the
country where the real seat of war lay, there was a good deal of
active fighting elsewhere. Some of it was severe and gave rise to
stirring events, including some stoutly contested battles. But with
the exception of the operations upon the Southern coasts in aid of a
more effective blockade none of these conflicts had any considerable
strategic importance and the story of them may with propriety be
briefly told.
In Missouri the contest was in effect a civil war, in the strict
acceptation of that term. It is needless and it would be tedious to
recount here the proclamations, the gubernatorial manifestos, the
legislative resolutions and the so-called conventional action of that
state. None of these had any undisputed legal sanction whatever, though
each of them claimed all possible legality. The simple fact was that a
part of Missouri's people adhered to the Union and another part equally
clung to the cause of the Southern Confederacy. After much confusion
the Unionists formed an army under General Lyon and the Confederates
assembled a strong force under General Price. Let the lawyers quibble
as they please over the technicalities involved, the fact remains as
already stated, that the people of Missouri were divided in sentiment;
that they arrayed themselves against each other in hostile armies; and
that they fought each other in considerable battles--measured by the
number of men engaged and by the slaughter involved. But these battles
bore no influential relation to the contest between the Union and the
Confederacy, except in so far as their conduct served to occupy troops
on either side who might have been much more effectively employed at
those more eastern points at which the issue was in fact to be fought
out to a conclusion.
At Carthage, Missouri, where General Franz Sigel attacked the
Confederates on July fifth, 1861, the Federals were beaten and forced
to retreat. At Dug Spring, August third, Lyon defeated McCulloch, but
a week later (August the tenth), the Federals were again defeated in
a severely contested battle at Wilson's Creek, and General Lyon was
killed.
On the fifth of March, 1862, the two armies west of the Mississippi met
in a pitched battle at Pea Ridge, Arkansas. The contest was a fierce
and bloody one, involving a heavy, though unascertained loss. The
Federals had distinctly the better of it, but like the Confederates
at Manassas, they utterly failed to follow up their victory or in any
other way to give effect to it.
It is unnecessary to relate the story of these battles in detail. They
were gallant and strenuous actions, reflecting the highest credit upon
the courage of the officers and men engaged on either side. But they
contributed nothing whatever to the ultimate result. They played
no part in the solution of the war problem. Whether the actions so
gallantly fought by Federals and Confederates alike were won by the one
or by the other, made no difference in the ultimate outcome of a war
which was clearly destined to be decided by other men and upon other
fields of larger strategic significance.
The operations in Kentucky and Tennessee, though smaller in themselves,
were of much greater importance. Those states lay within the strategic
field. Kentucky had officially assumed an attitude of neutrality,
as has already been related, to which neither side paid or could be
expected to pay the smallest attention. That state lay between the
North and the South. It was absolutely necessary that each should push
armed forces into and across its domain in order to get at the forces
of the adversary. Moreover, Kentucky's assumption of neutrality was a
transparent absurdity in itself. If it could have commanded respect,
it would have interposed a neutral ground, stretching for about four
hundred miles from east to west between the contending armies, neither
of which would have been privileged on any account to cross it or
to enter it. Thus Kentucky, while retaining its place as a state in
the Union, would have stood as a protective barrier to the seceding
states, of even greater value than all the armies that could have been
assembled within Kentucky's borders. It would at one and the same time
have held the position of a state in the Union and the most potent of
all states in aid of the Confederacy.
It is necessary to explain that this Kentucky resolution of neutrality
never had the complete legal sanction of the state authorities, actual
or pretended; but its effect was so small that it is scarcely worth
while to discuss the technicalities. The simple fact was that Kentucky
furnished men to both sides and that its legislative and its executive
authorities were never at any time fully and legally agreed upon any
policy whatever.
In a history that takes account of facts rather than of theories, of
events rather than of resolutions, there seems no occasion to follow
this subject further, except to say that both Federals and Confederates
presently pushed their armies into Kentucky and tried conclusions
there, with results that must form the subject of future pages in this
history.
In Maryland the struggle ended in the adherence of the state to the
Union, while a large part of its vigorous young manhood went South and
enlisted in the Confederate army. It was this division of sentiment,
this separation of families, this arraying of brother against brother,
that constituted the tragedy of the Confederate war.
In North Carolina and in Tennessee there was a strong Union sentiment
among the mountaineers. It could not control either state, but it
resulted in the enlistment of a large number of hardy volunteers in
the Union armies, and in the organization of an efficient "underground
railroad," by means of which Northern soldiers escaping from Southern
prisons were aided in their journey to the North.
In Virginia the anti-secession sentiment found expression in an act of
secession from secession. The western half of that state had scarcely
any property interest in slavery and scarcely any sympathy with the
institution. The men of that region had accepted the teachings of
Thomas Jefferson, and George Wythe, and a score of other Virginian
statesmen, to the effect that slavery was a curse which it was their
duty to extirpate as soon as might be. The secession of their state
seemed to offer them an opportunity. If secession was to be the order
of the day, why should not they, as representatives of the western and
non-slave-holding half of their state, repudiate secession from the
Union by themselves seceding from their seceding state?
Upon this hint they acted. They proceeded to set up the state of West
Virginia under an autonomy granted by the National Government. It was
in direct violation of the Federal Constitution thus to divide a state
without its own consent, but the thing was done in war time, and when
war is on the rigid letter of the law is very apt to be disregarded in
the interest of general results. At any rate the thing was done, and
West Virginia has ever since 1863 held her place as one of the states
of the Union.
Thus were the border states arrayed in the war. Thus was the issue made
up. Thus were the lines drawn for the momentous conflict.