In Missouri during the American Civil War, the connections forged by family, church and neighborhood would be erased with a single question: Union or Secesh?
By Candace O’Connor
From the opening salvo of the Civil War, fired in April 1861, St. Louisans—both Union loyalists and Southern sympathizers—felt embattled and surrounded. They lived in a pivotal spot, the largest city in a key border state that both sides wanted to control. Over time, bloody battles raged to the east, west and south. Confederate guerillas terrorized parts of central Missouri. On the present-day campus of Saint Louis University, federal forces seized Confederate militia at Camp Jackson and massacred innocent civilians, killing 28 and injuring nearly 100.
No wonder the city’s social fabric began to fray as its close-knit elite chose sides. Some descendants of Southern families became “Secesh”—as in “secessionist”—among them William M. McPheeters, a prominent physician, whose brother Samuel was a Presbyterian minister; William Carr Lane, the first mayor of St. Louis; and Sterling Price, former Missouri governor and a major general in the Confederate army.
On the opposing side were Unionists, many of them poor Germans—political refugees who had flooded St. Louis during the preceding decade. But some prominent St. Louisans were also ardent advocates of the Union cause: Francis (Frank) P. Blair Jr., a former congressman who became a major general; occasional St. Louis resident Gen. William T. Sherman; William Greenleaf Eliot, a well-known Unitarian minister; and Edward Bates, attorney general under President Abraham Lincoln.
Adding fuel to this fiery dispute was the issue of slavery. By 1860, some 115,000 slaves lived in Missouri—9.7 percent of the population overall, though less than that in St. Louis. Still, slavery was never far from sight. Slave auctions were held on the steps of the Old Courthouse, a proceeding whose last act Eliot described this way: “St. Louis was fast becoming a slave-market. ... Often have I seen ‘gangs’ of negroes handcuffed together, two and two, going through the open street like ... driven cattle on the way to the steamboat for the South.”
Amid the conflagration that lasted four bitter years, Missouri finally remained in the Union, thanks to the efforts of Blair and others. But wartime measures imposed by federal officials—such as a loyalty oath, an attempted emancipation measure and financial levies on known Confederate sympathizers—angered St. Louis Secesh. Still more controversial was the expulsion of “disloyal” St. Louisans, such as McPheeters’ family, shipped out to destinations behind enemy lines. A snapshot of the daily environment these pressures created can be seen in a letter one Confederate supporter, Euphrasia Pettus, sent to her sister in May 1861: “My blood boils in my veins when I think of the position of Missouri—held in the Union at the point of ... bayonets. ... Mrs. Henry Kayser came for me one day last week to take dinner with her. You may be assured that she talks Southern or I wouldn’t have talked with her. ... We talked almost in a whisper lest we should be overheard. It is like the French Revolution.”
Such was the atmosphere in parts of Missouri—uneasy and uncertain. As the following brief stories illustrate, a potential new conflict was as close as the next town, or even the next room.
1. Sharp and Cobb: A Violent End
West of St. Louis, due north of the Missouri River, was territory known as “Little Dixie” for its concentration of Confederate sympathizers. Some Unionists lived there as well, including lawyer Benjamin Sharp, once a student in the first class at the Virginia Military Institute. He married and in 1843 settled in Danville, Mo., close to members of his family; in 1854 he was elected to a seat in the Missouri Senate.
Among his neighbors in central Missouri was the Cobb family, including son Alvin Cobb, a notorious Rebel bushwhacker. Cobb and Sharp were acquainted, but they could hardly have been more different: While Sharp was an articulate politician, the one-armed Cobb was known as “a man of few words,” according to a Sharp descendant; while Sharp was an idealist and a courageous soldier, Cobb was a brutal renegade.
In July 1861 Col. Sharp and fellow soldier Lt. A. Jager were heading to Mexico, Mo., in a horse and buggy, with orders to raise a regiment for the Union cause. But they took a wrong turn, and as they circled round south of Martinsburg, Cobb’s men ambushed them, firing on the unsuspecting pair. Both were badly wounded but not killed outright.
An 1885 history of Montgomery County picks up the story. Cobb “told them they must die, and asked them if they wished to pray. Jager made no answer, but Sharp kneeled down and prayed God to ... grant that the armies of the Union might be successful, and the Union itself preserved to his posterity forever. Ben Sharp died as he had lived, brave as a lion, devoted to the Union cause. ... The prayer finished ... both men were shot kneeling; then they were taken off and buried.”
Today, a tall monument in a weedy cemetery south of Interstate 70 in Danville marks the resting place of Sharp. It was commissioned by the local Masonic Lodge, to which he belonged. The town of Danville was largely leveled a few years after Sharp’s death; in October 1864 most of it was burned by another group of Rebel guerrillas, who also killed several townspeople. One building left unharmed was the chapel of the Danville Female Academy, which Missouri’s Civil War Heritage Foundation is now planning to restore.
2. McPheeters and Strong: Church vs. State
When the Civil War began, the Rev. Samuel McPheeters, much-loved pastor of the Pine Street Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, declared that he was the minister of his entire flock and wouldn’t take sides. But a Unionist member of the congregation, George P. Strong, refused to accept his neutrality. In 1862, just after McPheeters baptized a baby named “Sterling Price Robins” for the former Missouri governor and now Confederate general, Strong mounted a vitriolic campaign to run McPheeters out of town for his probable Southern sympathies.
Although Strong was likely motivated by personal dislike, he did have some reason to suspect McPheeters, given the politics of the reverend’s brother, William M. McPheeters, a Virginia-born physician and St. Louis Medical College faculty member. Offered the chance to take an oath of allegiance to the government, William McPheeters refused and left town to join the Confederate army, becoming chief of Gen. Sterling Price’s medical staff.
As William wrote later, the “diabolical hatred” of St. Louis Unionists for the Secesh had made him do it. “[U]nder the rigor of martial law ... my house was entered in broad day light by United States police officers and robbed of over $2,000 worth of furniture, and this too at a time when one of my children was lying at the point of death in the house, and did die a few days thereafter.” In midwinter 1865, he was further outraged when his wife, Sally, and their children were summarily expelled from the city.
For her journey south, Sally boarded a steamboat that was carrying some Northern women to Vicksburg, Miss. “They treated Mrs. McPheeters with suspicion and discourtesy until Memphis was reached,” wrote a friend in 1905, recalling an ironic twist. “There Mrs. U.S. Grant, wife of the [Union] general, came aboard. Mrs. Grant, learning that Mrs. McPheeters was the wife of Dr. McPheeters, whom she had known before her marriage, made the remainder of her journey pleasant ...”
Undoubtedly, Strong knew of William’s departure and assumed that Samuel was cut from the same cloth. After Strong wrote an accusatory letter to the newspaper, the city’s military authorities shut down the Pine Street church and banished McPheeters and his wife from the city. McPheeters—who had twice taken the loyalty oath and offered frequent prayers for the president—responded by leaving for Washington, D.C., to lay his case before President Lincoln himself.
With his old friend Attorney General Edward Bates at his side, McPheeters saw Lincoln, who refused to interfere in church affairs, though he did admonish the St. Louis authorities in a letter: “I tell you frankly, I believe he does sympathize with the rebels; but the question remains whether such a man, of unquestioned good moral character, who has taken such an oath as he has, and can not even be charged of violating it ... can ... be exiled, upon the suspicion of his secret sympathies.”
In the end, McPheeters was not banished from St. Louis, but Strong still battled him, convincing the local and then national Presbytery to deny McPheeters his pulpit. After the war, the Pine Street church called him back as pastor, but McPheeters, now living in Kentucky and in poor health, declined. Still, he said charitably, he appreciated the continuing support of his old congregation—if not of Strong—in “maintain[ing] the vital truths of ... a Spiritual Kingdom at once separate from and independent of the State.”
3. Glasgow and the In-Laws
Pity William Glasgow, a stalwart Unionist, who fought his own daily war against his wife and her family, all rabid Secesh. He was married to Sarah Lane Glasgow, whose father—physician and former mayor William Carr Lane—was a political hothead. Hotter still was Anne Ewing Lane, Sarah’s unmarried sister, who couldn’t resist taking jabs at William’s politics in the letters she sent to the Glasgows, away in Germany during the war years.
The harried Glasgow, wrote descendant William G.B. Carson years later, “was never left in the slightest doubt of their opinions of his iniquitous views. Not even from his wife could he look for understanding or sympathy. The fact that they were, all of them, fond of him and respected him as an honorable man only made matters worse. They simply could not understand how a man of his character could defend the terrible things which had been imposed on the city.”
Passionately hopeful for the Confederate cause, the Lanes sent confident letters to the anxious Glasgow, exiled in Wiesbaden, where his arthritic wife was undergoing treatment. Glasgow had agreed to the trip in part because of his wife’s health but also, wrote Carson, because he secretly wanted his children “removed from the influence of their grandparents and their aunt, who were relentlessly destroying their respect for the institutions they had been brought up to revere.”
Lane’s letters, such as the one he wrote in April 1862, must have horrified Glasgow: “Missouri is becoming more Secesh every day. Before the affair at Camp Jackson full 9/10 of our people were for the Union; now more than that proportion are on the opposite side ...” Lane also castigated such Union leaders as “that most unscrupulous demagogue, traitor & knave Frank Blair.” Anne Lane seconded her father’s optimism, writing to her sister in 1862: “All the rebels that I see are in good spirits. Accounts from [Gen. Sterling] Price say his army are ready to fight all the men that go against him.”
From their caustic references to ministers, it is clear that the Lane family blamed Glasgow’s stand on that resolute Unionist, the Rev. William Greenleaf Eliot. “I hope Mr. G. suffers no disquietude, as I am sure his everlastingly busy & medling friend Mr. Eliot does not,” wrote William Carr Lane to Sarah Glasgow in
February 1862.
But the long-suffering William was not completely silent—he had drafted his own views in letters to a newspaper. “It is well known,” he wrote in one 1861 letter, “that the majority of secessionists in the border and extreme southern states are composed of demagogues. ... The time has now come ... when Missouri must take her position among the states of the Union and define her policy ... one of Peace and loyalty to the Union.”
So long outnumbered, Glasgow must have relished the advances his side would make in the years ahead.
4. Eliot: A Minister’s Conscience
Another well-known minister had little in common with Samuel McPheeters. William Greenleaf Eliot, the passionately pro-Union pastor of the Church of the Messiah, believed in taking a public stand. In an 1861 sermon, he told his flock that “the minister of Christ ... should, as a general rule, be the steady, uniform supporter of the established Government. ... I know that some of you differ from me as to the propriety of introducing the subject, in this place. ... But it is not a matter of policy, nor choice, with me. ... It is a matter of positive obligation. I may do no good, but I must try.”
Eliot was equally outspoken with state and national officials. In August 1862 he wrote to Missouri Gov. Hamilton Gamble, arguing that the assessments on Southern sympathizers were “working evil in this community and doing great harm to the Union cause.” So it likely came as little surprise to his congregation that Eliot—an abolitionist at heart but also a pragmatist, who hoped before the war that adopting a policy of gradual emancipation might stave off violence—had made another declaration.
This time, it had to do with the controversial Fugitive Slave Law, enacted by Congress in 1850. Not only did the law call for the arrest of anyone suspected of being a runaway slave, but it also threatened to penalize those who aided such slaves with six months’ imprisonment and a $1,000 fine.
Later, Eliot recalled his response to this law. “I had always been an advocate for obedience to law, and prided myself upon it, though an equal advocate for freedom,” he wrote. “When the fugitive slave law had been enacted by Congress ... I had said openly in the pulpit that I, for one, could not obey it, but should be ready to bear the penalty.”
During the Civil War, Eliot was living on Beaumont Place, near the current A.G. Edwards site, in a farmhouse spacious enough for his large family. When the bloody Camp Jackson affair took place only half a mile away, bullets whizzed past their fence. One day in 1863, Eliot’s wife, Abby Cranch, asked the butcher at Jefferson and Market whether he knew of a handyman for hire. He pointed to Archer Alexander, an African-American man of about 50, who had arrived that day and was asking for work.
After Abby brought Alexander home, Eliot gradually elicited his story. Just days before, Alexander, his wife and children had belonged to a Southern-sympathizing farmer in St. Charles County, who had threatened to sell him for aiding Union troops. At that, Alexander ran away; though captured briefly, he escaped and made his way to St. Louis.
Immediately, Eliot tried to buy Alexander in order to free him, but the angry farmer sent slave catchers who snatched and concealed him. In a dramatic twist, Eliot located Alexander and hid him in Illinois until emancipation was declared in 1865. Then Alexander returned to the Eliot home and worked there for the rest of his life. His wife, Louisa, was not so fortunate; though she rejoined her husband briefly, she returned to her old home to reclaim some possessions—and mysteriously died on that visit.
“I have felt as proud of the long-continued friendship and confidence of Archer Alexander as of any one I have known,” wrote Eliot, who arranged for Alexander to serve as the model for the freed slave in a famous monument, Freedom’s Memorial, still in Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C. Alexander remained grateful for his own emancipation. When he died around 1879, added Eliot, the former slave’s last words were “a prayer of thanksgiving that he had died in freedom.”
5. The Bates Family: A Father and Sons
No one could deny that Edward Bates was a faithful Unionist. A presidential hopeful in 1860, promoted by Frank Blair and others, he lost the Republican nomination to Abraham Lincoln, who then appointed him attorney general. He was also closely connected to the Union cause through his brother-in-law, Hamilton R. Gamble, named the state’s Unionist provisional governor in 1861 after the pro-Confederate governor, Claiborne Fox Jackson, had fled.
Born in Virginia, Bates was devoted to his adopted state. A strong proponent of Missouri statehood, he served as the state’s first attorney general, a U.S. congressman and a member of the Missouri State Senate and House. During the Civil War, he remained keenly interested in Missouri politics and frequently promoted state causes to President Lincoln.
Further, he came from a strong military tradition. His father, though a Quaker, had served valorously in the Revolutionary War, which is perhaps what inspired Bates himself to fight in the War of 1812. Among his six sons were five Unionists, and four of them were in the military: Julian, a surgeon in the Missouri militia; Richard, a Navy ensign; Charles Woodson, a West Point cadet; and John Coalter, who fought at such major battles as Antietam and Gettysburg and who remained in the U.S. Army long enough to be promoted, in 1906, to lieutenant general and Army chief of staff.
Then there was Fleming, 28 years old, seventh among the 17 Bates children—and the family renegade. In 1862 Fleming enlisted with Capt. Ben Von Phul’s Company of Missouri Light Artillery in the Confederate army and later served under Gen. Sterling Price. While there is no record of why Fleming strayed so far from the family line, we know his father was grieved at the decision. In an 1865 diary entry, he noted that Fleming had come home “apparently in good health and bodily comfort—dressed (not to my liking) in grey frock and pantaloons ...”
The elder Bates could hardly have been more pro-Union, but he was able to put family before cause, remaining on good terms with his children. The exception, surprisingly, was Charles Woodson, whose failure to graduate from West Point disgraced the family. “I could have borne his death,” wrote his father in 1866, “but my courage sinks, in view of his degradation.”
In the end—in death—they were all reconciled. Fleming, Charles Woodson and other Bates children are all buried close to their father in the Bates plot at Bellefontaine Cemetery in North St. Louis.
