Sword Broken by Lt. Col. John Knapp at the Capture of Camp Jackson, 1860-61, Missouri History Museum Collections.
The Civil War would never be called simple, but here in Missouri, it was perhaps more complicated than in the rest of the country. A slave state, Missouri never had a consensus among its citizenry on the peculiar institution, which made the war psychologically devastating, in addition to being bloody and brutal.
And a new exhibit at the Missouri History Museum, The Civil War in Missouri, puts this division and its resulting chaos into stark relief. The exhibit, which opened this weekend, is curated by Jeff Meyer and takes visitors through the leadup to the war, the brutal battles, martial law in cities, marauding guerillas and questions of loyalty into an uneasy and fractured peace. It's an intelligent and comprehensive look at the war that manages to clarify and illuminate corners of history that have lain unexamined.
Meyer says that six years ago, he started digging through the museum's archives and realized there was a real treasure trove at hand. Sure, there were plenty of obvious old favorites—a sword that Lt. Col John Knapp broke at the capture of Camp Jackson instead of surrendering to Federal troops, and the shattered pocket watch that dramatically saved the life of the Confederate army's Missouri guard Col. Austin M. Standish during the Battle of Wilson’s Creek. There were guns and uniforms, too—plenty of great artifacts that history nuts have seen time and time again.
What makes this exhibit stand out, with its vast array of material, is the careful attention given to context. It’s one thing to say that Missouri was deeply divided on the subject of slavery, and that rural and urban people disagreed. It’s another to show graphs of the levels of immigrants moving into cities like St. Louis, who brought with them anti-slavery mindsets (and truly beautiful glassware, which is also on display), or to show how new railroad construction provided a physical—and ideological—link between St. Louis and free areas like New York and Philadelphia.
Citizens were forced to sign loyalty oaths to the Union, but soldiers, who might even be in disguise, could trump up charges of disloyalty. (A reproduction of a painting from the time shows a family bedroom being raided by soldiers who are brandishing a tiny Confederate flag found under a mattress at a cowering but defiant mother and her children.) The exhibit makes excellent use of interactive technology, with a touch-screen kiosk where visitors can view the dossier of several historical Missourians and decide for themselves if they were loyal Unionists, and then find out what the courts ultimately decided. The task is hard and frustrating—a visitor doesn’t expect to fail repeatedly at a task like this! But when you do, it highlights how arbitrary and nuanced of a call it was to make.
The humanity of living through this period in history is given a clear examination, too. There’s a pair of scissors a slave owner used to cut the hair off her human chattel. A kit for amputations and grisly full-color illustrations on how to properly saw off a human limb make clear that there was agony suffered on all sides. And a newspaper account of a woman who secretly enlisted as a man to serve—the story hints at a romantic reason behind her deception—lets us remember that life, with all its passions, continued during the conflict.
Civil War buffs will find much to ponder here, from documents to weaponry to a fascinating interactive map of troop movements. But its real strength lies in how deftly and comprehensively it meets curator Meyer’s goal. “I want people to have an understanding of how complex it was,” he says. “It was not simple It’s brushed over—it was brutal.”
The Civil War in Missouri is on display at the Missouri History Museum (5700 Lindell, 314-361-9017, mohistory.org) through March 16, 2013. Admission is $10 for adults, $8 for seniors/students/miitary/groups, $6 for children 6 -12, and free for children under 5.
