Terrible Swift Sword Read Online Free PDF Page A

shoulders, and one of the men described General Price
himself with the words: "He is a large fine looking bald fellow dressed in
common citizen clothes an oald linen coat yarn pants." None of them had
been given anything which West Point would have recognized as drill; one group,
led by former country lawyers, was called to quarters daily by the courtroom
cry of "Oyez! Oyez!" and customarily addressed its commanding officer
as "Jedge." Not even in the American Revolution was there ever a more
completely backwoods army; these men were not so much soldiers as rangy
characters who had come down from the north fork of the creek to get into a
fight. Their commissary department consisted of the nearest cornfield, and
their horses got their forage on the prairie; and a veteran of the State Guard
wrote after the war that any regular soldier given command of this host would
have spent a solid six months drilling, equipping, organizing, and provisioning
it, during which time the Yankees would have overrun every last county in
Missouri once and for all. He added that although Price's men had very poor
weapons—some of them actually carried ancient flintlocks—they knew very well
how to use them, and they did not scare easily. They were wholly devoted to
General Price, whom they always referred to as "Pap." 10
    Price was in truth worthy of devotion, and
the mere fact that he was out here at all testified to the strange complexity
of the war on the border. A handsome, stalwart man in his early fifties,
Virginia born and a resident of Missouri for thirty years, Price was a good
lawyer and a good politician; had served in the state legislature, in Congress
and as governor, and had led a regiment in the Mexican War, winning a
brigadier's star for gallantry. He was no secessionist; on the contrary he had
counted himself a good Union man even after the bombardment of Fort Sumter and
President Lincoln's call for troops, and although he had not been prepared to
help destroy the Confederacy he had not been prepared to help establish it
either. He had taken to the warpath, in fact, only after Lyon compelled
everyone in Missouri to choose sides; he was definitely fighting against the
Federals now, but he was not so much fighting for the Confederacy as for the
vain hope that the war could be kept out of the front yards of the people of
Missouri. He wanted to put limits on the war, so that no one but soldiers need
be hurt. Later this fall he would sign a formal agreement with Fremont
providing for an end to guerrilla warfare, cessation of arrests for political
opinion, and a mutual pledge that "the war now progressing shall be
exclusively confined to armies in the field." 11 The Federal
authorities would quickly disavow this agreement, and in the end Missouri knew
all of the horrors civil war could bring, but nobody could say that Price had
not done his best.
    In a military sense Price was an orphan,
serving a government which was adrift in no man's land, and although he was a
major general and Ben McCulloch was a brigadier, McCulloch's commission came
from Jefferson Davis, a full-fledged President, and Price's came from Claiborne
Jackson, who was only a fugitive; if Price and McCulloch were to go to the wars
together it would have to be on McCulloch's terms. Price learned this a few
days before his troops, Pearce's Arkansans and McCulloch's brigade made camp
together by a stream called Wilson's Creek, ten miles southwest of Springfield.
Lyon had just moved back into Springfield, and it was obvious that the combined
force ought to attack him immediately. But McCulloch had a poor opinion of
Price and a worse one of Price's troops, and he was not entirely sure that he
himself ought to be in Missouri at all: the Confederate government, he had been
informed, did not want to wage aggressive warfare on foreign soil, which
seemed to include Missouri, and he had visions of disaster. Price had a hot
argument with him, threatening to attack Lyon unaided,