CH. XVIII. 1862. His instruction to "take care of Missouri" was not easy of execution. The social, political, and military disorders sprang from a tangle of conflicting sentiment and irreconcilable factions. At the bottom lay the hatred and daring of an active secession minority. Their sympathies and desires, springing from bitter pro-slavery intolerance, had created as a natural reaction an intense antislavery opposition, forming the basis and strength of the Missouri Unionists. But the Union party also counted in its ranks many men of moderate proslavery views whose conservatism the aggressive antislavery Radicals were little disposed to humor or tolerate. Minor causes of complication and rivalry existed in the former issue and revocation of the proclamation of Frémont, in the defense or condemnation of his military acts, in the support or the criticism of Halleck's Order No. 3, in the personal quarrels between the respective adherents of Frémont and Blair. These factions and their subdivisions so far mentioned, had their main strength in the city of St. Louis and in the river towns on the Mississippi, forming a fringe along the eastern border of the State. Along its western border, near the dividing line between Missouri and Kansas, a somewhat different condition prevailed. There the dragon's teeth sown in the days of the Border Ruffians were yet yielding a baleful harvest of illicit arms and private vengeance. The complaints in former years of Border Ruffian forays from Missouri into Kansas, were, as soon as the civil war began, paid with interest by a continual accusation of incursions of Kansas "Jayhawkers" and "Red Legs" into Missouri. It was alleged that, under pretense of military service in C. XVIII. the Union cause, they plundered the dwellings, stole the horses, and ran off the slaves of the neighborhoods they visited, without nice discrimination between the loyal and disloyal. They, on the other hand, retorted that such accusations came from men who with willful deception preached Unionism in public and practiced rebellion in secret. Midway through the State, or rather in a diagonal belt from Southwest to Northeast, lay the pathways and haunts of the guerrillas proper, along which surged irregularly and spasmodically the incursions and risings of partisan leaders and their bands of secession "bushwhackers." During the winter of 1861, the military activity which attended the organization of the Governor's Missouri State Militia, combined with the inclemency of the season, had served to maintain a reasonable quiet, but with the opening mildness of the summer, secession manifestations once more began to increase. The drilled United States regiments were mostly sent away to reënforce the Tennessee armies. Curtis, having won the decisive battle of Pea Ridge, was penetrating into Arkansas, and by that movement leaving Southern Missouri without the controlling influence of a military force. The very completeness of his victory also produced a resort by the enemy to methods of warfare which bore pernicious fruits in Missouri. Not only did the battle of Pea Ridge scatter and demoralize the March, 1862. rebel forces which were for the moment united in that encounter, but the fragments of Van Dorn's army were soon afterwards entirely withdrawn from Arkansas to assist in stemming the tide of CH. XVIII. disaster in Tennessee. An official report of the Confederate commander, T. C. Hindman, draws a strong picture of the complete wreck of Confederate power and authority in Arkansas which followed the Union victory of Pea Ridge, or, as the rebels named it, Elkhorn Tavern. "The Governor and other executive officers fled from the capital, taking the archives of State with them. The courts were suspended and civil magistrates almost universally ceased to exercise their functions. Confederate money was openly refused, or so depreciated as to be nearly worthless. This, with the short crop of the preceding year and the failure on all the uplands of the one then growing, gave rise to the cruelest extortion in the necessaries of life, and menaced the poor with actual starvation. These evils were aggravated by an address of the Governor, issued shortly before his flight, deprecating the withdrawal of troops and threatening secession from the Confederacy." Hindman, 1863. W. R. Vol. XIII., p. 30. No single incident conveys so vivid an idea of the sudden weakening of resistance to the Union flag in the trans-Mississippi country, and none conveys a more striking idea of the geographical vastness of the conflict than that here was an empire of territory which the side in possession could not defend, and the side in rightful authority could not occupy. If at that critical juncture McClellan had possessed the courage and skill to capture Richmond, and Halleck the genius and boldness to open the Mississippi, for the achievement of which successes the country and the Administration had furnished both these generals armies sufficient in numbers, |