Book Review: Massacre at St. Louis: The Road to the Camp Jackson Affair and Civil War

Massacre at St. Louis: The Road to the Camp Jackson Affair and Civil War. By Kenneth E. Burchett. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Softcover, 334 pp. $49.95.

Reviewed by Phill Greenwalt

Missouri played a significant role in the history of the pre-Civil War United States and its eventual rupture. Starting with the controversial Missouri Compromise in 1820 and continuing on into the troubled period known as “Bleeding Kansas,” the border state’s geographical position—northernmost of the slave states and at the edge of emerging new territories—along with its mixture of politics and culture, virtually ensured Missouri would face an internal struggle of whether to stay loyal or secede. In his history, Massacre at St. Louis: The Road to the Camp Jackson Affair and Civil War, historian and author Kenneth E. Burchett traces this tangled history in the “Show Me State.”

Missouri’s inner strife came to a head early in the Civil War at Camp Jackson. Referred to either as “The Camp Jackson Affair,” or the “Camp Jackson Massacre,” the unfortunate event happened on May 10, 1861, when Brig. Gen. Nathaniel Lyon led a regiment of Federal volunteers to thwart secessionists with designs on capturing the government arsenal in St. Louis, located at Camp Jackson. After Lyon’s successful movement, a citizen’s mob, attracted by the day’s events, swarmed the Union soldiers. During the altercation, and in response to rocks and epithets thrown at them, a soldier accidentally discharged a musket. Soon more shots rang out from the ranks, killing at least 28 civilians. The confrontation touched off a few days of rioting only quelled by the declaration of martial law when U.S. Army regulars arrived in the city. Missouri had descended into conflict.

With this action, events came to a head. For “long seen as a crisis [the Civil War] in the making, Missouri was at the center of the action. The first drums of civil war sounded in Missouri.” (5) Burchett traces that history and supports fellow historian John Fiske’s assertion that “from the seizure of Camp Jackson in 1861 down to the appearance of Sherman’s army in the rear of Virginia in 1865, there may be traced an unbroken chain of causation.” (5)

The first four chapters of Massacre at St. Louis build the foundation of Missouri within the larger story of United States history as the country moved toward disunion. Burchett occasionally breaks away from the main narrative to offer small chapters about influential individuals within Missouri’s political and military sphere in 1860-61. These chapters are biographical in nature and shed important light on these personalities, their principles, and attitudes. For example, Burchett describes Frank Blair as a “man walking into the future backwards,” as his views “never progressed much beyond the notion of the geographic separation of Blacks and whites”. (99) Burchett also explains that Gen. Lyon’s “treatment of enlisted men [was] especially reprehensible.” (115) These tidbits added significantly to the narrative and are a credit to Burchett’s skillful research.

As its subtitle suggests, the primary emphasis of this book is “The Road to the Camp Jackson Affair and Civil War.” With a detailed prologue, as mentioned above, the foundational chapters tracing the history of Missouri to the brink of the war make up a sizeable portion of the book. In fact, the first 70 pages of the book’s overall 256 pages of text cover the lead up to 1860. While the page count discussing the actual events of the Camp Jackson affair is rather thin, Burchett buttresses the section with an excellent selection of images and helpful maps, including one of Lindell Grove, the Missouri State Militia encampment, and the route map showing the Federal capture of Camp Jackson.

If readers are looking for a thoroughly researched and well-written study about Missouri’s role leading up to the first actions of the American Civil War, this is the book. Burchett is very detailed oriented, as he analyzes the number of arms stored by the Federal government in St. Louis and uncovers primary sources that discuss the role and viewpoints of the pro-Southern Missouri governor, Claiborne Fox Jackson, among other gems. The level of detail, including sojourns into various elements, like the role of the dominant German minority that called St. Louis home, makes a convincing argument on how critical of a border state Missouri was. Follow Burchett and the country along the road to Camp Jackson, and from there, the perilous trek through the next four years of civil war.