Lincoln’s Grasp of War: Hard War and the Politics of Neutrality and Slavery in the Western Border States, 1861–1862

Lincoln’s Grasp of WarHard War and the Politics of Neutrality and Slavery in the Western Border States, 1861–1862 Christopher Phillips (bio) For nearly two decades, historians of the American Civil War have ascribed an evolution of Federal war policy toward civilians in the slave states. According to this interpretation, both Abraham Lincoln and his commanders initially believed the war required a limited Federal military incursion into the slaveholding states to restore order, and with it the Union. For the first year of the conflict, the Lincoln administration and military commanders stayed the “hard hand of war,” implementing a benign Federal strategy that historian Mark Grimsley has termed conciliation.

Less a coherent military policy than a general sentiment, conciliation (or as historian Stephen V. Ash has termed it, the “rosewater policy”) derived ostensibly from Federal war makers’ collective determination to assist the perceived loyalist southern majority, believing that the mass of white slave state residents were loyal yet cowed by an aggressive secessionist minority. Military and political goals and strategies entwined as the vagaries of the ground war forced the commander in chief and leading war makers to broaden their once limited definitions of military necessity, none more written about than emancipation.

Only when battlefield reverses failed to end the war did Federal authorities expand the conflict against disloyal civilians in the Confederate states, first by interfering with their “domestic institutions”—the most important being slavery—and later by initiating a “hard war” that included the destruction of civilian property and the universal emancipation of slaves.1 The wartime experience of the Border States, the first slave states that Federal troops reached, both assists and complicates this interpretation. The historian William Gienapp has attributed the long-held “hands-off ” theory of the Lincoln administration’s delicate handling of these states—as well as historians’ general inattention to the actual wartime conditions in them—to the president’s careful approach to two critical events: secession and emancipation. Lincoln’s apparent restraint on the vexing political issue of slavery, however, belies the reality of an early hard war on the [End Page 184] ground, especially in the western Border States, where Grimsley himself concedes that the framework for evolving Federal military policies toward slave state civilians works less well than elsewhere. “Indeed, in the western states generally,” Grimsley writes, “in many respects, the Union army treated the region as if it were enemy country, and indeed enemy country of a particularly virulent kind.”2 If the advent of directed destruction and confiscation of civilian property and, however infrequent, the killing of civilians judged disloyal by military personnel is the point at which conciliatory warfare gave way to hard war, it was reached not in the seceded states in the war’s last years but rather in the Border States early in the conflict.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the westernmost of these states, Kentucky and especially Missouri. Early on June 15, 1861, a detachment of the 2nd Iowa Volunteers debarked from a commandeered train at Stewartsville, Missouri, a sleepy northwest Missouri rail town. The unit was nearing the end of a two-day rail expedition ordered by Samuel R.

Curtis to secure the Hannibal & St. Joseph line against reputed saboteurs. At several prior points, Curtis reported encountering those he called rebels, confiscating powder and secession flags, suppressing a disloyal newspaper, arresting disloyalists, and firing on others who fled.

Within minutes of arriving at Stewartsville, one of the Iowans shot to death an alleged disloyalist, nineteen-year-old Donald M. McDonald. Later reports alleged that a displayed secession flag had triggered the shooting.

The incident mirrored the previous month’s much-publicized shooting of Illinoisan Elmer Ellsworth, a Federal officer and a former law student of the president, by a secessionist in Alexandria, Virginia. Yet this latest killing occurred in an ostensibly loyal state. In his official report, Curtis declared that the “homicide” resulted from the man attempting to fire a revolver at his troops, a charge disputed by onlookers, but the detachment’s commander, Lt.

Col. James M. Tuttle, averred that his soldiers were informed of the flag while still in Hannibal and they determined then to kill...