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| Monday June 17, 1861 |
The Battle of Boonville occurs in Cooper County Missouri. By later standards it is a minor
skirmish. This early victory establishes Union control of the Missouri River and helps stop
attempts to move Missouri into the Confederacy.
Claiborne F. Jackson, the pro-southern Governor of Missouri, has worked to move the
state toward secession and to join the Confederacy. Union Brigidier General Nathaniel
Lyon moved to put down Jackson’s Missouri State Guard, commanded by Sterling Price.
Reaching Jefferson City, the state capital, Lyon discovered that Jackson and Price had
retreated towards Boonville. Lyon reembarked on steamboats, transported his men to
below Boonville, marched to the town, and engaged the enemy. In a short fight, Lyon
dispersed the Confederates, commanded on the field by Col. John S. Marmaduke, and
occupied Boonville
A young man named Samuel Clemons participates in another battle about the same time.
He will become know the world over as Mark Twain. In later years he speaks of his own
battle, supposedly taking place at the same time as Boonville.
"When your secretary invited me to this reunion of the Union veterans he requested me to
come prepared to clear up a matter which he said had long been a matter of dispute and
bad blood in war circles in this country, to wit: the true dimensions of my military service in
the Civil War, and the effect which they had upon the general result. I recognize the
importance of this thing to history, and I have come prepared. Here are the details. I was
in the Civil War two weeks. In that brief time I rose from a private to Second Lieutenant.
The monumental feature of my campaign was the one battle which my command fought –
it was in the summer of ’61. If I do say it, it was the bloodiest battle ever fought in human
history; there is nothing approaching it for the destruction of human life in the field, if you
take into consideration the forces engaged and the proportion of death to survival. And
yet you do not even know the name of that battle. Neither do I. It had a name, but I have
forgotten it. It is no use to keep private information which you can’t show off. Now, look at
the way history does. It takes the battle of Boonville, fought nearby, about the date of our
slaughter, and shouts its teeth loose over it, and yet never even mentions ours; doesn’t
even call it an “affair”, doesn’t call it anything at all; never heard of it. Whereas, what are
the facts? Why, these: In the battle of Boonville there were 2,000 men engaged on the
Union side, and about as many on the other – supposed to be. The casualties all told
were two men killed, and not all of them killed outright, but only half of them, for the other
man died in the hospital the next day. I know that because his great uncle was second
cousin to my grandfather, who spoke three languages, and was upright, though he had
warts, and used to – but never mind about that, the facts are just as I say, and I can prove
it. Two men were killed at the battle of Boonville, that’s the whole result. All the others got
away – on both sides. Now, then, in our battle there were just fifteen men engaged, on our
side – all Brigadier Generals but me, and I was a Second Lieutenant. On the other side
there was one man. He was a stranger. We killed him. It was night, and we thought he was
an army of observation – in fact he looked bigger than an army of observation would in
the day time; and some of us believed he was trying to surround us, and some thought he
was going to turn our position and so we shot him. Poor fellow, he probably wasn’t an
army of observation after all, but that wasn’t our fault; as I say, he had all the look of it in
that dim light. It was a sorrowful circumstance; he took the chances of war, and drew the
wrong card; he overestimated his fighting strength and suffered the likely result; he fell as
the brave should fall – with his face to the front and feet to the field – so we buried him
with the honors of war, and took his things. So began and ended the only battle in the
history of the world where the opposing force was utterly exterminated, swept from the
face of the earth – to the last man. And yet, you don’t even know the name of that man.
Now, then, for the argument. Suppose I had continued in the war and gone on as I began,
and exterminated the opposing forces every time – every two weeks – where would your
war have been? Why, you see yourself, the conflict would have been too one-sided.
There was but one honorable course for me to pursue; and I have pursued it. I withdrew
to private life, and gave the Union cause a chance. There, now, you have the whole thing
in a nutshell; it was not my presence in the Civil War that determined that tremendous
contest – it was my retirement from it that brought the crash. It left the Confederate side
too weak."