Thank you, John for taking time to reply to my query. Your information helped me gain perspective on what their experience would have been like. The details you offer also add to my revelation that, I believe, all gratitude and honor are due Providence that our grandfather’s survived to produce descendants.
I preface further remarks with being fully open to course correction in my assumptions and thought processes as I am an admitted victim of “revisionist history” in regards to the Civil War though I am endeavoring to resolve.
In imagining to understand the mind of the Missouri civilian during the late 1850’s, early 1860’s and on into the War I recall that for the most part, though not wholly, the population were sons of the South. Though Missouri was indeed a slave state the people were not interested in engaging in the War, they’d had enough of the border conflicts and Governor Jackson had struck a deal with General Harney over the matter with the proviso that (I paraphrase) Missouri would concede to the results of the War.
Missouri was however pressed into the War by the combined acts of Lyons, Blair and Fremont and their radical and what seem to have been downright hostile attitudes. Missouri’s involvement did not include the issues of slavery or secession; it was about defending themselves from occupation by the Federal army and their terroristic behavior exercised on the civilian population.
The Missourians believed their Constitutional rights and freedoms had been sorely compromised and without doubt that would spark anyone’s fierce ire. It certainly would spark mine!
Unless a soldier left a diary it cannot be pinpointed exactly what motivated his willingness to join a fight but I am certain the “nature of the beast” and what influences him have not changed for centuries. A brief study of the socio-economic and political environment they lived in has also much assisted in understanding. However, for a young man, or any man for that matter to be proactively willing to leave home, family and livelihood in the face of marshal law, being very possibly unarmed, possibly afoot with only the clothes on his back and the provisions in his knap pack or saddlebags to rely upon, to join a force that is outmanned, outgunned and out provisioned by the opposition, probably aware that he would have to scrounge or get lucky to obtain a firearm, hope his mount, if he had one, survived the battle and if not hope his shoe leather lasted until he could find another horse, knowing that there would be days of hunger and sleeplessness followed by intense rushes of adrenaline and the terror of battle defies sound reason and dictates a courage of conviction that commands an unprecedented level of respect, at least in my mind. They had no idea how long the war would last or where it would take them from day to day or if they would live to see tomorrow. They had to have had strong survival instincts, iron constitutions, quick and clever mindedness and an outrageously rock solid commitment to their ideals.
I know they were not lacking in strong, wise leadership. I am beginning to conclude that had our Missouri Confederate Soldiers been as well provisioned as the Federals the tables might well have been turned, at least in Missouri.
It takes me time to wrap my mind around it all when I think about it and try to imagine what brews in the soul of a man when facing such a war and it’s finite consequences and what his circumstances were that affected his thinking.
Am I misguided anywhere or missing something?
Thank you again.