Sharp and Cobb: A Violent End
West of St. Louis, due north of the Missouri River, was territory known as “Little Dixie” for its concentration of Confederate sympathizers. Some Unionists lived there as well, including lawyer Benjamin Sharp, once a student in the first class at the Virginia Military Institute. He married and in 1843 settled in Danville, Mo., close to members of his family; in 1854 he was elected to a seat in the Missouri Senate.

Among his neighbors in central Missouri was the Cobb family, including son Alvin Cobb, a notorious Rebel bushwhacker. Cobb and Sharp were acquainted, but they could hardly have been more different: While Sharp was an articulate politician, the one-armed Cobb was known as “a man of few words,” according to a Sharp descendant; while Sharp was an idealist and a courageous soldier, Cobb was a brutal renegade.

In July 1861 Col. Sharp and fellow soldier Lt. A. Jager were heading to Mexico, Mo., in a horse and buggy, with orders to raise a regiment for the Union cause. But they took a wrong turn, and as they circled round south of Martinsburg, Cobb’s men ambushed them, firing on the unsuspecting pair. Both were badly wounded but not killed outright.

An 1885 history of Montgomery County picks up the story. Cobb “told them they must die, and asked them if they wished to pray. Jager made no answer, but Sharp kneeled down and prayed God to ... grant that the armies of the Union might be successful, and the Union itself preserved to his posterity forever. Ben Sharp died as he had lived, brave as a lion, devoted to the Union cause. ... The prayer finished ... both men were shot kneeling; then they were taken off and buried.”

Today, a tall monument in a weedy cemetery south of Interstate 70 in Danville marks the resting place of Sharp. It was commissioned by the local Masonic Lodge, to which he belonged. The town of Danville was largely leveled a few years after Sharp’s death; in October 1864 most of it was burned by another group of Rebel guerrillas, who also killed several townspeople. One building left unharmed was the chapel of the Danville Female Academy, which Missouri’s Civil War Heritage Foundation is now planning to restore.
Cobb was 1 armed from previous fight prior to Civil War.