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Missouri was called upon for four regiments of militia as her quota of the seventy-five thousand. Governor Jackson replied to the president that he considered the requisition “illegal, unconstitutional and revolutionary in its objects, inhuman and diabolical, and cannot be complied with.” At the same time he was going on with preparations for carrying the state out of the Union, contrary to the desires of a majority of its inhabitants, as if they had no rights that he was bound to respect!
As before stated, the arsenal at St. Louis is completely dominated by the range of hills beyond it, and a military force having possession of these hills would have the arsenal in its control. The secession leaders laid their plans to take possession of these hills in order to capture the arsenal. Learning of their intentions, Captain Lyon threw up a line of defensive works in the streets outside the walls of the arsenal, whereupon the secessionists invoked the local laws and endeavored to convince him that he had no right to do anything of the kind. The board of police commissioners ordered him to keep his men inside the walls of the arsenal, but he refused to do so, and for this he was loudly denounced as a violator of the law.
There were about seven hundred men in Camp Jackson, under command of General Frost. Captain Lyon had issued arms to several regiments of the Home Guards of St. Louis, in spite of the protest of the police commissioners, who considered his action in doing so highly improper. These regiments, added to the regular soldiers composing the garrison at the arsenal, gave Captain Lyon a force of six or seven thousand men, with which he marched out on Friday, the tenth of May, surrounded Camp Jackson, and demanded its surrender. Under the circumstances General Frost could do nothing else than surrender, which he did at once. The militia stacked their arms and were marched out on their way to the arsenal. A short distance from the camp they were halted for some time, and during the halt a large crowd of people collected, nearly all of them being friends of the prisoners or sympathizers with secession.
Most of the Home Guards were Germans, and during the halt they were reviled with all the epithets with which the tongues of the secession sympathizers were familiar. These epithets comprised all the profanity and vulgarity known to the English language in its vilest aspects, and added to them was the opprobrious name of “Dutch blackguards,” which was applied in consequence of one of the companies calling itself Die Schwartze Garde. Without orders, some of the soldiers fired on the jeering mob; the fire passed along the line until several companies had emptied their rifles, and twenty-eight people fell, killed or mortally wounded, among them being three prisoners. Then the firing ceased as suddenly as it began, and the prisoners were marched to the arsenal.
On the eleventh all the captured men were liberated on their parole not to bear arms against the United States. One officer, Captain Emmett McDonald, refused to accept release on this condition, and like a true secessionist sought his remedy through the Constitution and the laws of the country. It took a long time to secure it, but eventually he was liberated on a technicality, went South and joined the Southern cause, and was killed in battle not long afterward.
“What has all this to do with Jack and Harry?” the impatient reader asks. We shall very soon find out.