In eighteen sixty-one Missouri faced a crisis over whether to remain in the Union or choose secession, with Governor Claiborne Fox Jackson urging the state to stand with the South while most Missourians held a conditional Unionist position that favored remaining in the Union but not fighting the seceded states. Tensions sharpened through events in Saint Louis, including the struggle over the arsenal, the Camp Jackson Affair, and the collapse of neutrality after the Planters House meeting, leading Jackson and Sterling Price to flee and raise pro-Southern forces while Nathaniel Lyon and Franz Sigel moved to stop them. On July five, eighteen sixty-one, after Lyon had seized Jefferson City and scattered state guard forces at Boonville, Jackson’s roughly six thousand volunteers, only about two-thirds armed, met Sigel’s eleven hundred well-drilled Union troops northwest of Carthage as Jackson tried to reach the safer southwestern corner of Missouri and unite with Price and nearby Confederates from Arkansas. The battle opened with artillery fire at long range, then turned into a fighting retreat as Sigel, threatened with encirclement, pulled back across Dry Fork Creek, fought hard delaying actions, broke through a cavalry blockade at Buck Branch with a bayonet charge, covered his withdrawal at Spring River and in Carthage, and finally escaped toward Sarcoxie after nightfall. The battle caused two hundred forty-four casualties, left the field to Jackson, and lifted Southern morale in Missouri even though Sigel saved nearly all his wagons and most of his force. Carthage became one of the earliest and bloodiest Missouri engagements of the war’s opening stage, briefly strengthening the Southern cause before later Union victories, especially at Pea Ridge in eighteen sixty-two, secured Missouri for the Union for the rest of the war.
