Today begins the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, or the War Between the States, as it is known in some parts of the nation. On April 12, 1861, the Confederacy bombarded Fort Sumter. The cannons then echo through the country now because we are still a nation divided by ideology.
It was a huge war, the bloodiest we have ever fought. Because of poor record-keeping, especially in the Confederacy, the number of total casualties is estimated to be about 650,000. Approximately 10,000 battles were fought throughout the theater of war, which was not confined to the 13 original colonies and the trans-Appalachian region to the Mississippi River. The Civil War extended into Kansas, Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and into southern California.
It trickled into East Idaho Territory (Montana Territory after May 26, 1864) with the gold seekers in 1862, swelling into a flood after the gold strikes on Grasshopper Creek (Bannack) in July 1862 and on Alder Creek early in June 1863.
(No, there is no quiz. The dates are just to help you orient yourself to the Civil War in the East.)
By contemporary accounts, Confederate sympathizers were in the majority in the gold fields. A decided majority. Wilbur Fisk Sanders, Montana’s first senator, wrote to his sister, “I am the only lawyer of the Union persuasion in the Gulch.” It could make a man lonely, but Sanders was a courageous, strong-minded man with a turn for blistering sarcasm. He could also get along with people who did not agree with him when the cause was good.
Beginning in December 1863, the cause was important enough that men on both sides of the conflict cooperated to establish law and order in a region where ruffians ruled and murder was tolerated. They formed a Vigilance Committee, and became what Josiah Dimsdale calls in his account of their actions, The Vigilantes of Montana.
For example:
Paris Swayze Pfouts — Vigilante President, Confederate. He objected very strenuously to being forced to take the loyalty oath, as he writes in his autobiography, Four Firsts for a Modest Hero. He was elected Mayor of Virginia City, and he held the highest Masonic office in Montana Ty. until after the war, when he moved to Texas.
Wilbur F. Sanders — Vigilante Prosecutor, Union. During the trial of George Ives, Sanders and other men who believed Ives had murdered young Nicholas Tbalt, feared that he might not be convincing to the rag-tag, mostly Southern, crowd of miners. They thought all the lawyers in the Gulch had been hired by Ives, but another man volunteered.
Charles S. Bagg — Vigilante Prosecutor, Confederate. Bagg, the volunteer, was a trained lawyer as well as a miner. He was very effective in arguing for Ives’s guilt. The miners trusted him because his clothes were as dirty and ragged as theirs, his hair and beard as wild, and he spoke with a Southern accent.
All five lawyers for the defense were Confederate sympathizers.
You can find more information about the Vigilantes and the Ives trial on my main website.
Coming Friday: Civil War divisions still exist in the nation and in Montana: The Cannons’ Echo.
