Troubled State

A native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Dick moved to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1842 and began practicing law there. In 1851 he married Myra Madison Alexander, a sister-in-law of Francis Preston, Jr., “Frank” Blair’s. Well-educated and connected to the politically powerful Blair family, Dick’s journals provide an interesting look at a civilian’s life during the war, convey a sense of the psychological impact of the conflict, and are interspersed with much reflection on war news, religion, and finances.

Dick resided in the Philadelphia area during the beginning and ending stages of the war, and the majority of his surviving journals detail that phase of his life. Although his first entries were written in the Philadelphia area, Dick reflected back on life in politically divided St. Louis in early 1861. Dick vividly detailed his friendship with Brigadier General Nathaniel Lyon, the riot at Camp Jackson, and the meetings of pro-Union supporters in Dick’s law office. Upon his return to Philadelphia, Dick invested in a cartridge-making factory along with a brother-in-law. Problems with this endeavor frequently troubled him, and the venture ended in tragedy when the factory exploded in March 1862 and several workers died.

Back in St. Louis, Dick engaged in strenuous and stressful attempts to maintain Missouri’s loyalty to the Union. His surviving journals detail some of his work on the Board of Assessors in St. Louis. As the editor ably describes it the “board’s purpose was to raise money for the Western Sanitary Commission to support civilian refugees in St. Louis. Southern sympathizers who did not voluntarily donate money to the commission were required to pay an assessment based on the value of their property and the degree of their disloyalty…” (p. 87). In November 1862, Major General Samuel R. Curtis appointed Dick provost marshal general for the Department of Missouri, a position in which he served until May 1863. As provost marshal general, Dick served as overseer of military prisons in the department, dealt with suspected spies and others who were disloyal, and had authority to banish individuals. Again, he served in a position that infuriated Southern sympathizers but won him praise from Unionists. Dick’s letters from this time convery the challenges of life in that “troubled state”, Missouri. As a useful corrective to prevailing views of Abraham Lincoln, it is interesting to note that although Dick respected Lincoln, he felt Lincoln treated Southerners much too leniently.

In the journal covering the latter part of the war, Dick spent much time considering whether to move back to St. Louis. It is apparent from this portion of his journal that his work in St. Louis had caused some type of psychological trauma leading to great indecisiveness and a desire for vengeance on Southerners. The title of the book also serves as a useful description of Dick’s mindset during this part of the war.

The editor has done a good job of identifying individuals written about by Dick and placing his journals and letters in context, although this reviewer desired more information about the explosion at the cartridge-making factory. A helpful chronology of war events is included at the beginning of each chapter, and there are two appendices: one includes short biographical sketches of military leaders and family members and the other is a genealogy of Dick’s family. Dick’s writings are an unusual addition to Civil War literature, valuable for their portrayal of how the war impacted one man in a politically divided border state.

His eyewitness description of Capt. (soon to be Gen.) Nathaniel Lyon’s “tremulous,” emotional reaction to civilian victims counters the image of Lyon as a hard-bitten, calculating career officer.

Gari Carter, the great-great-granddaughter of Franklin Dick and custodian of his wartime journals, has painstakingly transcribed and annotated them into a vivid, accessible, often surprising first-person account of the war in Missouri.

“Troubled State: Civil War Journals of Franklin Archibald Dick” encompasses the fears and passions of a partisan, committed Union man.

These pages reflect whiplash pessimism and optimism about the Union war effort. He was an early critic of President Abraham Lincoln’s “cowardly” war leadership, including support of Gen. John C. Fremont.

“(W)ith Fremont I fear the Rebels may get full possession of the State, even of St. Louis,” Dick writes.

The law partner and brother-in-law of Francis P. Blair Jr., he also experienced the metamorphosis of that remarkable political and military leader. And Dick was sufficiently anxious about his family’s well-being in those desperate times to invest in a cartridge factory, whose workers were victims of its own success when it exploded.

During 1862-63, Dick was provost marshal general of the Union Army’s Department of the Missouri. In effect, he was the ruling military judicial authority while the state was under martial law and, though an efficient administrator, advocated harsh justice for “traitors” and Confederate sympathizers.

“St. Louis is the seat and centre of the rebel plots & schemes, and spies revel here,” he warned in 1863.

A critic of Lincoln to the end, he even found a silver lining in the assassination of this “good” but, to his mind, weak man. Lincoln’s “mawkish sensibility nauseated the Southern heart,” he writes. “And yet, he was the very bulwark of safety to them.”

“I left Missouri because the President would not allow the defenders of the country to strike down their enemies. As soon as we had disarmed the Enemy, the President stepped in & disarmed us. … Now I want Mr. (former Vice President Andrew) Johnson to deal with these Rebels, as only the Border State Union Man knows how to do.”

Under Missouri’s draconian Drake Constitution, radical Republicans did exact some revenge against their former enemies. It was not until Union men more broad-minded than Franklin Dick stepped up critically, among them, his brother-in-law Frank Blair — that Missouri began to heal its wounds.

Martin Northway is a writer and regional historian in Callaway County, Mo.

Troubled State
A family history-based book that does draw from actual fact is Black Mountain-based author Gari Carter’s Troubled State: Civil War Journals of Franklin Archibald Dick (Truman State University Press, 2008). The text is culled from the journals of Carter’s great-great-grandfather, a prominent St. Louis attorney and Assistant Adjutant General to Captain Nathaniel Lyon.

Dick, it turns out, was loyal to the Union in the midst of politically-tirn St. Louis, and his journals demonstrate his own misgivings about the war and concerns as to his own future. It’s an intriguing premise for a book, but worth noting that readers without more than a passing interest in battles and Civil War history will find Troubled to be a dense and fairly dry read. The 205 pages of journal entries are packed with footnotes — often four to a page — and are followed by detailed biographies and a genealogy of the Dick Family.

But there are rare gems tucked into the pages: Images of Dick’s letters to military personnel, a letter from President Abraham Lincoln himself, and Dick’s of-the-moment perspective on momentous events. “Mr. Lincoln, the President, was assassinated last evng. in Washington …” he writes. “Here and now is the life of the Nation struck at by this vile rebellion. Mr. Lincoln throughout has failed to appreciate the wickedness of these people — pardons & pardons have fallen from him into the hands of guilty doers — who have turned again from their pardoned crimes, to again slay & destroy the defenders of Nation.”

Such weighty insights are an important contribution to the unfolding of American history, and Troubled, though scholarly and challenging, provides a keen look back in time.

Gari Carter reads from Troubled State at Malaprop’s on Wednesday, May 21. The event begins at 7 p.m.

— Alli Marshall, A&E reporter

From 5/15/08 Author crafts book from ancestor’s diary. BLACK MOUNTAIN’S, Gari Carter’s discovery of her great-grandfather Franklin Dick’s diary led her to write a book, Troubled State, The Civil War Journals of Franklin Archibald Dick (Truman State University Press, 2008). From firsthand account of Dick’s experiences as Missouri assistant adjutant general and provost marshal general, Carter crafted a story of St. Louis’ divided and violent history during the Civil War. Dick, an ardent supporter of the Union, was frequently troubled by the slow progress and terrible cost of the war. For him, the divided city of St. Louis presented a test of personal strength. Carter, who makes her home in Black Mountain, will sign the book 1-3 p.m. today at Barnes & Noble and at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Malaprop’s Bookstore/Cafe. For more information, visit garicarter.com

Published Sunday, March 23, 2008 at 4:30 a.m.
Last updated Sunday, March 23, 2008 at 3:57 a.m.

Ten years of squinting at faded Spencerian script in two old journals and countless hours of research by the great-great-granddaughter of Missouri’s provost marshal general have yielded a new addition to the source material for Civil War scholars.

“Troubled State: Civil War Journals of Franklin Archibald Dick” (Truman State University Press, $34.95) by Gari Carter is drawn from 2 of 10 journals Dick kept as the United States was going through the upheaval of the Civil War.

Heavily annotated, the book is designed to appeal to Civil War scholars and amateurs alike.

The two journals, one leather-bound and the other a school copybook, were handed down to Carter, an only child, by her mother in the 1960s. They had been stored wrapped in tissue paper in a department-store gift box. The only other artifacts of Dick’s service were a campaign chest and two swords of uncertain provenance, and another set of journals from an ancestor on another branch of the family tree.

Carter, who lives in North Carolina and spends part of her winters in Sarasota, kept the journals for years as bits of family history. It wasn’t until after she finished her first book, “Healing Myself,” an account of her recovery from an automobile accident that left her critically injured and her face in ruins, that she began to look more closely at the journals.

She began to research the family genealogy and to painstakingly transcribe the journals.

“They actually were in surprisingly good condition,” she said. “The pages were a little yellowed. The hardest part was reading his handwriting and getting used to the way he wrote.”

Dick was born in 1824 in Philadelphia and established a law practice in the frontier town of St. Louis, Mo., in 1842. Missouri had entered the Union as a slave state in 1821 after the Missouri Compromise, “which allowed slavery in Missouri, but prohibited slavery from then on in territories north of Missouri’s southern border,” Carter writes in the introduction to “Troubled State.” The Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which repealed that prohibition, inflamed the simmering tensions along the border.

Franklin Dick became law partners with Frank Blair, whose brother was mayor of St. Louis. The two helped organize the Free Soil Party in Missouri, which opposed the spread of slavery into new territories. When the situation worsened in 1861, Dick took his family back to Philadelphia and returned to St. Louis as adjutant general to Union Gen. Nathaniel Lyon.

“In the midst of this turmoil, Franklin Dick started to write his journals, never intending for anyone else to read them,” Carter writes. “He began looking over the events of the previous nine months and recorded his introspective and outspoken views.

“His life had rapidly changed from that of an intellectual St. Louis attorney and businessman to that of an ardent Unionist in the midst of a turbulent Civil War.”

Carter said her own knowledge of the Civil War tended to skew away from the Midwest and toward the eastern and southern battles, so reading Dick’s journals was a revelation for her.

“Once I started, it was almost like a page-turner,” she said. Even knowing the end of the story, “reading how he dealt with things, what was happening in his daily life, was just riveting.”

Carter sought advice from the publishers of Civil War histories on how best to proceed with the book. Nancy Rediger, editor of Truman State University Press, “must have e-mailed me for six months, with different places to do research, a lot of really good suggestions. So those were the guidelines I used as I started, not doing too many footnotes, but doing enough that people would know what was going on.”

She had a rude awakening when she sent the manuscript off, however.

“I was so naive,” she said. “I’d never done any scholarly things. I’d done all these footnotes and all these references, but I hadn’t done any page numbers or any of that.” Ultimately she had to recheck every reference to appropriately footnote the volume.

The journals are but 2 of 10, bookending the war; the others were lost. In 1862 Dick was appointed provost marshal general for Missouri, “making him responsible for carrying out orders for banishment or assessment of disloyal persons and for overseeing the military prisons and dealing with prisoners,” Carter writes. His correspondence in that role was preserved in the Library of Congress and makes up the center section of the book.

Enough additional correspondence remains that Carter expects to get another book out of it. But the journals and letters are of interest to her less as war artifacts and more as an individual’s history.

“I’ve never been interested in the Civil War,” she said. “I’m more interested in the personal part of it than the actual war and the battles. I’m more interested in what they experienced and how they went through it.”

When she speaks to groups of Civil War enthusiasts, as she will this week, “it’s interesting for me. They’re the experts and I’m not. I’ve learned a lot from them.”