Northern soldiers in a backwater of the Civil War are imprisoned for freeing slaves by the same Union Army that is freeing slaves on the frontlines.

Now That Should Be A Movie.

Short Pitch

It’s called Incident At Otterville Station.

It’s a Legal Drama.

In the vein of A Few Good Men.

It is like Rules of Engagement meets The Trial of the Chicago 7.

It follows idealist Union soldier Francis Merchant.

And strong slave husband John.

As they attempt to keep a slave owner from selling John’s family during the Civil War.

Problems arise when Union commanders charge Francis Merchant and his fellow soldiers with mutiny for freeing John’s family.

Together they will become the focus of internal political debates in both the Union government and the army command.

The idea came to me when reading the description of John Christgau’s book Otterville Station: A Civil War Story of Slavery and Rescue on Amazon.

My unique approach would be the nuanced experience of Union soldiers juxtaposed with the ambiguous goals of the Union high command and political leaders regarding slavery.

A set piece would be when the Union soldiers who freed the slaves are marched through Jefferson City like common deserters as Lincoln takes the stage in Gettysburg. As they are imprisoned in the basement of an abandoned hotel, Lincoln claims that the United States was conceived in liberty. As the soldiers are put on half rations, Lincoln declares that all men are created equal. As the soldiers convey to each other their feelings of betrayal by their officers, Lincoln declares that a “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Target audiences would be history buffs and men and women aged twenty-five through sixty-five.

People would turn out to see the film due to the universal themes of nuanced history, ambiguous political intrigue, and common soldiers fighting the system. 

Today’s book I would like to pitch as a movie is Incident at the Otterville Station: A Civil War Story of Slavery and Rescue by John Christgau, from University of Nebraska Press. I also consulted One Drop in a Sea of Blue: The Liberators of the Ninth Minnesota by John Lundstrom, from Minnesota Historical Society Press, for more information.

The State of Missouri was a gray area during the American Civil War. It was a slave state in which slavery was in decline. When a convention discussing secession was held in 1861, the delegates rejected the idea since Missouri was dependent on the eastern markets and trade on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Secession would have been economic suicide.

Then President Abraham Lincoln sent out a call for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the Lower South after Fort Sumter was fired upon. Pro-secession Missouri governor Claiborne Fox Jackson responded by creating the Missouri Volunteer Militia, with plans to seize the Federal arsenal in Saint Louis in May, 1861. Federal troops marched out of the city and surrounded the militia, taking them prisoner. Pro-secession residents threw rocks at the Federals when they marched the prisoners into the city. The troops fired back, setting off several days of rioting in which dozens were killed.

Despite finding support in Missouri, Jackson was forced in June to flee from the capital, Jefferson City, and set up a government-in-exile in the south of the state. In October the government-in-exile passed a secession ordinance. The Confederacy recognized Missouri as its twelfth state, a mute gesture since most of the state was under Union occupation.

By 1862, Jackson was in Arkansas. The Union army had prevailed in Missouri and firmly backed the loyalist state government in Jefferson City. In response, Confederate guerrilla bands sprang up in Missouri and began attacking Union positions and infrastructure. One area full of suchactivity was in the northern central area of the state where many southern planters had settled along the banks of the Missouri before the war. It soon became known as Little Dixie. Seriously, there could be several TV shows about the War Between The States in Missouri.

In August 1861 Union General Freemont tried to crush the rebellious activity by proclaiming that the slaves of masters disloyal to the Union were free. But Lincoln, fearing such actions would send slaveholders in Missouri and other border states like Kentucky over to the Confederacy, nullified the proclamation and removed Freemont from command that October.

The ambiguous response of Union army officers to escaped slaves, especially in Missouri, cast shade on the simplistic idea that the North fought the war to end slavery. When escaped slaves first started coming into Union lines, the northern officers did not know what to do with them. Some even returned them to their masters. General Benjamin Butler came up with the idea that slaves were contraband to be confiscated to sabotage the Confederacy’s infrastructure. Under the Second Confiscation Act of July 1862, slaves whose masters were disloyal to the Union could be confiscated if the masters did not surrender to Union forces within sixty days. Lincoln had offered Missouri’s leaders compensation if they freed their slaves. The leaders of the Show Me State and the other border states turned him down. Furthermore, the slaves in Missouri were not declared free by the Emancipation Proclamation since the presence of a loyal state government replacing that of Jackson’s government-in-exile meant Missouri was not in rebellion. In addition, while Congress declared that it was not part of the duty of the soldiers to capture and return fugitive slaves, all the existing rights of Union states and planters having sworn allegiance to the Union, including ownership of slaves, were to be respected and maintained. That meant that runaway slaves in Missouri were not safe in contraband camps. Union generals were conflicted. Some turned slaves away. Some allowed owners to come into the camps and take their slaves back to their homesteads. In some counties, especially in Little Dixie, Union commanders issued permission certificates for slave owners to ship their slaves to Kentucky. Some officers in Missouri did bar owners from coming into their camps to retake their so-called property. There was an incident in which two hundred blue clad soldiers surrounded a father and son who had come into a camp to retrieve their slaves and began stoning them. One compromise was to keep slaves in army custody until civil authorities decided the issue. To sum it up: Union commanders could not aid masters in recovering their slaves, but they could not stop them either.

The most serious attempt to free slaves in Missouri occurred In April 1863. Legal scholar Francis Lieber drew up a code of conduct for Union soldiers in which Confederate guerrillas were characterized as brigands who would be summarily executed and their slaves freed. If their slaves ran into Union lines, they would be free. This did little to suppress the guerilla activity in Missouri.

One of the harshest attempts to quash guerrilla activity in Missouri was General Thomas Ewing’s General Order No. 11. Passed in response to Quantrill’s lethal raid on Lawrence, Kansas, in August, 1863, it depopulated four western Missouri counties of their civilian presence in hopes that without sympathizers aiding and abetting the guerrillas, they would have to flee to friendly areas. Instead, “The Burnt District,” as the region came to be known, simply became a no-man’s land where guerrillas thrived. And a haven to which slaves could escape.

This was too close for comfort for Charles W. Waler who grew hemp in Pettis County, on the border of  Little Dixie. He owned thirteen slaves, six adults and seven children. November 1863 he woke them up to informe them that he was going to do what other Missouri planters had been doing to a thousand slaves for months: ship them to the border state Kentucky to be sold at auction in Louisville. Lundstrom in One Drop In A Sea of Blue  suggests that Walker was not only afraid of the slaves running away to the Burnt District, but was also worried about the future of slavery at the state level. In the November 1863 state elections, the abolitionist and radical elements of the Republican that believed in immediate, uncompensated emancipation and manumission of black soldiers who enlisted in the Union army had been defeated by the conservatives who either believed in gradual, compensated emancipation or in maintaining slavery’s status quo. However, it had only been by 2,436 votes after several allegedly suspicious ballots from radicals in the military were discounted. Such a close election was the writing on the wall for Walker in regarding the future feasibility of slavery in the Show Me State. To avoid financial ruin, he decided to get a return on his investment by selling his slave “property” in Kentucky where pro-slavery factions still held the upper hand in the state government.

When Walker informed the slaves of his decision, Christgau believes that they were shocked since he was always kind and sociable to them, working beside them in the fields. An escaped slave from the area, Henry Clay Bruce, claimed that masters in the area were often good friends with their slaves, trusting them to hide their valuables from marauders, both blue and gray. Walker’s benevolence was most likely to keep the slaves from running away to the free country that surrounded Missouri: Kansas, Iowa and Illinois. His plan on this day was to take the slaves to the train station in Sedalia to begin their journey east. Their odyssey would take them through St. Louis. Radical Republicans living in that city had noticed the traffic of slaves passing through to Kentucky.

The day before Walker took his slaves to the station, the commander of the Department of Missouri, General John Schofield, issued orders from his headquarters in St. Louis prohibiting Union officers from allowing slave owners to take their so-called property to any other state. The lieutenant at Sedalia had not received this order, so he wrote and signed a permit allowing Walker to transport the slaves. However, the ticket agent at the railroad station simply handed the permit back to Walker. The Pacific Railroad agent would not permit him to use the train for shipment since the company had several lawsuits by abolitionists pending against it regarding the transportation of slaves. When the squad of soldiers stationed in Sedalia arrived to guard the depot, they also said Walker could not transport his slaves via the railroad. They even came between him and the passenger cars.

Walker loaded his slaves up and began to ride back out into the countryside. Then he stopped his wagon and told his slaves that he was going to another town, Smithton, where there were no soldiers stationed. Here he would load them on the train. Walker and the slaves arrived in the town at dawn where he gathered the slaves on the train station platform.

While waiting on the platform, John, the first slave Walker ever owned, having bought him seven years previously, made a run for it. Walker shot at him at first, but then decided to cut his losses and stay at the station to guard the other remaining slaves. John headed back to Sedalia. He arrived as the train was loading. He found the soldiers and informed them that Walker had defied them, going to a different station. They simply replied that their orders were to guard the platform. However, they did say that after Smithton the train would stop at Otterville. Just east of there was the Lamine Bridge, where a cantonment of Union soldiers was stationed to guard the crossing against saboteurs. Maybe he could get them to stop Walker. John made a bolt back down the tracks for Otterville. Christgau believes that years of harvesting hemp gave John the strength to run through the autumn morning to reach the soldiers. Lundstrom suggests that a deeper emotional drive strengthened John. Walker had strived to keep the slave families together, selectively purchasing family members of the slaves he already owned. Though a form of paternalism, he also recognized the slave marriages. If the slaves were put up for sale in Kentucky, the families might be separated. John’s feat of endurance and speed was driven by the love of family. 

The soldiers guarding the bridge from rebel saboteurs were the men of companies C and K of the Ninth Minnesota Infantry Regiment. They were recruited from Winona and Mower counties and contained many transplants from New England and New York, immigrants from Germany and Scandinavian countries, and French-Canadian rivermen. Some had joined to defend the white citizens of southern Minnesota during the Great Sioux Uprising the previous year. Others answered the call because the German newspapers spoke of Secesh Rabble killing German Union men. Some were among the very last to join, hoping to avoid the shame of being drafted, while others enlisted for the bounty money. Many were either older or younger than the average Union soldier’s age of twenty-five. Some had strong anti-slavery views, including one who was a minister of the United Brethren, while others saw the end of slavery was secondary to maintaining the Union. Others had sympathy for slaves as individuals but did not have an opinion one way or another on the topic of slavery. All knew that orders from on high forbade them from either assisting in the capture or aiding in the escape of runway slaves. And all would be considered racists by 21^st century standards. For example, many of them were upset that  Lincoln had pardoned all but thirty-eight of the four hundred Dakota sentenced to hang after the 1862 Sioux uprising had been suppressed, which should also be a movie. When John arrived at the cantonment he was the first black man some of the soldiers had ever seen since there were no African Americans in Mower County.

John approached the Minnesota soldiers and hurriedly informed them of the situation. John lied to them, saying that another slave had been shot four times by Walker in the head. He also claimed that Walker was in the rebel army. John found Captain David Wellman and told him his story. Wellman went to discuss matters with his first sergeant, Marcus Whitman. Whitman called for his second sergeant, Francis Merchant. Whitman told Merchant that Wellman wanted the soldiers to volunteer to free the slaves and Merchant was to lead them. The officers relieved themselves of the responsibility for the soldiers’ actions by claiming their backs would be turned so as not to notice any soldiers “leaving camp that morning.” Merchant gathered the troops and informed them of the situation, then asked for volunteers.

Thirty-six soldiers stepped forward from companies to volunteer in the rescue. Why did they volunteer? Perhaps they truly believed the war was being fought to end slavery. Perhaps they volunteered out of boredom since the guerrillas had not tried to burn the bridge. Perhaps the soldiers thought that having free the slaves they would become their camp servants, doing all their laundry and cooking. Perhaps the other soldiers did not volunteer since they had enlisted to fight the Dakota and were tired of sitting around in a backwater of a war that they hoped would soon be over.

At Otterville, Merchant, who was accompanied by John, split the soldiers into two details. He ordered one detail to stand in front of the locomotive to block its progress. The other detail would search the train for Walker and the slaves. Merchant found the slaves in the boxcar. Some were tied together. After untying them, Merchant informed the twelve African Americans that they were free to go. Where was Walker? Christgau claims he stood between the soldiers and the slaves. Lundstrom claims he cowered in the passenger car.

Then the conductor of the train, a man who had helped secure St. Louis for the Union two years earlier by transporting troops, came back to the boxcar. He ordered the slaves to sit back down so the train could start moving. When the train engine start up, the soldiers in front of the locomotive pointed their rifles at the engineer. The conductor asked by whose orders Merchant was freeing the slaves. Merchant claimed that he and all the soldiers were officers. Merchant won the battle with the conductor, and the slaves moved closer to the door.

But then a Captain Oscar B. Queen of the Seventh Missouri Militia Cavalry jumped up in the box car. He was wearing an officer’s greatcoat but no straps or insignia. Again, the slaves stopped moving to the boxcar door. Queen claimed that the companies of the Ninth Minnesota at the Lamine Bridge were part of his military subdistrict. Queen was joined by a Levi Pritchard, captain and inspector for the Central Military District of Missouri. This title meant nothing to Merchant and his men. Walker appeared and showed the officers his pass allowing him to transport the slaves. Queen tried to come to a compromise. Keep the slaves on the train until they came to Lamine Bridge and see just who had ordered the men to volunteer. But Merchant would have none of it, ordering the slaves out of the boxcar.

When the slaves left the boxcar, they gathered around Merchant like he was their new master. He told them to break for the woods. They hesitated at first, but then John led the group towards the woods on the other side of the train tracks where they disappeared altogether. Lundstrom’s book differs with Christgau regarding the timeline of the slaves’ escape. According to his research, the soldiers were marching the slaves down the railroad tracks when they saw a train approaching. It was carrying Queen, Pritchard, Walker and their officer, Wellman. They hurried the slaves into the forest and hid them in a swamp, there they occasionally took them food. A soldier wrote of them still being there after two weeks. After that, the paper trail ends.

Queen and Pritchard remained with Walker on the train until it arrived at the Lamine Bridge. There they confronted Wellman, who denied ordering the men to volunteer, claiming they were AWOL. He agreed to board the train and help Queen, Pritchard and Walker try to find the slaves. They were unsuccessful. Then Queen sent Union General Egbert Brown a telegraph informing him of the incident. Brown sent back a telegraph informing Queen to have Wellman arrest the soldiers and send them under guard to Jefferson City. Wellman had the regiment form up. “All Parties who were engaged in the release of the slaves, step forward,” he ordered. Merchant and the other thirty-six men stepped forward. “You are all under arrest for violation of the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth articles of war.”

They had, according to Wellman, violated Article 6 by showing disrespect and/or contempt to a commanding officer like Queen. They could face death under Article 7 for committing mutiny or sedition. Article 8 covered those who did nothing to stop a mutiny or sedition. They were charged under Article 9 for “offering violence” against a superior officer while obeying a “lawful command.”

Merchant and the others were marched through Jefferson City like common deserters. There they were imprisoned in the basement of an abandoned hotel and put on half rations. They felt betrayed by their officers. Meanwhile, at the dedication of the national cemetery at Gettysburg, Lincoln was proclaiming that the nation would experience a new birth of freedom. In a movie, this would be a good juxtaposition in which the soldiers are imprisoned while an actor delivers The Gettysburg Address in voiceover.

When the passengers on the train arrived in St. Louis, they told newspaper reporters what they had witnessed. One headline read “Another-Nigger-Driver Prevented From Exporting His ‘Chattels’ – This Time Without Orders.” Another read “Attack on a Railroad Train.” The newspapers in Minnesota picked up the story. In a movie, this would call for a good old fashioned montage of printing presses and newspaper boys getting the word out to the public.  One of the imprisoned soldiers wrote a letter to a member of the Missouri General Assembly, H. J. Fisher. Assemblyman Fisher quickly started a petition, which was signed by sixty of his fellow legislators. The petition repeated the lie that Walker was a Confederate officer, said that the train still ran on schedule, and that the soldiers were of upstanding character and ready to sacrifice their lives for the Union. The only mention of slavery was that “the men were all from a free state, and it was only natural that they should hate slavery.”

General Brown, despite being from a free state himself and personally opposed to slavery, was not moved, charging the men with mutiny. The regiment had been formed a year before and Merchant and the other thirty-six should have been well disciplined soldiers by now. Fisher contacted Missouri Senator Gratz Brown, who had many German Americans, a group whose experience has been negated by recent filmmakers and who deserve a movie based on the Lost German Slave Girl, in his constituency. Senator Brown sent a letter on behalf of the thirty-six men to the general. General Brown began his own investigation into the matter and discovered that Walker was not a Confederate officer and had possessed a permit.

With his own version of events laid out, General Brown went to the prisoners. He sympathized with them. But discipline had to be maintained. Then he asked the men if they would acknowledge their error. He was met with silence. Then Brown said that if they would acknowledge their error, they would be released. The men said they were sorry for what they had done, so the general ended their month long stay in prison. After being released, Merchant spent two months in the hospital, sickened from his confinement. Even though the men were free to return to their station at Lamine Bridge, Brown was preparing to ask his superiors that a military board of inquiry be formed to investigate the matter.

In January, Minnesota Senator Morton Wilkinson offered a resolution on the Senate floor in Washington, D. C., that “the Secretary of War is hereby instructed to inform the Senate whether he has any official information in his department relating to the arrest and imprisonment in Missouri of a large number of soldiers of the Ninth Minnesota Regiment.” With some light embellishments, including the lie about Walker being a Confederate, Wilkinson informed the Senate of the incident at Otterville Station. Kansas Senator James Henry Lane, a former Jayhawker who waged war on pro-slavery Missourians early in the war, stood up and claimed Union soldiers were jailed and even bayoneted in Missouri for saying “Hurrah for Jim Lane.” The first part about Nebraskan Union soldiers being jailed was true. He thanked Wilkerson for bringing the incident of Otterville Station to the Senate’s attention and then seat down without voting for the resolution to be passed. It took Missouri senator John B. Henderson to express a desire that the resolution be passed. It did so without objection.

The issue of the incident at Otterville station was also used by Radical Republicans to have General Schofield removed from command of the Department of Missouri. Senator Brown presented a petition from the Missouri General Assembly in which it was claimed that “disloyal elements” were favored by Schofield. He then evoked the image of Merchant and thirty-six men from the Ninth Minnesota. “Blue-eyed northern boy,” Brown said. “Marching from his far-away home to confront a rebellion contending for the mastery of the State – his heart aglow, perhaps with traditions of freedom – [who] finds transgression against the slave code visited with unrelenting harshness while oblivion drapes a corresponding breach of the articles of war.” In the end Schofield would be replaced by another general due to battlefield necessity rather than political ideology.

Around the same time as the politicking in Washington, the Nineth Minnesota was removed from Lamine bridge. As soon as they were gone, the bridge was burned by guerrillas. They were stationed in Warrensburg, where citizens complained of the soldiers discharging their weapons in town. Then in a dispute over liquor, a Minnesota soldier shot an Irishman, killing him. Other soldiers, angry at Captain Wellman, began making him the butt of their pranks. One prank was placing sod over his chimney pipe, smoking him out of his winter quarters. Some soldiers even murmured of shooting officers once they were engaged in battle. This gave the regiment the appearance of a undisciplined mob, which would not help the case of Merchant and the others soldiers if the army proceeded with their court-martials.

That would be the crisis at the top of the plot’s ascending action as the Secretary of War Edwin Stanton began collecting material for his report. The responsibility for the charges laid with Queen, Pritchard, Wellman, and General Brown. Wellman refused to defend the troops, leaving their only defense up to Missouri legislators and northern newspaper editors who insisted that Union soldiers were not waging a war to maintained slavery. General Brown continued to insist that Walker was a loyal citizen of Missouri and that the troops should be charged with mutiny, since they had cocked and pointed their guns at an engineer. The individual feelings and personal morality of the soldiers did not matter, he said in his version of events, which varied from that of the other officers. However, after a seven-week investigation, Secretary Stanton dismissed the charges of mutiny against Merchant and the others. Stanton reasoned that the army would be not be benefited by a court-martial of the soldiers. Decades later when applying for pensions some of the soldiers found it necessary to clarify they had never been court-martialed. But that was in the future. For now, they were free men. 

The soldiers hardly had any time to enjoy their freedom as they were quickly shipped off to fight Nathan Bedford Forrest, who also deserves a movie, in northern Mississippi. After repairing bridges burned by Confederate guerrillas, Wellman was promoted to an engineer position and removed from the regiment which he had refused to defend. Merchant survived the war to return to Minnesota to live out his life as a farmer and then chief of police of Albert Lea. Of the other thirty-six men, one fell in battle, ten sustained wounds, eleven were captured, six died in prison camps, two died in Union hospitals, thirteen were discharged due to health or wounds, and two deserted. When the Ninth Minnesota disbanded, only fourteen of the liberators remained. And in response to their actions at Otterville Station, the Unionist governor of Missouri ordered that no more slaves could be shipped out of the state.

No one knows what became of John and the thirteen other escaped slaves. Did they make it to a northern city where they were met by poverty and prejudice? Did they make it to a contraband camp where the men enlisted in the Union army and the women and children were taken into the care of the Freedmen’s Bureau? Did they die of exposure and hunger in the wilderness? Did Union officials find and return them to Walker? Were they murdered by bushwhackers? Were they captured and sold back into slavery farther south? Their mysterious fate gives the story of Otterville Station the kind of ambiguous ending with which more movies about the American Civil War should have in our current heated political atmosphere.

This historic event would be a fairly easy Civil War movie to make. Other than guerilla attacks on the bridge, there no epic battle scenes. Perhaps artistic license could be taken and there could be a skirmish with guerrillas. It would be during this skirmish that the character arch of Merchant could be completed as he chooses not to shoot his officer or stops the other thirty six men from shooting Wellman. With only a few skirmish, it could be shot on a relatively small budget and require just a few hundred extras. It would be a legal drama, with the elements of rebelling against the system, political intrigue, betrayal and the experience of individuals whose lives remain hidden in the footnotes of history.

Because it is a nuanced and ambiguous incident from a critical point in American history is why I believe that Incident At Otterville Station should be a movie.