During the Battle of Kirksville on August 6, 1862, the Union Army captured several Confederate prisoners. These were interrogated by Union Colonel John McNeil or some of his men who learned that 17 of the 47 captives had been paroled. This meant they had previously served in the Confederate Army and had been taken prisoner a first time by Union forces. They were paroled if they would swear an oath not to take up arms against the United States again. Since they had violated this oath by again serving as a Confederate soldier, they could be executed by firing squad.
It was August 6, 1862, when Confederate officer Colonel Joseph C. Porter, who was in Northeast Missouri recruiting new soldiers for the Confederate Army, decided to take a stand in Kirksville against his pursuer, Union Colonel John McNeil. The Union soldiers were fully armed and ready for battle. The Confederate recruits were not, but they took a stance the best they could.
In the summer of 1862, the Civil War had been a reality in the United States for about a year. Due to the lack of news sources in those days, citizens were not well informed about battles and skirmishes going on around them. They relied on newspapers and word of mouth coming through the stagecoach lines, railways or by telegraph. Unfortunately, Kirksville did not have the latter two sources in 1862. Perhaps the locals had heard of the Confederate defeat at the Battle of Pea Ridge in Arkansas in March 1862, but little did they know that one of the major officers in that battle, Major General Sterling Price, would soon send a man to northern Missouri to recruit young men for the Confederate Army.
Last week, we learned about the first skirmish of the Civil War in Adair County at the Westenhaver home north of Kirksville. There, Corporal Hervey Dix from Iowa became Adair County’s first casualty of that war.
Hervey Dix was not a native of Missouri, but during his duties as a corporal in the early part of the Civil War, he became the first casualty of that war in Adair County, Mo. He was buried in Kirksville, and after the war, he was honored by having a post of the Grand Army of the Republic in Adair County named for him.