How about American troops that attack other American troops that they deem not to be radical enough for their tastes? That same band of renegades from St. Louis did just that in Missouri by instigating a war with the Missouri State Militia.
This business of creating a private army, a sort of Black Republican Sturmabteilung, has never been taken seriously or looked at closely as far as I can tell. Sandburg told the story, but only in terms honorific to the intrepid Captain Lyon, Hero of the Union.
The fact that Lyon did something fairly close to what Aaron Burr tried to do, and for which Swartout and Bollman were arrested by the federal authorities, one doesn't read about much.
Missouri was a State.
Very true. One of the ex-Wide Awakes leaders later wrote about some of the stuff that went on in St. Louis. They had troopers secretly drilling inside of a warehouse and smuggled arms to them inside of falsely labelled crates. Their object was to wait until the White House transfered hands then arm these Wide Awakes out of the St. Louis arsenal and declare them mustered into the "federal army" once they had control of the government. The plot was downright Hitlerian, give that he did the exact same thing with the NSDAP's private storm squadrons once he gained power.