USA > Louisiana > The province and the states, a history of the province of Louisiana under France and Spain, and of the territories and states of the United States formed therefrom, Vol. IV > Part 12
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Both the Stringfellows, whose names occur oftener in the bor- der troubles of the time than any other Missourians, excepting Atchison Himself, accepted the situation cheerfully. Benjamin F. who had been a member of the legislature and attorney general in Missouri, moved from Missouri to Atchison in 1858, returned to IV --- 0)
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Missouri later on, resided in Kansas City for a time, became a Republican after the Civil war, helped to build up every town in which he resided, was attorney for the Kansas City, St. Joseph and Council Bluffs Railway for a few years, and died in Chicago in 1891, aged seventy-five. Doctor Stringfellow, who was three years younger than his brother, was, like him, born in Virginia, and also, like him, was a public spirited and personally popular man. He practiced medicine in several places in Missouri before he helped to found Atchison in 1854, moved to St. Joseph, Mo., in his latter years, and is living there still ( 1903).
But although the raids for political purposes into Kansas had ended by the beginning of Governor Stewart's service, the troubles on the frontier were far from being over. Lawless bands-border ruffians from Missouri and jayhawkers from Kansas, the designation border ruffian, however, being popularly applied to the political raiders as well as to the predatory bands of Missourians of a later day-crossed the line in cach direc- tion and murdered, robbed and burned in a desultory way until near the beginning of the Civil war, of which the Kansas struggle was the opening skirmish. One of these incursions into Missouri is historically important from the fact that John Brown was a leader in it.
Brown, who had been in Kansas most of the time from Octo- ber, 1855, and who had participated in several demonstrations on the free state men's side, invaded Vernon county, Mo., with a few men on December 20, 1858, liberated eleven slaves belonging to Hicklan, LaRue and Cruise, all residing close to the Little Osage. Cruise was killed, but not by the party under Brown's immediate command. Brown carried the slaves into Kansas, and, baftling his pursners, eventually led them to Canada and freedom. This was less than a year before his last and most sensational act, the attack on Harper's Ferry and his execution. Brown's raid into Missouri incited the passage of an act by the legislature, approved by Governor Stewart on February 24, 1859, appropri- ating thirty thousand dollars for the suppression of the banditti and the protection of the people of the frontier counties, and empowering the governor to use his discretion in the way he should put this statute in operation. Prompt and joint action by Governor Stewart, Governor Medary of Kansas Territory, and by the federal military authorities in 1850, checked the guerrilla warfare on the frontier, and a semblance of peace was had until it was spoken by real was in TSot.
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CHAPTER XIV
Social and Political Situation in 1860
T HE year 1860, which saw the most important political canvass that the country has known, and which was the eve of the . country's greatest war, showed a population of 1,182,012 in Missouri, of which 114,931 were slaves and 3,572 were free -
negroes. In 1850 the state's aggregate population was 682,044. From the twenty-third place among the states in inhabitants in 1820, the year of the passage of its admission act, Missouri had advanced to the thirteenth place in 1850 and to the eighth in 1860, leading all the rest of the slave states except Virginia, which still, of course, included West Virginia.
In both population and wealth St. Louis had grown much more rapidly than the rest of the state during the decade. From 77,860 inhabitants in 1850 her total had increased to 160,773 in 1860. St. Louis was the eighth on the list of the country's cities in population in that year, being led, in this order, by New York, Philadelphia, Brooklyn ( which dropped off the roll in 1897 by its absorption by New York), Baltimore, Boston, New Orleans and Cincinnati. In that year Kansas City, St. Joseph, Hannibal, Springfield, Jefferson City, Sedalia, Independence, Boonville, Cape Girardieu, Lexington, Louisiana, St. Charles, Macon and Weston were also thriving communities.
Though Missouri's growth in inhabitants in the decade had been notably large, her expansion in wealth was much faster. While, according to the national census returns, the valuation of her property, real and personal, was one hundred thirty-seven million dollars in round figures, in 1850, it was five hundred one million dollars in 1860. This amount, which was equivalent to two hun- dred one dollars for each man, woman and child in the state in
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1850, reached a per capita of four hundred twenty-four dollars ten years later.
Missouri had attained a high rank as an agricultural state by 1860. The value of her lands ( this, however, including the unim- proved lands as well as the improved) was put at two hundred thirty-one million dollars in that year, and nine million dollars additional represented farming implements, and fifty-four mill- ion dollars stood for the value of her live stock. She had twenty million dollars invested in manufactures, which worked up annu- ally about twenty-four million dollars in raw material, employing a little over 2,000 persons, and yielding a finished product of forty- three million five hundred thousand dollars. The output of her lead, coal and iron mines was also beginning to reach important figures.
There were 817 miles of railroad in Missouri in 1860, and the cost of the railroad building in the state along to that time was put at about forty-two million five hundred thousand dollars. The most important of these roads were the Pacific ( the present Mis- souri Pacific, the construction of which began in 1850, as men- tioned in a previous chapter of this history, but which, in its extension westward from St. Louis, did not reach Kansas City until 1865), the Hannibal and St. Joseph, the North Missouri, the Iron Mountain, and the Southwest Branch of the Pacific, afterward known as the St. Louis and San Francisco.
The completion of the Pacific railroad to Jefferson City, one hundred and twenty-five miles from St. Louis, in 1855, was attended with a disaster which was one of the memorable occur- rences of the time. An excursion train comprising nine crowded coaches went over the road to celebrate the event on November 4 of that year, and on crossing the Gasconade river a span of the bridge gave way, and the locomotive and several of the cars went down. Forty-three persons were killed and many more were injured, while the locomotive and cars were a complete wreck. Among the persons who lost their lives were Thomas S. O'Sullivan, chief engineer of the road; Mann Butler, author of a history of Kentucky ; Henry Chouteau, a well known St. Louis business man ; Rev. John Teasdale and Rev. Dr. Bullard, also of St. Louis ; and one or two members of the legislature.
To the railroads which have just been named and one or two others the state, as was the custom of the time throughout the west, pouanteed bonds issued by them, the extent. of the obliga- tion being about twenty-four million dollars. The Hannibal and St. Joseph was the only one of the roads which preserved its
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faith. All the other defaulted and were sold by the state soon after the Civil war, the proceeds of which sales, however, reach- ing only six million dollars, leaving a balance, on principal and interest, of twenty-five million dollars due by the roads, which the state had to assume.
Missouri got direct railway communication with the Atlantic seaboard in 1857 by the junction of the Baltimore and Ohio, the Northwestern Virginia, the Marietta and Cincinnati, and the Ohio and Mississippi roads, the western terminus of the last named line being at East St. Louis, opposite St. Louis.
That was not the first point at which the Mississippi was touched by railroad from the East. Rail connection ( from Bos- ton as well as from New York) was opened from the East with Chicago in 1853. In 1854 the Mississippi was reached at Rock Island by the completion of the Chicago and Rock Island road. The Mississippi was also touched at Memphis in March, 1857, by the opening of the Charleston and Memphis line. It was June 5 of the latter year when the connections between Baltimore and Fast St. Louis were established, and St. Louis received its first through communication by rail with the Atlantic coast. It was 1874, however, before the first bridge, the Eads, across the Mississippi at St. Louis was finished.
The completion of the railroad connection from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi opposite St. Louis had a larger recogni- tion than did any other railroad event of that period except the opening of the Frie to Dunkirk six years earlier. The exercises in St. Louis, which were participated in by many national celeb- tities, as well as by local magnates from every important point on or near the connecting lines, began on June 5, and lasted three days. During that time St. Louis was the gayest of the United States' cities. The opening day of the world's fair in 1904 will hardly be more ecstatic. Hundreds of visitors, some from points as far distant as New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore, were present. Among them were cabinet officers, governors, con- gressmen, mayors and other dignitaries. At midnight on Thurs- day, June 4, the first train arrived. Then started a round of festivities, consisting of military and civic parades, banquets, speechmaking, drives through the city and its surroundings, and sails up and down the Mississippi. The theaters were open each night to the visitors, and special entertainments were given in their humor. Receptions were also extended to them at the resi- dences of many of the prominent citizens.
The railroads which touched the Mississippi opposite St. Louis
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connected three states ( Maryland, Virginia and Missouri) techni- cally belonging to the South with three (Ohio, Indiana and Illi- nois) belonging to the North. That circumstance, in that era of secession threats which were soon to be put in practice, had a significance which some of the orators ( Mayor Wimer of St. Louis, Edward Bates and others) on that occasion took pains to point out.
Two years after the railroad from the East reached the Mis- sissippi opposite St. Louis the Missouri was connected with the Mississippi by rail by the completion of the Hannibal and St. Joseph to the last named place in 1859. From St. Josephi as its easterly terminus the pony express line to San Francisco started in 1860.
Missouri's great transportation agencies, however, in 1860, were the steamboats and not the railroads. The steamboats on the watercourses of the Mississippi valley reached their highest number and splendor on the eve of the Civil war. The rivers were then at the height of their activity and importance. By way of the Mississippi, north and south, the Missouri, the Ohio, the Illinois and other streams, St. Louis was in direct water communication in 1860 with most of the important points in the great valley, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Falls of St. Anthony, and from Pittsburg, near the Alleghanies, to Fort Benton, in the shadow of the Rocky mountains.
Moreover, in other than the strictly material things Missouri was also in a fairly satisfactory condition in 1860. In number, pecuniary support and attendance its churches compared favor- ably with those of the average Western state. Its public school system had just made rapid and premanent advances over its previous condition. A school fund of a rudimentary sort was established by act of congress in 1812, back in the territorial days. Thomas F. Riddick, one of Missouri's most public spirited and valuable citizens, originated the act, and Edward Hemp- stead, the territory's first delegate, presented it in congress. Governor Dunklin, who served from 1832 to 1836, did good work for the school system of the state's early era. James S. Rollins, the father of the State University, at Columbia, performed an important service in the same general field. All that had been done in this sphere was materially supplemented by an act of the legislature signed by Gov. Sterling Price on Februay 24, 1853.
Under the law of 1853 twenty five per cent of the reveniles of th tate were set apart for the benefit of the common schools, and added to the previous annual accruing funds. These reve-
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nues were distributed among the counties according to the num- ber of children of school age in them. The highest amount which the public schools of the state received under the old con- ditions was sixty-five million dollars in 1853, just before the act of that year went into effect. In 1854, the first year of the . operation of the new law, the school fund was swelled to one hundred seventy-two million dollars. It steadily increased with the growth of the state's revenues, and amounted to two hun- dred sixty-two million dollars in 1860. Suspended most of the time during the Civil war period, the allotment of the fund was resumed just afterward, and has continued ever since.
Among the institutions of the higher education which were in active operation in 1860 were the State University at Coltin- bia and the St. Louis and the Washington universities in St. Louis.
There were 173 newspapers and periodicals in Missouri in 1860, with an estimated annual circulation of 30,000,000 copies. Naturally the most widely read and influential of the state's papers were published in its principal city. These were the Missouri Republican, the Missouri Democrat, the Evening Bul- letin, and the Westliche Post. The Missouri Republican (the present St. Louis Republic) dated back, through changes of name, to the Missouri Gasette, established in St. Louis in 1808, which was the first newspaper published west of the Mississippi river. Its editor in 1860 was Nathaniel Paschall, and its busi- ness manager and largest stockholder was George Knapp. The Republican had been a Whig paper, but with the collapse of the Whig party as a consequence of the repeal of the Missouri com- promise in 1854 it became a Democratic journal. It supported Buchanan in 1856, but in the division in the Democratic party in 1860 it went to Douglas, who was opposed by the Buchanan administration.
The Missouri Democrat (one of the progenitors of the pres- ent St. Louis Globe-Democrat ) had been founded by a few of Benton's supporters in 1852, who had just previously purchased the Signal, a Free Soil paper, and who just afterward, in 1853, bought out the Union, both papers being thus merged in the Missouri Democrat. The Democrat's earlier stockholders included William McKee, Francis P. Blair, Jr., Benjamin Gratz Brown (afterward governor of Missouri and vice presidential candidate in 1872 on the Greeley ticket) and other influential citizens. J; advocated Benton's election to congress in 1852 and 1854 and to the governorship in 1856, supported Buchanan in
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1856 for president, as did Benton, but it went to the Republicans in 1857, on the organization of their party in Missouri, and remained with the Republicans afterward, through all its changes of name, proprietorship and editorship. The Democrat's suc- cessive editors along to 1860 were William S. McKee ( 1852-54), cousin of William McKee, Benjamin Gratz Brown (1854-57), and Peter L. Foy (1857-61). It supported Lincoln in 1860. Daniel M. Houser, who has been at the head of the Globe-Demo- crat for many years past, began his connection with the Democrat in 1862.
In that year the Evening Bulletin was a Breckinridge paper, and took the extreme Southern ground on the dominant issue of the day. Its principal writer was Col. Thomas L. Snead, a man of ability, character and courage, who was a member of the staff of Gov. Claiborne F. Jackson in 1861, served on the staff of Gen. Sterling Price, was a member of the confederate con- gress, and was the author of the well-known book, "The Fight for Missouri." The Westliche Post, which was only three years old in 1860, was the spokesman of the German residents of Mis- souri, almost all of whom were stalwart Unionists. It was a champion of Lincoln and the Republicans in 1860, and under the editorship of Dr. Emil Prectorius, is still the best known news- paper printed in the German language west of the Alleghanies.
Among the newspapers of ability and influence outside of St. Louis was the Columbia Statesman, edited by William F. Switzler, the historian, a former Whig, who was a member of the legislature for several years, including the time when the Jackson resolutions were before that body, and who opposed the resolutions. The Statesman supported Fillmore, the candidate of the American party, in 1856, and went to Bell, the Constitutional Union party's nominee, in 1860.
An analysis of Missouri's population returns brings out sev- eral important facts. The increase in inhabitants from 682,000 in 1850 to 1,182,000 in 1860 was, taking into consideration the warfare on the Kansas border during the greater part of the decade and the general disturbance which it caused in a large part of the state, a very remarkable gain, though, of course, the expansion in wealth from one hundred thirty-seven million dollars in the decade's first year to five hundred one million dol- lars is the last year, was still more notable.
About two thirds of Missouri's population of 1860 was born in the state. Of the population born in the United States and outside of Missouri, the South was still ahead of the North, Ken-
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tucky being the largest single contributor among the states. The North, though, was soon to take the lead.
While the slave element of Missouri's population had increased 27,000, or 31 per cent, during the decade, the white ingredient of its inhabitants had expanded 471,000, or 80 per cent. This was a portentous fact. It meant that even if the war between North and South could be averted, slavery's days in Missouri could not be long in the land. Possibly the masters had not yet begun to sell their slaves "down the river," a place which had a superstitious terror for Missouri's bondmen before and after the days of "Roxana" and "Tom" in Mark Twain's "Pudd'nhead Wilson," but things were drifting in that direction in 1860. The underground railroad was actively at work on three sides of the state by that year. John Brown's raid from Kansas into Missouri in 1858, which was preceded and followed by other slave stealings and slave runaways along the Kansas bor- der, transmuted the prophecies of Atchison, Burnes and the . Stringfellows of 1854 and 1855 into fact. The forty-six million dollars represented by Missouri's 115,000 slaves in 1860 was a very precarious asset.
Of the 160,000 foreign residents of Missouri in 1860, 88,000, or more than a half, came from Germany. This was a circum- stance of vast consequence in that crisis. While many of the other foreign ingredients of the state's population leaned to the extreme Southern view in the division which opened early in 1861, and some of them went into the confederate armies, the Germans were Unionists almost to a man, and furnished the bulk of the troops which Missouri contributed under Lincoln's first calls.
From the time that Gottfried Duden settled in the present Warren county in 1824 and the parties of immigrants under the lead of Frederick Muench and Paul Follenius located in the same quarter ten years later, Missouri had been an attractive spot for Germans, though it did not receive so many of them as did some of the states east of the Mississippi. But the real inflow did not begin until after the failure of the risings in Prussia, Bava- ria, Baden and the other German states in 1848-49. The names of Krekel, Schurz, Preetorius, Sigel, Osterhaus, Haarstick, Daenzer, Niedringhaus, Nagel, Rassieur, Sessinghaus, Bernays,. Taussig, Busch, Soldan, Kayser, Fisse, Rommel, Husman, Baum- garten, Brockmeyer, Boernstein, Finkelnburg and Stifel represent a few, and only a few, of Germany's contributions of a few decades ago to the business, political or social life of Missouri.
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Most of the Germans of Missouri joined the Democratic in pref- erence to the Whig party at the outset, but they went to the Benton section of the Democracy as soon as slavery became the dominant question, and furnished Benton a large portion of the vote which he received in 1852 and 1854 when he was a candi- date for congress. When the Republican party, founded on the issue of hostility to slavery extension into the territories, was established in Missouri, most of the Germans joined it.
This was the situation in Missouri at the time the national canvass of 1860 opened. Four presidential tickets were placed in the field. The Kansas question, especially that phase of it which was involved in the Lecompton constitution fight of 1858, in which Douglas opposed the Buchanan administration and the Southern element of the party, split the Democracy in the Charles- ton convention in April of that year. At conventions held in other places a little later the Northern section of the party nomi- nated Douglas for president and Herchell V. Johnson of Geor- gia for vice president, and the Southern element put up Jolm C. Breckinridge for the higher office and Joseph Lane of Oregon for the second post. The Republicans nominated Lincoln and Hamlin, while the old Whigs who had not as yet joined the Democracy or entered the Republican party put up John Bell of Tennessee and Edward Everett of Massachusetts, and adopted the name Constitutional Unionists. The bulk of this element, who were called Americans or Know Nothings, at that time, sup- ported Fillmore for president in 1856.
In Missouri the contest, both for governor and president, was between the Democrats and the Constitutional Unionists, or Amer- icans. Notwithstanding the violence of the feud between the two sections of the Democracy on president and on the general policy of the party, they united on Claiborne . F. Jackson for governor, but when Jackson announced that he would support Douglas, a section of the Breckinridge stalwarts put up Hancock Jackson. Sample Orr was nominated for governor by the Ameri- cans and James B. Gardenhire was selected by the Republicans.
The Douglas candidate, Claiborne F. Jackson, carried the state for governor, receiving 74,416 votes, as compared with 64,583 for the American, Orr. The Breckinridge men and the Repub- licans were far in the rear, Hancock Jackson's poll being 11,415, and Gardenhire's 6,135. This was in August, 1860, three months before the voting for president took place. As Lincoln received 11,000 more votes than Gardenhire, it is evident that many Repub- licans supported Orr, who received 8,000 more ballots than Bell,
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and perhaps a few of them voted for Claiborne F. Jackson, on account of his imagined devotion to Douglas. Jackson, however, and Thomas C. Reynolds, who was chosen lieutenant governor, were primarily Breckinridge, or Southern Rights, men, and accepted Douglas as a means of uniting the Democrats against their real antagonists, the Bell men. Jackson and Reynolds showed their attachment to the Southern cause at their entrance into office.
In November Donglas received 58,801 votes in Missouri, Bell 58,373, Breckinridge 31,317, and Lincoln 17,028. Missouri was the only state carried by Donglas. Its nine electoral votes and three of New Jersey's seven, the other four going to Lincoln, were the only votes in the electoral college secured by the can- didate of the Northern section of the Democracy. Though Lin- coln in Missouri received very little more than half as many votes as Breckinridge and not much over a quarter as many as Dong- las or Bell, he received almost twice as many in this state as he. got in all the rest of the slave states in the aggregate.
The Democrats elected five of Missouri's seven members of the popular branch of congress, the Republicans chose one ( Blair, of the St. Louis district ), and a coalition of the Republicans and the Bell men elected one ( Rollins, of Columbia, the old Whig leader ). Two of the Democrats ( John B. Clark and John W. Reid, the Mexican war hero) were expelled in 1861 for joining the confederacy.
When the news of Lincoln's election ( Lincoln received 180 electoral votes, all from the free states; Douglas 12, from Mis- sonri and New Jersey; Bell 39, from Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee ; and Breckinridge 72, the vote of all the slave states except those already mentioned) on November 6, 1860, reached the country the next day, South Carolina took immediate steps looking toward separation from the Union, passed an ordinance of secession on December 20, and issued an address asking the rest of the South to "join us in forming a confederacy of slave- holding states."
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