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 13
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Missouri's response to this appeal was not long in coming.
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CHAPTER XV
Missouri Stands by the Union
HIE character of Missouri's answer to South Carolina's
T T appeal would necessarily be of vast consequence not only to Missourians but to the people of the whole country. Missouri stood close to the geographical center of the United States. Half way between New York and California, she was also about half way between the Gulf of Mexico and the Cana- dian boundary. She was on the direct line of overland immi- gration from Europe, the East and the central West to the Rocky mountain region and the Pacific slope. Arkansas and Texas would, it was seen, join South Carolina and the rest of the cot- ton states in secession. Apart from Texas and Arkansas there were 2,000,000 people residing in the states and territories wholly west of the Mississippi at the end of 1860. Missouri had not far from half of these. If Missouri should be won over to seces- sion-and the South in the opening days of 1861 made a serious attempt to do this, and at the outset had some hopes of success -- the confederacy might have been able to control the Mississippi permanently for much more than half of its length, and the Union might be overthrown.
South Carolina's reasons for secession were reasons which appealed with force to separatists in Missouri and all the rest of the slave states. That state, in her official declaration of the causes which impelled her to dissolve her relations to the Union, started out by presenting the arguments in favor of state sov- ereignty, and then said that the North had elected a mnan to manage "the administration of the common government because. he has declared that the government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free, and that the public must rest in the
MISSOURI STANDS BY THE UNION.
belief that slavery is in course of ultimate extinction ;" stated that nearly all the Northern states, mentioning them by name, had passed personal liberty laws, nullifying or impeding a guaranty in article 4 of the constitution and the fugitive slave act which was part of the compromise measures of 1850; averred that, through the slavery prohibition in the territories which the Republicans were pledged to secure, the South was to be deprived of its equal rights in the common domain, and cited the tariff acts as having been passed for the benefit of the North and as burdensome and unjust to the South.
Alexander H. Stephens, however, the vice president of the Southern confederacy, said in his "War Between the States," published in 1867, that the discrimination against slavery, act- ual or expected, was only a minor cause of secession-that this, notwithstanding the two billion dollars of property which was endangered, was but as the "dust in the balance compared with the vital attributes of the rights and of independence and of sov -. ereignty on the part of the several states."
As a legal right secession was based on the theory that the constitution was a compact between states acting in a sovereign capacity, which could be abrogated at any time by the people of any state, so far as regards that state's relations to the Union. This claim had often been asserted in the North as well as in the South. It was voiced by Madison and Jefferson, respectively, in the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of 1798; openly pro- claimed by Josiah Quincy, a Massachusetts Federalist in con- gress in 1811, in retaliation for the admission of the state of Louisiana ; was plotted, it was charged, in the Hartford Conven- tion of New England Federalists in 1814; contemplated by South Carolina in Calhoun's and Hayne's nullification movement in 1832; was vaguely threatened, just before the annexation of Texas, by Ex-President John Quincy Adams and other Northern members of congress, if annexation should take place, and was many times asserted by representative Southern men, and also by Garrisonian abolitionists, between the Palmetto state's nulli- fication in 1832 and her actual secession in 1860.
On the other hand, a powerful element ( which was steadily increasing up to 1861) of the American people, chiefly in the free states, rejected the contract theory of the goverment from the beginning. They believed that "We, the people of the United States," who declare in the constitution's preamble that they do "ordain and establish this constitution," meant the people of the country collectively. That is to say, the United States is a
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nation, and not merely a league. This view was immeasurably strengthened and the love of the Union intensified by Webster's speeches in the Hayne debate in 1830.
In his first inaugural, March 4, 1861, Lincoln set forth the national idea by saying that the Union, as expressed in the con- stitution, was manifestly meant to be perpetual, and by asking that if the federal government be in the nature of a contract merely, "can it, as a contract, be peaceably unmade by less than all the parties who made it?" He declared that the idea of per- petuity was confirmed by history. "The Union," he said, "is much older than the constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the articles of association in 1774. It was matured and con- tinned by the Declaration of Independence of 1776. It was fur- ther matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen states expressly pliglited and engaged that it should be perpetual by the articles of confederation in 1778. And, finally, in 1787 one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the con- stitution was to 'form a more perfect Union.'"
But the theory of the legality of secession, except, of course, under the right of revolution, found very little favor in Mis- souri or any other part of the West. The fourth article of the ordinance of 1787 for the government of the Northwest Terri- tory, comprising the present states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and that part of Minnesota cast of the Mississippi, declares: "The said territory, and the states which may be formed therein, shall forever remain a part of this con- federacy of the United States." All the states outside of the original thirteen were the direct creation of congress. The claim made by some of the original members that they were older than the Union, and that they themselves delegated to the federal government all the power which it possessed, could not be urged in favor of any of the other states. Moreover, Missouri and all the rest of the states comprising the Louisiana region of 1803, were bought by the United States government, and paid for out of the United States treasury, and, as Governor Stewart of Mis- souri said, they certainly had no right to leave the Union except by the consent of all the members of it at the time of their admis- sion.
The Ohio, the Illinois and the upper Mississippi, supplemented by the railroads, had, by the time of Lincoln's election, created a stronger physical bond between Missouri and the states north of the Ohio and the Potomac than the lower Mississippi had estab- lished between her and the South. The free states furnished the
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principal home market for Missouri's products and provided most of the commodities for which these were exchanged. By that .time, too, the majority of her emigrants from the rest of the country were coming from the middle West and East. Missouri's affiliations by the latter part of 1860, notwithstanding the numerical and social preponderance which was still main- tained by the Southern element of her population, began to be principally with the anti-slavery, nationalist and Unionist group of states. All these influences asserted themselves decisively when the supreme test came.
On December 31, 1860, Missouri's newly elected legislature met in Jefferson City, and to it, on January 3, 1861, Governor Stewart sent his farewell message. A New Yorker by birth though a resident of Missouri for over twenty years, an old enemy of Benton and a believer in the right of the South to carry its slaves into the territories, Stewart was an opponent of slavery personally and a Union man who appealed to Missouri to "hold on to the Union as long as it is worth an effort to preserve it." He condemned South Carolina for seceding, was against all endeavors by the federal government to coerce South Carolina back into the Union, hoped that she and the rest of the states which might join her would soon return to their former posi- tion under some "honorable readjustment of the federal con- pact," and urged Missouri to maintain an "armed neutrality" against the combatants and to "hold herself in readiness at any moment to defend her soil from pollution and her property from plunder by fanatics and maranders, come from what quarter they may."
Stewart was a Union man, but a Union man under conditions. His position was that which was held by a large proportion of the people of Missouri in the closing weeks of 1860 and the opening weeks of 1861. Of far more consequence, however, in that exigency were the views of the incoming governor.
Gov. Claiborne F. Jackson, in his inaugural on January 4, averred that he had some hope that an "adjustment alike honor- able to both sections would be effected," said that "it is our duty to be prepared for the worst," and declared, in the spirit of his resolutions of 1849 in the legislature, that "the destiny of the slaveholding states of this Union is one and the same." Their tastes, customs, origin, territorial contignity and commercial relations "al! contribute to bind them together in one sisterhood," and added that Missouri would "best consult her own interests and the interest of the whole country by a timely declaration of
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her determination to stand by her sister slaveholding states, in whose wrongs she participates, and with whose institutions and people she sympathizes." He urged the legislature to call a state convention immediately, "in order that the will of the people may be ascertained and effectnated," and recommended a thorough organization of the militia.
Jackson, at this time fifty-four years of age, and at the height of his physical and mental powers, possessed more audacity and fervor than he had a dozen years earlier when he was fighting Benton and free-soilism, for now, elected governor by a large plu- rality, he believed that the bulk of the people of his state was behind him.
Acting on Jackson's recommendation, a bill for a convention passed the legislature (consisting of 15 Breckinridge Democrats, 10 Donglas Democrats, 7 Bell Constitutional Unionists and I Republican in the senate, and 47 Breckinridge Democrats, 37 Constitutional Unionists, 36 Douglas Democrats and 12 Repub- licans in the house) on January 18. The bill provided for an election on February 18 for a convention to consider the relations between Missouri and the United States, and to "adopt such measures for vindicating the sovereignty of the state and the pro- tection of its institutions as shall appear to them to be demanded." This meant secession. The legislature's prompt action encour- aged Jackson and the rest of the Southern rights men and depressed the Unionists.
Meanwhile the St. Louis secessionists, at a meeting on Janu- ary 7. started the organization of Minute Men, among whose officers were Basil W. Duke, Overton W. Barret, James R. Shaler, Colton Greene, Rock Champion and others, some of whom rose to high command in the Confederate army afterward. The Minute Men had their headquarters in the old Berthold man- sion on the corner of Broadway and Pine street, and drilled their recruits there and in other parts of the city. They formed part of Governor Jackson's and General Frost's state troops, who were captured at Camp Jackson by Lyon and Blair four months later.
But even before Duke, Greene, and their fellow secessionists began to move toward organization, the Unionist leaders in St. Louis, of whom Francis P. Blair was the most active and aggres- sive, started to transform the Wide Awakes, or uniformed Lin- coln campaign marching clubs of 1860, chiefly composed of Germans, into Home Guards for the defense of the government. On Hair's initiative, a few days later, on January 11, 1861,
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the first of a series of Union meetings took place, which had an important influence on the national cause.
Blair, forty years of age, daring, eloquent and resourceful, an ex-soldier of the Mexican war, a disciple of Andrew Jackson and Benton in Democratic politics, who fought for Benton in that chieftain's losing battle in and out of the legislature, who became a Republican as soon as that party was organized in Mis- souri, who served several years in congress and was then a mem- ber, was admirably qualified for the leadership which he assumed in Missouri's cyclonic days at the opening of 1861.
To show the connection between events in Missouri and in the nation, a glance backward for a few weeks will here be taken. Lincoln's election on November 6, 1860, precipitated South Carolina's secession on December 20, Mississippi's on January 9, 1861, Florida's on January 10, and Alabama's on January 11, the day of Blair's St. Louis meeting, Alabama at the same time inviting all the slaveholling states to send delegates to a convention to be held in Montgomery on February 4, to concert action for their defense in that crisis. Meanwhile Maj. Robert Anderson, commanding the United States troops in Charleston harbor, knowing that without strong re-enforcements he could not maintain himself, abandoned Fort Moultrie and moved his force of 7 officers and 61 non-commissioned officers and privates to Fort Sumter on the night of December 26, 1860, at which South Carolina occupied Fort Moultrie and Castle l'inckney on December 27 with state troops, and seized the United States arsenal in Charleston with its 75,000 stand of arms on December 30. Seizures of forts and other United States prop- erty were made immediately afterward by Georgia, Alabama, Florida and Louisiana. On January 9, 1861, the steamer Star of the West, sent by President Buchanan with troops and sup- plies for Anderson, was attacked by the batteries in Charleston harbor manned by South Carolina troops, and driven back to sea, and the first shots in the civil war were fired.
This was the national situation at the time of Blair's St. Louis rally of January 11, 1861. The meeting was held in Washing- ton hall, at the corner of Third and Elm streets; it was called by Republicans, and most of its participants, who numbered 1,200, according to the Missouri Democrat of January 12, belonged to the Republican party. As the Republicans, as shown by the poll two months carlier ( Douglas, 58,801 ; Bell, 58,373; Breck- mridge, 31.317; Lincoln, 17,028), constituted only a little over
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a tenth of the voters of Missouri, they would have to get aid from the other elements, especially from the Douglas and Bell men, or else they would be powerless. In his address to the meeting-the principal speech at which he delivered-Blair said only two parties were left in the country, one for the Union and the other for disunion, and that every man who loved his coun- try should strike hands with every other man, no matter what his past political associations had been, who favored the Union's perpetuation. Some Republicans opposed the dropping of their own organization. "Let us see that we have a country first before talking of parties," was Blair's answer. That meeting was historically important because-
(1) It was the first gathering held in Missouri, and the first of any practical consequence held anywhere in the United States, to combat secession.
(2) It disbanded the Wide Awakes, a Republican partisan organization, and started in its place a Central Union Club, in which any Union man of good character-Breckinridge Demo- crat, Douglas Democrat, Bell and Everett Constitutional Union- ist and Lincoln Republican-was eligible to membership, which attracted men from all these parties, and it established branch clubs in each ward of the city of St. Louis and in each township of the rest of St. Louis county.
(3) It temporarily dissolved the Republican organization of Missouri and formed a U'nion party in its place, open to men of all partisan affiliations who would adopt as their creed Andrew Jackson's motto of the nullification days, "The Union, it must and shall be preserved."
(4) It led to the founding of the Committee of Safety, which comprised Oliver D. Filley (mayor of St. Louis), Francis P. Blair, James O. Broadhead, Samuel T. Glover, John How and Julius J. Witzig, Filley being chairman and Broadhead secretary, Blair, however, being the dominant spirit, which upheld the cause of the national government in the city, county and state.
(5) It gave shape, courage, direction and unity to the sen- timent and influences which baffled the plottings of the state's secessionists, and hell Missouri firmly in the Union.
The next day, January 12, a meeting of conditional Union men-men who, while opposing secession, also opposed the coer- cion of seeded states took place at the cast front of the court house of Fourth street, which was many times larger than Blair's gathering, in which 15,000 persons participated, chiefly support- ers of Douglas and Bell in the preceding election, with a sprink-
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ling of Breckinridge men and Republicans. Hamilton R. Gamble, Lewis V. Bogy and others made speeches. Among the vice presidents of the meeting were Col. John O'Fallen, Wayman Crow, James E. Yeatman, John F. Darby, Luther M. Kennett, Nathaniel Paschall, Erastus Wells, Daniel G. Taylor, James H. Lucas, Isaac H. Sturgeon, John G. Priest, and others prominent in the business activities and social life of St. Louis and vicin- ity. Many of the conditional Union men were won to the unconditional Unionists-the men who would preserve the Union by force if necessary-even before Sumter fell, and most of the rest of them were gained not long afterward. Gamble, for example, was the Unionist provisional governor after Jackson was deposed for going over to the confederacy in July, 1861.
When, on January 18, 1861, a week after Blair's Washington hall gathering, the legislature passed the bill for holding a conven- tion which would decide whether the state should secede or not, the most important issue ever presented to the voters of Mis- souri had to be met. As February 18 was the day set for the election the canvass was short, but it was the most exciting which the state ever saw. There were three elements in the contest --- the conditional Union men, who were much more numerous than the other two ingredients put together ; the out and out Union men, and the Southern rights advocates, or secessionists. The conditional Unionists were led by Gamble, Paschall and their associates already mentioned, as well as by Gen. Sterling Price, Gen. Alexander W. Doniphan, John S. Phelps, James S. Rol- lins, William A. Hall and others from the rest of the state. The unconditional Unionists, with the Republicans as a nucleus, had as leaders Blair, Broadhead and their colleagues of the Commit- tee of Safety, with Edward Bates (who was already selected to be attorney general in Lincoln's cabinet), Benjamin Gratz Brown, William Mc Kee and others. The secessionists were marshalled by Governor Jackson, Lieutenant Governor Reynolds, United States Senators James S. Green and Trusten Polk, Ex-Senator Atchison, John B. Clark and John W. Reid, of the other branch of congress, and by many of the members of the legislature, in which body there were a great number of Southern rights advo- cates.
In the election the Unionist side ( the conditional and the unconditional taken together) was overwhelmingly victorious, gaining a majority of about 80,000 in the aggregate vote on dele- gates to the convention. Not a single avowed secessionist was chosen, although four fifths of the delegates were natives of the
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slave states. Many of the delegates, however, secretly favored secession, and a few of them, like .Sterling Price, who presided over the convention, went to the confederacy when the final divi- sion came after Lyon and Blair captured Camp Jackson. The bulk of the people of Missouri even as late as February 18, at the time of the election of delegates, believed that some sort of an adjustment would be reached which would avert war.
The ninety-nine members of the convention comprised some of the strongest men in the state. Among them were Hamilton R. Gamble, S. M. Breckinridge, John How, Henry Hitchcock, John HI. Shackleford, James O. Broadhead, and Hudson E. Bridge, from St. Louis city and county; while those from the rest of the state included John Scott, Charles S. Drake, Sample Orr, Joseph W. McClurg, Vincent Marmaduke, Alexander W. Doniphan, Willard P. Hall, Robert M. Stewart, Robert Wilson, James 11. Moss, William A. Hall, Sterling Price, Thomas Shackleford, John T. Redd, John B. Henderson and many oth- ers then or subsequently well known throughout the state. These were drawn from all parties and represented all shades of polit- ical thought, except that the secession sympathizers among them had not yet announced their views on that issue openly.
Thirty of the members were natives of Kentucky, 23 of Vir- ginia, 14 of Missouri, 10 of Tennessee, 3 each of New York, New Hampshire and North Carolina, 2 each of Pennsylvania, Illinois and Germany, and i each of Maryland, Alabama, Maine, New Jersey, Ohio, Ireland and Austria. Lawyers predominated among them, though the number of farmers was large. The numerical ascendeney of the southern born delegates (82 from slave states, 13 from free states and 4 from abroad) was marked.
The convention met at Jefferson City on February 28; chose Sterling Price president, Robert Wilson, vice president, and Sam- uel A. Lowe, secretary ; and soon adjourned to the more con- genial atmosphere of St. Louis, where a committee promptly reported against secession, though it also favored an adjustment on the general lines of the Crittenden compromise, which had just been before congress, and which proposed a division of the territories between slavery and freedom on the thirty-six degrees thirty minutes line.
But before the convention met, Jackson, Green, Polk, Atchi- son and the rest of the Southern extremists saw that they had blundered. The convention, which had been hailed with delight at the time of the passage of the bill for it in January, proved a trap for them and their canse. By relegating the whole mat-
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ter of Missouri's relations to the Union to the people of the state, where, of course, it belonged, the wave of Southern senti- ment in the state had a chance to subside under the sober sec- ond thought which, came when South Carolina, on January 9, fired on the Star of the West, which, under orders from Presi- dent Buchanan, was attempting to enter Charleston harbor with re-enforcements of troops and supplies for Major Anderson, and as Lincoln's accession to power neared. Jackson, who felt all along that war would come, was prevented, by the submis- sion of the question to the people, from taking the action which would precipitate a crisis in Missouri that would give him an excuse to seize the arsenal, which was at first virtually unde- fended, before the Unionist side became organized. The delay until the election on February 18 would favor Blair and the Union cause. Delay of any sort would necessarily be on Blair's side. Moreover, the convention was captured by the Unionists instead of by the secessionists, as Jackson and his friends expected. A bill urged by Jackson, for the arming of Missouri's militia, ostensibly in defense of the state against encroachment from the South or North, but really in favor of the South, was before the legislature at the time of the election of February 18, but the overwhelming victory for the Unionist side in the voting on that day frightened the secessionists, defeated the bill, not- withstanding Jackson's personal appeals for its enactment, and the legislature adjourned without taking any measure for putting Missouri in a condition of defence.
A wave of jubilation swept over the North at the news of Missouri's Unionist victory of February 18, 1861. New heart was put into the Union men of East Tennessee. The loyal sons of Virginia's mountain counties-the counties which separated from their state when it joined the confederacy, and formed themselves into the commonwealth of West Virginia-were encouraged to stand out against secession. A powerful factor was contributed to the sum of the influences which held Mary- land and Kentucky in the Union.
But the St. Louis Committee of Safety saw that bullets might have to re-enforce ballots before Missouri could be permanently saved. Blair, just before his meeting in Washington hall on January 11, 1861, began to secretly organize and drill the Home Guards, just as Duke, Shaler, Colton Greene, and others of the younger secessionists did the Minute Men, but the Minute Men, having the state authorities on their side, did this openly. The nucleus of Blair's Home Guards was the Wide Awakes,
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