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 15
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The losses among the higher officers on the Union side had been so great that the command, after Lyon's death, devolved on Major Sturgis, who conducted the retreat to Springfield, and after- ward to Rolla. McCulloch, on the plea that he was a confederate officer, was charged with the defence of Arkansas and the Indian Territory, and had no authority to invade a state still in the Union, refused to join in the pursuit, although pressed urgently by Price to do so, and as Price felt that he would be too weak to accom- plish anything alone, Sturgis' forces retired practically unmolested. Lyon's body, buried in Springfield soon after the battle, was removed a few weeks later, and interred in Eastford, Conn., his native state.
Lyon's death sent a wave of sorrow through Missouri and all the rest of the loyal states. Undoubtedly, with his ability, daring and dash, a brilliant career would have been his had he lived to the end of the war. But he had already done a great work for state and country. Said Col. Thomas 1. Snead, who fought under Price at Wilson's Creek, in speaking of Lyon's death: "By wisely planning, by boldly doing, and by bravely dying, he had won the fight for Missouri."
But much was to be done yet before the work gallantly begun by Lyon was finished. On July 22, 1861, the day after the Union defeat at Bull Run, and three weeks before the Wilson Creek disaster, the convention which adjourned in St. Louis in March met at Jefferson City, declared vacant the seat of Sterling Price, who had become commander of Governor Jackson's state guard, and put Robert Wilson in his place as president of the conven- tion ; deposed Governor Jackson and Lieutenant Governor Reyn- olds, who had also gone over to the Southern side, and made Hamilton R. Gamble provisional governor and Willard P. Hall provisional lieutenant governor ; declared the seats of the members of the legislature, a large majority of whom had taken the South-
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ern side, vacant, and annulled the laws passed by that legislature which had enabled Jackson to make war on the national govern- ment. All these were revolutionary proceedings, but they were justified by military necessity, they recognized facts, averted anarchy, protected life and property, and saved the state to the Union. During nearly all the time until after the election of Thomas C. Fletcher as governor in 1864 the convention exercised executive and legislative powers, and, considering the difficulties of the situation, it did this with courage, ability and rare public spirit.
Governor Gamble issued a proclamation on August 3, a week before Wilson's Creek, reciting that the act of the legislature which had created Jackson's and Price's state guard had been set aside by the convention, ordering the state guards to disband, and telling all Missourians who were in arms against the govern- ment that they would be protected if they surrendered and lived peaceably thereafter. By a proclamation on August 24 Gamble called for thirty-two thousand troops to enlist for six months, to defend the lives and property of the citizens of the state.
Jackson retaliated by issuing a declaration of independence for Missouri and by calling the legislature in session at Neosho, in the southwest part of the state, where it could be under the protection of Price's troops. There a rump body, comprising less than a quorum of each branch, met on October 21, passed what it called an ordinance of secession, which was recognized by the govern- ment at Richmond, which went through the form of admitting Missouri into the confederacy, and the legislature elected John B. Clark, Sr., and R. L .. Y. Peyton to the confederate senate, and seven persons, including George G. Vest (who served from 1879 to 1903 in the United States senate) to the confederate house.
The state convention held one more session in 1861, beginning on October 16, in St. Louis, at which it passed an act under which the Missouri state militia was organized on the Union side, and it also enacted a law exempting from punishment those who, having borne arms against the government or given aid and comfort to its enemies, should, within sixty days, take an oath to support the national government and obey the government established by the convention.
During all this time the military situation in Missouri was undergoing swift changes. Gen. John C. Fremont, who arrived in St. I dis on July 25, 1861, to take command of the Western Departna ut, comprising Ilinois, Missouri, and all the states and
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territories between the Mississippi and the Rocky mountains, issued a proclamation on August 30, three weeks after Lyon's defeat and death, in which he declared martial law throughout the state, and prescribed that the property of all persons who had taken up arms against the government should be confiscated and their slaves set free. Lincoln asked Fremont to modify that part of the proclamation relating to the confiscation of property and the freeing of the slaves, as he feared this would have a bad effect on the loyal slaveholders of the border states, particularly of Ken- tucky, and as Fremont declined to comply, Lincoln set that aside himself. Lincoln's action, though wise under the circumstances, angered many anti-slavery men in Missouri and elsewhere, drew them toward Fremont, and was one of the causes that put Fremont forward as a candidate for president by the radical Republicans in 1864 in opposition to Lincoln, though Fremont withdrew from the canvass in that year several weeks before the election.
But the Union men of Missouri were soon furnished with some- thing more exciting to talk about than Fremont's proclamation. McCulloch, not long after Wilson's Creek, dropped back into Arkansas and the Indian Territory, and Price marched northward with about 8,000 men, captured Lexington, on the Missouri, on September 30, garrisoned by General Mulligan with 3,000 troops, and then swung southward when he learned that Fremont was marching in his direction with 20,000 men. Fremont followed Price as far as Springfield, near which place Major Zagonyi, a Hungarian, commander of Fremont's cavalry bodyguard and of White's Prairie Scouts, made a gallant charge on a larger force of confederates, and defeated them. On November 2, while at Springfield, Fremont was relieved by an order from Washington, Gen. David Hunter being put in his place. Hunter himself was superseded by Gen. Henry W. Halleck on November 7, and the army soon afterward fell back to Rolla. Fremont received an enthusiastic reception when he reached St. Louis. He had many admirers, then and afterward, in that city. On November 7 Grant and Polk fought their indecisive battle at Belmont, in Southeast Missouri, which was Grant's first important fight of the war.
Pushing southwestward from Lebanon, Laclede county, early in 1862, Gen. Samuel R. Curtis, with ten thousand Union troops, drove Price into Arkansas, where effecting a junction with McCul- loch, the entire force of confederates and Missouri state guards, with Cien Albert Pike's force of Indians and half breeds, number- ing fourteen thousand, all under command of Gen. Earl Van Dorn,
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attacked Curtis at Pea Ridge, in the northwestern part of that state. In a battle lasting through March 6, 7 and 8, in which both sides lost heavily, Curtis drove his enemies from the field. McCulloch and McIntosh of the confederates and Gen. W. Y. Slack of Jack- son's state guard, were killed.
Shortly after this defeat Price and his division of Missourians entered the confederate service proper, ceased to be Missouri state guards, fought under the stars and bars on many fields, principally east of the Mississippi, and remained in the service until after Appomattox. With the change of status of Price and his men Jackson's state troops virtually ceased to exist. Jackson himself, deposed by the convention, and an exile from his state, entered the confederate service with the rank of a brigadier general was compelled to resign on account of ill health, and died near Little Rock on December 6, 1862, but resolute and loyal to the South to the last.
After Pea Ridge the confederates were never a serious menace to Missouri except during the few weeks in the fall of 1864 during which Price was on his raid through the state. Marmaduke, Shelby, Poindexter, Jeff Thompson, and others made forays into the state from time to time, and guerrilla warfare was waged in a desultory way on both sides of the Missouri. The official records indicate that from the capture of the federal arsenal at Liberty, on April 20, 1861, to November 20, 1862, over three hundred fights of various dimensions, most of them of course, being skirmishes, took place in Missouri. Probably more than that number were fought in the next two years, or to the end of 186.1. The greater part of these fights had no effect whatever on the general result.
The most and worst of these fights were waged on the western border of the state, and were a legacy from the Kansas territorial conflicts of the years immediately preceding secession. There were raids in each direction, many of them by persons who wore neither uniform, and who were not entitled to wear either. The most hideous of these atrocities was the dash by Quantrell and three hundred of his guerrillas, all mounted, into Lawrence, Kan., on August 21, 1863, in which nearly two hundred people, men, women and children, were murdered, stores and banks were robbed, and a large part of the town was burned.
In retaliation, on August 26 Gen. Thomas Ewing, whose head- quarters were at Kansas City, issued Order No. 11, commanding everbody hving in Cass, Jackson, Bates and part of Vernon counties to remove within fifteen days out of the counties, except
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those residing in the larger towns, but those who could prove their loyalty were allowed to stay at the nearest military post or to move into Kansas. All grain and hay were taken to the military stations, for which payment was given, and the rest of the produce was to be burned. This order, which was designed to stop the bushwacking, had no such effect, and inflicted great harship on thousands of persons, most of them loyal Unionists. The artist Col. George C. Bingham was a member of Ewing's staff, and protested against the edict, though vainly. Ile after- ward painted a picture called "Order No. 11," which had a great vogue for years, a few copies of which are still in Missouri house- holds.
The state convention's session at Jefferson City which began on June 2, 1862, and lasted to June 14, adopted a test oath pre- venting anybody from voting in any election in the state until he had taken an oath to defend the constitution of the United States and Missouri's constitution, until he had promised to give no aid and compact to the enemies of the United States or of the pro- visional government of Missouri, and until he had sworn that he had not borne arms against the United States or Missouri's pro- visional government since December 17, 1861.
In the elections, therefore, which took place in Missouri in 1862 and in subsequent years while this test stood, none but Union men could vote. Emancipation was the chief issue in the contests in that year, and the emancipationists won in the voting for con- gress and for the legislature. Blair. Rollins, H. T. Blow, J. W. McClurg and W. A. Hall were among the nine members chosen by Missouri to congress in 1862.
As the freeing of the slaves could not be decreed for several years, however, under the constitutional method of procedure, one of the things which the convention of 1863 did when it met, pur- suant to the call of Governor Gamble, on June 15 of that year, . was to pass an ordinance on July 1, decreeing emancipation on July 4, 1870, with these qualifications: The slaves over forty on that day should be subject to the control of their owners through life, those under twelve until they were twenty-three, and those of all other ages until July 4, 1876. But manumission came before either of those years. By operation of an ordinance of the con- stitutional convention which met early in Governor Fletcher's terin every slave in Missouri was freed on January 12, 1865.
July 1, 180%, which saw the passage of the emancipation ordi- nance, also brought the convention to an end. It had been elected . on Febre ry 18, 1861, to determine whether Missouri should
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secede or stand by the Union; declared overwhelmingly for the Union ; met in Jefferson City on February 28, and by successive assemblages in that place and St. Louis, it continued to govern the state, preserving order, and contributing most of the one hundred and nine thousand soldiers which Missouri furnished to the armies of the Union in the four years of the war, but on July I, 1863, it adjourned sine die. Its power continued beyond that date, moreover, for the executive which it elected controlled the state until the regularly chosen governor, Thomas C. Fletcher, entered office in 1865.
The year 1864 was a stirring time for Missouri. It brought Governor Gamble's death, Price's raid, and the election of a gov- ernor and a president. Gamble died on January 31, 1864, and Willard P. Hall, the lieutenant governor, acted as governor for the eleven months intervening before Fletcher's accession. Gamble was born in Virginia, removed to Missouri at an early age, settling in St. Louis a few years after he entered the state, was a success- ful lawyer, was successively secretary of state, member of the legislature and chief justice of the state's supreme court, and was elected to the convention in 1861, and made governor when Jack- son was deposed. He was sixty-six years of age at the time of his death. Hall, also a Virginian by birth, but twenty-two years younger than Gamble, was also an old resident of the state, was a soldier in the Mexican war, was a Benton Democrat, was several terms in congress, and was one of the members of the convention chosen in 1861.
Price's raid into Missouri in 1864 was the most formidable con- federate military demonstration which had been made in the state since the fall of 1861, when the same daring and skilful soldier advanced to the Missouri, won several victories, and captured General Mulligan and his force at Lexington. Many of the Union troops located in Missouri had been withdrawn in the spring and summer of 1864 for employment elsewhere, and those who were left in the state had a large territory to cover. General Rosecrans, the commander of the department, however, had learned about Price's intentions beforehand and had obtained some re-enforcements, chiefly Gen. A. J. Smith and his division.
With Shelby, Clark and others who had been operating in and near the state since early in the war, Price, with about twenty thousand men, whom he expected to increase by recruiting as he advanced, struck Southeastern Missouri in September, 1864, and made a dash northward and westward, intending to capture the great supply depots of the national forces at Pilot Knob, Jefferson
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City, Rolla and Springfield, and to menace St. Louis. The first obstruction which he encountered was at Pilot Knob, where he was gallantly resisted by Gen. Hugh S. Ewing, with one thousand two hundred troops. To escape capture, however, Ewing aban- doned his position after spiking his cannon and blowing up his magazine, and retreated westward to Rolla, where he joined General McNeil.
Pushing northward Price crossed the Meramec, reached a point within forty miles of St. Louis, which he evidently feared to attack, and then swung westward, advanced on Jefferson City, into which Rosecrans had thrown all the troops that he could spare from other points. Finding the capital prepared to resist him Price moved onward to Boonville and Lexington, his sub- ordinates Shelby and Clark capturing Glasgow and other towns on the way, and he himself defeating Curtis at Little Blue on October 21. Meanwhile Pleasanton, from Jefferson City, with a large force, chiefly cavalry, and A. J. Smith with another body of troops, chased Price, who, however, delayed his pursners by burn- ing the bridges behind him. Pleasanton defeated Price at Inde- pendence, when the latter, fearing capture, immediately started southward, pursued rapidly by the Union forces, and escaped into Arkansas.
The raid failed of its object. Price marched 1,434 miles, fought forty-three battles and skirmishes, received 6,000 recruits where he had expected to gain 25,000, destroyed according to his estimate, ten million dollars of property, but lost heavily in men by death and capture, and left the Union forces in the state nich stronger and more effective than he found them. This was the last despairing effort of the confederates to make headway in Missouri. Guerrilla fighting was kept up till after Appomattox, bushwhackers and jay- hawkers continued their demonstrations, and Bill Anderson and his bandits on September 27, 1864, robbed, burned and murdered at Centralia, the victims of the murders being twenty-three unarmed Union soldiers, followed by Anderson's annihilation of one hundred and forty armed soldiers, but when Price fled across the line into Arkansas in November of that year the serious opera- tions of the war in Missouri were ended.
While the marching and fighting of 1864 were under way, one of the most interesting political campaigns which the state ever saw was in active progress. That was the one in which Lincoln was re-elected president and Fletcher was chosen to be governor. There was a great deal of very complicated politics in Missouri from the beginning of the war. To a delegation of radical Repub-
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licans from Missouri who called on him in October, 1863, to ask him to remove General Schofield, who was charged with favoring disloyalists, and to put General Butler in command in the state, Lincoln said, after referring to the peculiar conditions there: "It thus becomes a question not of two sides merely, but of at least four sides, even among those who are for the Union, saying noth- ing of those who are against it. Thus, those who are for the Union with, but not without, slavery-those who are for it with- out but not with-those for it with or without, but prefer it with, and those for it with or without, but prefer it without. Among these again is a subdivision of those who are for gradual, but not for immediate, and those who are for immediate but not for gradual, extinction of slavery."
These cross currents affected every political contest in Mis- souri during the war. In the campaign of 1864 there were two divisions of the Union party of Missouri. Both sent representa- tives to the national convention which met in Baltimore on June 7, and which renominated Lincoln and put up Andrew Johnson for vice president. War Democrats were eligible to representation in that convention. It was called a Union convention, though a large majority of its delegates were Republicans, and the Repub- licans cast most of the votes which elected its ticket. One of the two bodies of Missourians which demanded admission to the national convention of 1864 was called the Radical Union and the other the Unconditional Union delegation. The Radi- cals took Fremont's side when Lincoln in 1861 abrogated Fre- mont's emancipation edict. They wanted the immediate libera- tion of all the slaves in every state, outside as well as in the con- federacy, even before Lincoln issued his emancipation proclama- tion of 1863 which applied only to the slaves in the confederate region. After a contest the Radical delegation was admitted to the convention by a vote of 440 to 4, and the Unconditional Unionists were shut out. The delegates at large of the Radicals were Chauncey I. Filley, Charles D. Drake and J. F. Benjamin of St. Louis, and Benjamin F. Loan of St. Joseph. They undoubtedly represented a large majority of the Union people of the state. In the ballot for president in the convention, the Missouri delegates, in accordance with instructions from home, cast their votes for General Grant, and then transferred them to Lincoln and made his nomination unanimous.
In Missouri the Lincoln and Johnson ticket received 72,991 votes, as compared with 31,026 for MeClellan, the Democratic candidate. Thomas C. Fletcher, the Union candidate for gov-
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ernor, got 71,531 votes, as against 30,406 for the Democrat, Thomas L. Price. Governor Fletcher, who entered office on Janu- ary 2, 1865, was thirty-eight years of age at the time, was the first native born governor (his birthplace was Jefferson county) which Missouri ever had, was a Republican from the founda- tion of the party, and served in the army during most of the war, rising to the rank of a brigadier general.
The peace which came to the country during the early months of Governor Fletcher's term, and which took Price, Cockrell, Marmaduke, Vest, Clark and the other ex-confederate leaders back to the state, brought up issues almost as exciting as any that had been precipitated during Jackson's and Gamble's serv- ice. These will form the chief theme of the next chapter.
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CHAPTER XVII
Reconstruction in the State
M ISSOURI had stood patriotically and intrepidly by the Union. She had furnished several thousands more than
her quotas of troops under Lincoln's various calls. Yet immediately after the war Missouri was put through a process of reconstruction which caused great commotion at the time, which destroyed, in the case of thousands of good Union men, the partisan affiliations established during that struggle, and which has affected the course of politics in the state to this day.
On January 6, 1865, four days after Governor Fletcher entered office, a convention provided for by an act of the legislature of February 13, 1864, which had been ratified by 29,000 majority by a vote of the people on November 8 of that year, the same days as Lincoln's and Fletcher's election, met in the Mercantile hall, in St. Louis. As recited in the act of the legislature, the objects of the convention were to arrange for the emancipation of the slaves in Missouri and to amend the constitution in such a way as to insure the franchise to loyal citizens of the state and to promote the public good. The convention in St. Louis in 1865, however, like that in Philadelphia in 1787, which was called to amend the articles of confederation, framed an entirely new charter.
The convention was composed of sixty-six delegates, thirty- five of whom were natives of slave states, and twenty-one of free states, while ten were born outside the country. Among its numbers who were then well known, or who subsequently became so were Arnold Krekel, of St. Charles ; Charles D. Drake, Chaun- cey 1. Filley, Henry A. Clover, George P. Strong and Wyllis King, of St. Louis; and Col. William F. Switzler, the veteran
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editor and historian, of Columbia. Arnold Krekel was elected president of the convention, and Charles D. Drake vice president. The latter was the master spirit of the whole assemblage.
Quick work was made with slavery. Mr. Strong, chairman of the special committee on emancipation, reported this ordinance, and urged its adoption : "Be it ordained by the people of the state of Missouri, in convention assembled: That hereafter, in this state, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except in punishment of crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted ; and all persons held to service or labor as slaves are hereby declared free."
After voting down all the amendments which were proposed, the convention passed the ordinance on that day by a vote of 60 to 4, two delegates being absent. A copy of it, duly signed and attested, was sent to Governor Fletcher immediately, and he, on January 12, issued a proclamation reciting that "hence- forth and forever no person within the jurisdiction of the state shall be subject to any abridgement of liberty, except such as the law shall prescribe for the common good, or know any master but God."
This was a grand enactment. January 1I, 1865, is a great datemark in the history of Missouri and of human freedom. Lincoln's emancipation proclamation of 1863 applied to the con- federate states only, and thus, of course, did not touch Missouri. The proposition for the thirteenth amendment to the federal constitution, which was to legalize Lincoln's edict, and to make slavery abolition universal and permanent throughout the United States, had not yet passed congress when Missouri acted. But slavery had practically been dead in Missouri even before the convention of 1865 met. In 1865 the census enumerators had found almost 115,000 slaves in the state, an increase of 27,000 in ten years. Probably the number who had escaped, who had been freed by their masters or who had been taken into the confederate states between the capture of Camp Jackson in May, 1861, and Price's final retreat from Missouri in the latter part of 1864, had more than offset the increase through births. The fact, however, that Missouri alone among the slave states vol- untarily rid herself of the institution, and that she did this eleven months before the thirteenth amendment was proclaimed in opera- tion throughout the country, is a distinction for their state which Missourians should remember.
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