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 16
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After passing the slavery abolition ordinance, the convention set to work to consider a new organic law to meet the altered
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conditions of the time. Missouri was still living under its original charter, that of 1820, which had been amended from time to time. The convention of 1865 framed an entirely new con- stitution. Some of its provisions, especially those relating to banks and corporations, to the militia and to general education, were wise. The constitution, too, shortened the term for gov- ernor to two years, making him ineligible to office for more than four out of six years, the governor under the original constitu- tion serving four years, and being ineligible to two terms in suc- cession. But the provision which attracted most attention, and which made serious trouble for its framers, was that relating to the suffrage.
This stipulated that no person should be allowed to vote or to hold any state, county or municipal office, to teach school, to practice law, to "be competent as a bishop, priest, deacon, min- ister, elder or other clergyman of any religious persuasion, sect or denomination, to teach or to preach or to solemnize marriages," unless he should take a prescribed oath that he had never been in armed hostility to the United States or to the government of Missouri ; that he had never given any aid, countenance or sym- pathy to persons engaged in such hostility; that he had never in any manner adhered to the domestic or foreign enemies of the United States, or had given them money, letters, information or sympathy ; and that he had never committed any other one of a very long list of prescribed offences. The list was so long, so minute and so sweeping in its scope that it would have excluded a large number of the Unionists of any prominence in the state, whether in private life or in the military or civil service of the government.
By an odd coincidence the convention which framed this enact- ment that precipitated something like a social convulsion through- out the state adjourned sine die on the same day, April 10, 1865, that the news arrived of Lee's surrender on the 9th and the collapse of the confederacy. Missouri had been a serious suf- ferer from the four years of conflict. Several hundred battles and skirmishes had been fought on her soil. She had contrib- uted over 109,000 troops to the service of the Union, almost 14,000 of whom had perished in the service from wounds or disease. About 30,000 of her sons were in the confederate armies. Some of the survivors of these never returned to the state. At the regular four luidred dollars valuation per slave, her loss in this species of property was over forty-six million dol- lars. Large amounts of other sorts of property were destroyed
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in the state by both combatants, aside altogether from that swept away by the bushwhackers, jayhawkers and other sorts of irregu- lars on each side. Tens of thousands of Missourians in the guerrilla-infested counties migrated to other states where life and property were more secure, and many of them remained away permanently. The disorder, demoralization and general dislo- cation of society incident to war, especially to civil war, entailed losses which are not easily estimated in terms of dollars and cents. Neighborhood feuds, murders, train robberies of the James and Younger order, and other species of criminality flourished for many years in the state as one of the legacies of the war.
For several years the appropriations for the benefit of the public schools of the state were suspended on account of the need of money to meet others of the state's demands which were deemed to be more immediately urgent. In many of the coun- ties the schools were closed during the greater part of the war, especially in those regions which were overrun by guerrillas. . The destruction of bridges and rolling stock and the interruption of traffic destroyed all incentive for the extension of the railroads for the time. The bushwhackers along the Missouri and the lower Mississippi made steamboating perilous, and virtually closed these streams to traffic such as had been known in the flush days of the decade or two before Sumter's fall.
Before the state had a chance to begin to rally from the war's adverse effects its people were called upon to decide by ballot whether they should accept or reject the constitution. June 6, 1805, was set for the election, and that charter itself stipulated that nobody should be allowed to vote upon its acceptance or rejection unless he would be a "qualified voter according to the terms of this constitution if the second article thereof were then in force," the second being the article on the suffrage. The test oath, or the "iron-clad" oath, as it was commonly called in the canvass, was rigidly applied. The canvass was short but tumult- nous. Yet even with all these conditions in its favor the con- stitution was won by only a narrow margin, 43,670 votes being cast in its favor, and 41,808 against it. Out of an aggregate vote of over 85,000, the majority in favor of the constitution was only slightly in excess of 1,800. The constitution went into effect on July 4.
An ordinance adopted by the convention three weeks before its adjourment, or on March 17, 1865, vacated the offices of the judges of the supreme, circuit and other comts, the ordinance to go into effect on May 1, the governor to fill the offices by
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appointment for the remainder of the term. One of the supreme court judges, Bates, resigned, but Judges William V. N. Bay and John D. S. Dryden refused to step down, declaring that the convention had no authority to remove them. Governor fletcher ordered the St. Louis police to forcibly eject them, which was done, and his appointees, David Wagner and Walter E. Lovelace, took their places. The governor's other appointee, Nathaniel Holmes, succeeded Bates. The ejection of Bay and Dryden took place on June 14, eight days after the voting by which the constitution was ratified.
Many lawyers, teachers, clergymen of all denominations and others refused to take the test oath. Gen. Francis P. Blair, the leader of the Unionists during the war, demanded to be allowed to vote without taking the oath, and on being denied that privi- lege, brought suit against the registering officers in the local courts, but was defeated. Rev. John A. Cummings, a Catho- lie priest, preached and taught in his church in Louisiana, Mo., regardless of the test oath, which he refused to take. He was con- victed in the courts of the state, fined five hundred dollars, and was to be committed to jail until the fine and the costs were paid ; but he appealed to the supreme court at Washington, and on January 14, 1867, that tribunal decided that this requirement was in violation of that provision of the federal constitution which prohibits any state from enacting a bill of attainder or ex post facto law, and was therefore null and void.
Said Justice Field, who delivered the opinion of the court: "The oath prescribed by the constitution, divided into its sepa- rable parts, embraces more than thirty distinct affirmations or tests. Some of the acts against which it is directed constitute offences of the highest grade, to which, upon conviction, heavy penalties are attached. Some of the acts have never been classed as offences in the laws of any state, and some of the acts, under many circumstances, would not even be blameworthy. . . The oath thus described is without any precedent that we can discover for its severity. In the first place, it is retro- spective. It embraces all the past from this day, and if taken years hence it will cover all the intervening period. . It was in the midst of the struggle ( the rebellion) that the pres- ent constitution was framed, although it was not adopted by the people until the war had ceased. It would have been strange, therefore, bal it not exhibited in its provisions some traces of the excitement amid which the convention held its deliberations. It was against the excited actions of the states, under such
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influences as these, that the framers of the federal constitution intended to guard."
A new registry law, however, was enacted by the legislature which met in January, 1868, that gave to the governor, with the senate's consent, power to appoint a superintendent of regis- tration in each senatorial district, these to select a board of regis- tration in each county, the entire electoral machinery of the state being in their control. These boards made lists of all the legal voters of the state, none could vote whose names were not on the lists, and an oath of loyalty to United States and state had to be taken by the citizen before he could be enrolled, while a large latitude was allowed the boards in deciding who should be enrolled and who, even if they offered to take the oath, should be excluded. This law, which, to a numerous element of the citi- zens of Missouri, was as offensive as the iron-clad oath had been, was the leading issue of the state canvass of 1868.
He who writes-and likewise he who reads -- the history of an era should attempt to project himself intellectually into it, to look squarely at the conditions which confronted its people, and to test things by their standards and not by those of his own day. This injunction is especially imperative in regard to Missouri's annals in the half dozen years immediately following Appomattox. The war had left a heritage of passion, hatred and violence, particularly in Missouri, in which real war had been waged for four years, and in which, for several years before Lincoln's election and South Carolina's secession, there had been a condition closely approaching actual war on the Kansas frontier.
The convulsive conditions in Missouri had been intensified by the national situation. Aside from the acceptance of the thir- teenth amendment abolishing slavery, Lincoln's reconstruction policy virtually gave the ex-confederate states a free hand in restoring their local governments and in re-establishing their relations to the rest of the Union. After Lincoln's assassination President Johnson, without any of Lincoln's tact, or any of his influence over the Republican party, then overwhelmingly in the supremacy in each branch of congress, attempted to carry out Lincoln's plan. The states of the old confederacy, except Ten- nessee, rejected the fourteenth amendment. Nearly all of them elected prominent ex-confederates to congress. Almost all of them enacted laws copied in a general way after statutes in force in some of the Northern states, directed against vagrants, white or black, but which the South obviously intended to apply to blacks chiefly, which were very objectionable to the North, and
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which many people of the North thought woukl restore some- thing like slavery in the old seceded states. In every particular this conduct of the South was natural under the circumstances, but it was unwise.
Confronted by these conditions, which were welcomed by some extremists in the North as affording a pretext for harsh legis- lation, and in the contest between Johnson and congress, which took place at the same time, congress gradually evolved its recon- struction scheme, insisted on the ratification of the fourteenth amendment by the South, and enacted the law of March 2, 1867, the original reconstruction act, all being carried over the presi- dential veto by the constitutional two-thirds vote. The act of March, 1867, divided the ex-confederate states into military dis- tricts, under the command of generals of the army, enforced the exclusion of ex-confederates shut out by the fourteenth amend- ment, established negro suffrage, restored the states to their old places in the Union, and brought carpet-bag rule for a few years in ten states, Tennessee escaping it by being restored to its old place in 1866.
Though Missouri was not directly touched by the reconstruc- tion acts of congress, for she had stood by the Union, they affected Missouri politics, as they did the politics of most of the states for a few years. Before the campaign of 1868 began, Francis P. Blair, James O. Broadhead, Samuel T. Glover and other Missouri Republican leaders, largely as a consequence of the proscriptive features of the Drake constituton, as the charter of 1865 was popularly called, had left their party and allied them- selves with the Democracy, although Blair, on some points, began to diverge from the Republicans before 1865. In retaliation for Blair's defection, and especially for his hostility to the Missouri constitution, the Republican congress in 1866 rejected his nomi- nation by President Johnson for collector of internal revenue in St. Louis and for minister to Austria.
A letter from Blair to Broadhead, dated Washington, June 30, 1868, declared that the president who would be elected in that year, and who, he supposed, would be a Democrat, ought to set aside the reconstruction law, "compel the army to undo its usurpations at the South, disperse the carpet-bag state govern- ments, and elect senators and representatives." "It is idle," he added, "to talk of bonds, greenbacks, gold, the public faith and the public credit. What can a Democratic President do in regard to any of free with a Congress in both branches controlled by the carpet baggers and their allies? We unist restore
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the constitution before we can restore the finances, and to do this we must have a President who will execute the will of the people by trampling into dust the usurpations of Congress known as the reconstruction acts. I wish to stand before the conven- tion on this issne, but it is one which embraces everything else that is of value in its large and comprehensive results."
This revolutionary utterance, which must be read in the light of the tumultuous politics of the time, especially in Missouri, which was made public just before the Democrats met in national convention on July 4, in New York, obtained for Blair the nomi- nation for vice president on the first ballot, Horatio Seymour of New York being the presidential nominee. Grant and Colfax were the Republican national ticket.
In one of the most exciting campaigns which Missouri had ever known, the Republicans swept the state in 1868, rolling up a majority of 25,883 for Grant and one of 19.327 for Joseph WV. McClurg, of Camden county, for governor. E. O. Stanard, of St. Louis, was the Republican nominee for lieutenant gover- nor and was also elected. McCluirg's Democratic opponent was ex-Congressman John S. Phelps, of Springfield, whose time as governor was to come a few years later. Missouri's total vote for president was only 145,459 in 1868, or 20,000 less than the state's aggregate in Lincoln's first canvass, in 1860. . The dis- franchising of the ex-confederates and the operation of the regis- tration act had shut out tens of thousands of voters. Of the nine Missouri members of congress chosen in 1868, the Repub- licans elected six and the Democrats three. The Republicans also carried a majority of the legislature.
Joseph W. McClurg was born in St. Louis county, was a law- yer and also a merchant, served as a colonel of cavalry for a short time during the war, then went to congress, where he remained six years, and was fifty years old when he entered the governorship. He served only two years in that office, being beaten by B. Gratz Brown in 1870, and held the post of register of the land office at Springfield, Mo., for a few years under an appointment by President Harrison in 1889.
In 1867 Charles D. Drake was elected to succeed B. Gratz Brown in the senate, serving till 1870, when he resigned to take the post of chief justice of the court of claims, under an appoint- ment by President Grant. Drake was born in Cincinnati in 181; removed to St. Louis in early manhood, was a lawyer of note, a member of the legislature just before the outbreak of the war, was a member for a short time of the Gamble con-
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vention which governed the state during nearly the whole of the war, and was the most influential personage in the convention of 1865 which framed the constitution of that year.
Carl Schurz was elected senator in 1869 to succeed John B. Henderson, who had aroused the opposition of some of his party by voting to acquit President Johnson in 1868, whom the Repub- licans impeached and attempted to remove. Schurz, who, like Drake and Henderson, was a Republican, was a native of Ger- many, was prominent in the risings of 1848-49, immigrated to the United States in 1852, was a delegate to the convention of 1860 which nominated Lincoln, held the post of minister to Spain for a short time under Lincoln's appointment, was a major general of volunteers in the war of secession, became one of the editors of the Westliche Post of St. Louis in 1867, and was temporary chairman of the convention of 1868 which nominated Grant the first time. He served out his term in the senate, was secretary of the interior in 1877-81 in the cabinet of President Hayes, and has resided in New York most of the time since.
In the vote in 1868 on the question of striking out the word "white" from the provisions of the constitution relating to the suffrage, there was a majority of nearly 19,000 cast against the change-that is, against negro suffrage. Missouri, however, which ratified the thirteenth amendment in 1865, cast a large majority in 1867 for the fourteenth amendment, which, practi- cally, brought negro suffrage, and it gave a large majority for the fifteenth amendment in 1870. Possibly some of these amend- ments would have failed in Missouri had the disabilities imposed by the constitution of 1865 on ex-confederates and others been removed at the time.
The victory of 1868 was destined to be the last triumph which the Republican party was to gain in Missouri for many years in a state election, but neither Democrats nor Republicans could have foretold this at the time. In his inaugural message to the legislature in January, 1869, Governor McClurg recommended several changes in the state constitution, among them the removal of all the disfranchising provisions which the war had inserted in it. McClurg had been against these all along. His prede- cessor Governor Fletcher had also been opposed to them. The legislature, overwhelmingly Republican in both branches, but affected by the altered feeling of the time, submitted several amendments to the people of the state at the general election IV-12
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on November 8, 1870, on the same day as that on which a gov- ernor and state officers were to be chosen. These amendments proposed to abolish the test oath for voters, to dispense with the oath of loyalty for jurors, to render the oath no longer neces- sary as a condition precedent to the holding of office under the state government or in private corporations, and to remove the political disabilities attached to the ex-slaves, while other amend- ments related to banks, to corporations, to courts and to educa- tion.
On this issue of the restoration of the ballot to ex-confeder- ates and others shut out by the test oath and other restrictions, the dominant party split. In the Republican state convention which met in the house of representatives hall in Jefferson City on August 31, 1870, what was called the "radical" section of the party declared in favor of "re-enfranchising those justly dis- franchised for participation in the late rebellion as soon as it can be done with safety to the state." What was called the "liberal" section of the party demanded re-enfranchisement imme- diately. When the "radicals" carried the convention for their resolution the "liberals,". to the number of about 250 delegates, withdrew from the convention and went to the senate chamber, under the lead of Senator Schurz and Benjamin Gratz Brown, and nominated a ticket headed by Brown for governor and J. J. Gravelly for lieutenant governor. The "radicals" renomi- nated Governor McClurg, and for lieutenant governor they put up A. J. Ilarlan.
Among those who left the Republican party in the schism of 1870 was Charles P'. Johnson, of St. Louis, who had been chair- man of the emancipation committee of his brauch of the legis- lature in 1863; who, while remaining in the party, had opposed the proscriptive features of the Drake constitution; who was in the legislature in 1865-66; who served as circuit attorney, first by appointment of Governor Fletcher and then by election by the Republicans in 1868; and who, two years after the separa- tion of 1870, was elected lieutenant governor on the ticket with Woodson in the fusion between the Democrats and the Liberal Republicans on the state ticket.
The Democrats, who were far in the minority under the dis- franchising clauses of the constitution, saw their salvation in this division among their enemies, declined to put up a ticket of their own in 1870, and threw their support to the "liberals." The coalition swept the state, carried all the amendments, and elected Brown by a majority of 41,917. The aggregate vote on gov-
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ernor in 1870 was 166,625, or only about 1,000 in excess of that of 1860 for president, although the census showed that the state's population had expanded 539,000 during the decade. To congress, four Democrats, three "radical" Republicans and two "liberals" were chosen. The coalition also gained control of the legislature.
The amendment abolishing the test oath had 127,000 votes in its favor and only 16,000 against it. With the adoption of the amendments virtually all the proscriptive legislation incited by the war was swept away.
By the election of 1870 the Republican party, which practi- cally dominated Missouri during the days of the Gamble-Hall convention, from 1861 to Governor Fletcher's entrance in 1865 into power, and which absolutely ruled it during Fletcher's and McClurg's terms, was removed from office, and it has never car- ried the state since except for minor officers in 1894.
In the suffrage provisions of the constitution of 1865, the Republicans of Missouri made a grave mistake. Framed while the war was still raging, and in a state which had seen war's horrors in peculiarly savage shape, the things which incited the mistake are, of course, plain. The mistake's social effects, how- ever, convulsed the state at the time, and its partisan conse- quences have been felt through every minute of all the years which have passed since. Passion commonly is a bad counsellor, and passion blazed hotter in those days than it ever did before or afterward in the United States. In such volcanic times as those moderation would have been casier in preachment than in practice, but moderation in 1865 would have saved the conquer- ors' party from the disruption which assailed it immediately afterward, would have held such conservatives as Brown, Glover, Broadhead and Johnson in the party, though probably Blair and others would have been lost in any case, and would, perhaps with occasional intermissions of Democratic rule, have retained Repub- lican sway in Missouri to this hour.
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CHAPTER XVIII
The Democratic Party's Return to Power
F OR Missouri the year 1870 was as notable industrially and economically as it was politically. The census showed that the state's population, which was 1,182,012 in 1860, had grown to 1,721,295 in 1870, an increase of 539,283. The true value of the state's property was placed at a little over five hundred one million dollars in 1860, and this had expanded to one billion two hundred eighty-four million nine hundred twenty- two thousand eight hundred ninety-seven dollars, considerably more than doubling in the decade. While the state's per capita wealth had been four hundred twenty-four dollars in 1860, it was seven hundred forty-six dollars ten years later. Consider- ing the destruction of life and property in the state during the four years of war and the demoralization which had resulted therefrom, and which projected itself into the half a dozen years immediately following the surrender of the last of the confed- erate soldiers in the state, these were surprising gains. The popu- lation increase was altogether in the white element. The 118,071 negro population found in the state in 1870 represented a falling off of over 400 from 1860, which is partly accounted for by the escape of slaves from the state to the free region during the war days. Relatively to the whites, there has been a steady decline in the negro ingredient of the population in Missouri to this day. From the eighth place among the thirty-three states in 1860, Missouri had advanced to the fifth among thirty-seven states in 1870.
A far larger proportionate gain, however, had been made in Missouri's principal city during the decade. St. Louis' popula- tion had increased from 160,773 in 1860 to 310,864 in 1870. The
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