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 2
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nado's daring with Talleyrand's adroitness, had ance with the Indians of the Missouri river th who lived before or since, and had better succe them. Clark appointed Lisa United States s the formidable red men on that stream from ish, and he did his work in characteristically eff Indian village of Prairie du Chien, on the si Wisconsin city of that name, was a rendezvous and a radiating center of influences hostile tot and also commanded the upper Mississippi. CI Captains Yeizer and Sullivan and Lieutenant : hundred volunteers, went up in armed barges built Fort Shelby at that point, and, leaving it, returned to his post.
Notwithstanding Clark's precautions, howev Hearing that an attack in large force on tha impending, he sent Lieutenant Campbell and a soldiers in three keelboats up the river to re-ent but they allowed themselves to be led into : river, were attacked by the Sacs and Foxes, the river with considerable loss of life. Mea son at Prairie du Chien, on July 17, 1814, was British and Indians from the lakes, under Colo tain Yeizer and his gunboat were driven dow Fort Shelby surrendered on the 19th.
There had been considerable fighting in the souri during the war. Capt. Sarchell Cooper, Lick country, a leading spirit in his locality, w house, which formed part of Cooper's fort, one night, was killed by an Indian who had crept for that purpose. On March 7, 1815, Capt. the commander of the rangers in his vicinity, of his men, near Prairie Fork, in the present Mc killed by the Sacs and Foxes. Cooper and Cal
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THIE TERRITORY OF MISSOURI.
counties were afterward named, were the most prominent men who were killed in Missouri by the Indians during the war.
The news of the Hague treaty of peace reaching St. Louis soon after this time, Clark called a great council of all the Indians in Missouri Territory and on the upper Mississippi, which took place at Portage des Sioux, on the neck of land between the Mississippi and the Missouri, a compact of peace was signed, and the war in the West was formally ended.
After the close of the war of 1812-15 an inrush of immi- grants into Missouri began, and old settlements were extended and new ones founded. A fever of land speculation set in, and raged many years. Timothy Flint, a New England Congrega- tional clergyman, who was in the Territory at the time, gives a graphic picture of the craze for wild lands which prevailed. "I question if the people of Missouri," he said, "generally thought there existed higher objects of interest than Chouteau and a few other great landholders of that class. A very large tract . of land was cried by the sheriff for sale while I was present, and the only limits and bounds given were that it was thirty miles north of St. Louis. A general laugh went through the crowd assembled at the court house door. But a purchaser soon appeared, who bid off the tract thirty miles north of St. Louis, undoubtedly with a view to sell it to some more greedy specu- lator than himself."
The same writer gives a vivid account of the inpouring of settlers during those days. "Between the second and third years," he says, "of my residence in the country, the immigra- tion from the Western and Southern states poured in in a flood, the power and strength of which could only be adequately con- ceived by persons on the spot. We have numbered a hundred persons passing through the village of St. Charles in one day. The number was said to have equalled that for many days together. From the Mamelles I have looked over the subjacent plains quite to the ferry, where the immigrants crossed the upper Mississippi. I have seen in this extent nine wagons har- nessed with from four to six horses. We may allow a hun- dred cattle, besides hogs, horses and sheep, to each wagon, and from three or four to twenty slaves. The whole appearance of the train; the cattle with their hundred bells; the negroes with delight in their countenances, for their labors are suspended and their imaginations excited; the wagons, often carrying two or three tons, so loaded that the mistress and children are stroll- ing carelessly along, in a gait which enables them to keep up
tary for four years, and judges and justices of for four years, were appointed by the presiden sent of the senate, all being subject to remove dent during their term, and all were required of the Territory. The house of representatives every second year by the people of the Territo of one representative for every 500 free white of the Territory, the number of members, thong twenty-five. All free white male citizens of th above the age of twenty-one, resident in the " months, who paid a territorial or county tax, vote for members of this body. The council w nine persons, to be selected by the president, v consent, from a list of eighteen persons name of representatives, resident in the Territory, ca acres of land, to continue in office five years removed by the president. A delegate was to b Territory's voters to the national house of re Washington, to have the privilege of talking measures, but not of voting.
Missouri Territory's first delegate to congres Hempstead of St. Louis, who was elected in ISI. ceeded by Rufus Easton, of St. Louis, in 1815, lowed by John Scott of Ste. Genevieve in 1817 in office until Missouri became a state in 1821. to congress for three terms under the state go ing from 1821 to 1827.
While agriculture was the largest of Missouri " ests, lead mining was the earliest of all its la Motte, in the present Madison county, wa. La Motte and Renault in 1720, in the early day occupation. Later on, especially after the trans ince in 1762 to Spain, lead discoveries were mac of Missouri-in the present counties of Ste. Go lin, Washington and Jefferson-south and southw
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TIIE TERRITORY OF MISSOURI.
By the beginning of the territorial days the lead mines were being worked with considerable success, adding to the region's resources and population. The iron, coal and zinc industries were later developments. In St. Louis, Ste. Genevieve, St. Charles and other towns mercantile houses were being opened ; the fur trade, which was the most important of St. Louis' inter- ests for many years, was being extended, and banks were being established.
St. Louis got two banks, which were the pioneers for that part of the Territory, in 1816. These were the Bank of Missouri, opened for business on September 30, and the Bank of St. Louis, which began operations on December 12. With one or other of these institutions most of the prominent business men of St. Louis and vicinity-Col. Auguste Chouteau, one of the found - ers of St. Louis ; Lilburn W. Boggs, afterward governor of the state ; Louis Bompart, Thomas F. Riddick, Thomas H. Benton, afterward senator and representative in congress ; Thomas Hemp- stead, Charles Gratiot, John P, Cabanne, Matthew Kerr, John B. C. Lucas, Bernard Pratte, Moses Austin, the promoter of the American colonization of Texas; Bartholomew Berthold, Joshua Pilcher, Frederick Dent and others-were identified.
On July 12, 1808, four years before Missouri Territory was created, Joseph Charless started at St. Louis the Missouri Gasette, which, after passing through several changes of name, is the present St. Louis Republic. This was the first newspaper pub- lished west of the Mississippi, but not the first in the Louisiana Province. New Orleans had one fourteen years before that time. In ISI9 Nathaniel Patton established in the town of Franklin the Missouri Intelligencer, the first newspaper which appeared west of St. Louis.
The newspaper and the steamboat, which appeared about the same time, brought in the new era in the West. In 1811, four years after the launching of Fulton's Clermont on the Hudson, Fulton, Livingston and Nicholas J. Roosevelt, President Roose- velt's granduncle, completed the New Orleans at Pittsburg, and it went down the Ohio and Mississippi to the town after which it was named, and established a route between that place and Natchez. On August 2, 1817, the General Pike, the first steamboat which went up the Mississippi past the mouth of the Ohio, tied up at the foot of Market street, in St. Louis. On October 2, of the same year, a larger steamboat, the Constitu- tion, arrived at St. Louis, the arrival of each attracting to the river the greater part of the residents of the town and of the
way in Missouri. The Arkansas district, com ent state of Arkansas and a large part of India Oklahoma, was cut off from Missouri in 181 into a separate territory. Missouri Territory ha to the third or highest grade in 1816, its per privilege of electing the council, or upper bra lature. They wanted complete self rule, howe a memorial of the Missouri legislature asking f form a state government was offered in the hou tives at Washington by John Scott, the Territory conflict which this request precipitated, and w the longest and most exciting that ever took p will be given in detail in the next chapter.
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MISSOURI'S FIGHT FOR STATEIIOOD.
CHAPTER HI
Missouri's Fight for Statehood
T "O the bill to allow Missouri to frame a state constitution, which was reported to the house on February 13, 1819, James Tallmadge, a New York Democrat, offered the fol- lowing amendment, copying the phraseology of the sixth article of the ordinance of 1787: "And, provided, that the further intro- duction of slavery or involuntary servitude be prohibited, except for the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted; and that all children born within the said state after the admission thereof into the Union shall be free at the age of twenty-five years."
This precipitated a contest in congress which lasted two years, convulsed the country, incited threats of secession from both north and south, but principally from the south, divided congress and the country on sectional lines, and called ont this exclamation from Jefferson, in a letter to John Holmes, one of the senators of the then newly created state of Maine, written April 22, 1820: "This momentous question, like a firebell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as a knell of the Union." Then, in words which future events proved to be prophetic, he added: "It is hushed, indeed, for the moment, but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once con- ceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated, and every new. irritation will make it deeper and deeper."
Slavery was the issue which incited the contest on Missouri's admission. The institution had existed in the province of Louisiana from the early days of the French occupation. It had
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THE PROVINCE AND THE STATES.
been recognized by the laws of France and Spain, its successive owners. Slavery had been in Missouri from the opening of the lead mines in the Meramec region, a century before statehood was asked. In effect it was guaranteed by the Bonaparte-Jefferson treaty of Louisiana cession of 1803, and had not been disturbed by any of the' acts of congress organizing any parts of the province-Orleans, Missouri or Arkansas-into territories. A majority of Missouri's inhabitants were from the slave states. Though probably less than a fourth of them owned or held slaves in 1819, most of them, including some who were enemies of the institution of slavery then or afterward, took the ground that the prohibition of slavery in Missouri by congress would be an arbitrary exercise of federal power, which would impose limitations on it that were not placed on the other communities, and thus deprive it of that equality with the rest of the states which was guaranteed to all of them on their entrance into the family of commonwealths.
The desire to preserve the balance between the slave and the free sections of the country put the South on Missouri's side on this issue. At the time the constitution went into operation in 1789 the Union consisted of seven free and six slave states, giving the original thirteen states the classification accorded to them subsequently. Delaware, Maryland and all the states south of these were classed as slave states. Those to the north of the two named, although nearly all of them had some slaves for years after the adoption of the constitution, were designated as free states. In 1700, when the first national census was taken, there were 698,000 slaves in the United States, of which 40,000 were in the seven northern states and the remainder in the six southern states, Virginia having 293,000. All the northern states, except Massachusetts, had some slaves at the time. Slavery soon dis- appeared in the North, but it increased in the South, and there were 3,954,000 slaves in the south in 1860, five years before the institution's final extinction by the thirteenth amendment.
From the beginning the North drew ahead of the South in pop- ulation (chiefly on account of the existence of slavery in the South), and consequently in its number of votes in the house of representatives. To offset this preponderance by the North, the South carly in the nineteenth century began to insist that the states should be admitted in pairs, a slave state being linked to a free state. When Louisiana was admitted in 1812 there were eighteen states in the Union, nine free and nine slave. Five- the free states of Vermont and Ohio and the slave states of Ken-
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MISSOURI'S FIGHT FOR STATEHOOD.
tucky, Tennessee and Louisiana-had been added to the original thirteen by 1812. Indiana was admitted in 1816, Mississippi in 1817, Illinois in 1818 and Alabama in 1819, Indiana and Illinois belonging to the free column and the other two to the slave. There were thus twenty-two states before the contest on Mis- souri's admission began. The division between the sections was still even. True, Alabama had not been actually let in when the strife on the Missouri question started, but her early entrance was seen to be inevitable. Alabama's enabling act was passed March 2, 1819, and her admission took place on December 14 of that year.
This was the situation when the Missouri admission bill started the contest between the North and South in congress. In sub- stance, the argument of the slavery exclusionists was that the constitution, in empowering congress to admit new states to the Union, permitted congress to refuse to admit ; that this power to exercise its option in admitting or in refusing to admit states included the power to admit them on such conditions as it should prescribe-a power which it exercised when it required Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, as a condition of their admission to statehood, to prohibit slavery, as provided by the ordinance of 1787 shutting it out from the region which included those and other states-and that slavery was inconsistent with the republi- can government which the constitution obliged congress to guar- antee to every state.
The opponents of slavery exclusion argued, in effect, that the restriction prescribed by congress in the case of the three states named was unconstitutional; that congress had no power to impose conditions on new states which were not required from the original thirteen, unless the authority to do this was plainly set forth in the constitution ; that the original states, before and after the adoption of the constitution, exercised the power to admit or exclude slavery ; that the constitution had not taken this power from them, and that the imposition of distinctions by con- gress between the terms on which the new states should enter the Union and those on which the old states came in destroyed the equality of the states in powers and privileges.
In general, the division in congress on the Tallmadge slavery exclusion proviso was on sectional lines, most of the membersfrom the North voting in favor of the prohibition, and most of those from the South voting against it. Hamilton's, Adams' and Jay's Federalist party was dead at that time, and only one great political organization was in the country-Jefferson's. Republican party,
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THIE PROVINCE AND THIE STATES.
which was sometimes called Democratic then, which adopted the latter name permanently in Jackson's days, and which has retained it ever since. The best speeches which were made in congress on the slavery prohibition side were by Tallmadge him- self and by John Taylor, also a New Yorker, in the house, and by Rufus King, from the same state, in the senate. The strongest speeches made against the restriction were by John Scott, Mis- souri's delegate, Philip Barbour of Virginia, Louis McLane of Delaware, Henry Clay of Kentucky, and John Holmes of Massachusetts (who belonged to the section of Massachusetts which became the state of Maine in the admission act passed just before Missouri's), all in the house, and by William Pinckney of Maryland in the senate.
Tallmadge's anti-slavery amendment to the Missouri admission bill, proposed on February 13, 1819, was accepted by the house, in which chamber the North was predominant by reason of greater population. The bill, with the amendment, passed that body on February 17, by a vote of 87 to 76. In the senate, in which the vote of the sections was nearly even through the balance between the states, the Tallmadge proviso was stricken out, and the bill passed without it on March 2. In the disagreement between the two branches, Missouri was still a territory when the Fifteenth congress expired on March 3.
When the Sixteenth congress met on December 6, 1819, the Missouri admission question came up early. Maine at this time, separating from Massachusetts, asked to be let in as a state, and the house passed a bill to this effect on January 3, 1820. On February 18, the Maine admission bill passed the senate by a vote of 28 to 20. With it, however, the senate had linked a bill admitting Missouri without the slavery restriction, but with an amendment, proposed by Jesse B. Thomas, an Illinois Democrat, excluding slavery from all the Louisiana province north of lati- tude 36 degrees and 30 minutes ( Missouri's southerly boundary line), except Missouri. The house rejected the Missouri admis- sion rider and the Thomas amendment, and sent the Maine admission bill back to the senate. Each branch sticking to its position, the matter was referred to a conference committee of the members of both houses, which reported that the bills be separated, that both be admitted, Missouri to come in without the Tallmadge restriction but with the Thomas amendment. Both branches accepted the report, and the hills went to President Mon- roe, who signed the Maine bill on March 3, 1820, and the Mis- souri bill on March 6. The Thomas proviso-that slavery be
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MISSOURI'S FIGHT FOR STATEHOOD.
excluded from all the region purchased from France in 1803 north of latitude 36 degrees and 30 minutes, save Missouri-was the Missouri compromise proper.
Another compromise had to be adopted, however, before Mis- souri came in. Missouri's state constitution which was framed a few months after congress passed the enabling act of March 20, 1820, contained a provision making it the duty of the legis- lature to pass laws preventing free negroes or mulattoes from coming into the state. This provision caused an exciting con- test in both branches of congress, and a deadlock ensued which threatened to defeat the bill and leave Missouri in the territorial stage for an indefinite time.
Henry Clay then came forward with the first of his great adjustments to maintain peace between the sections. Clay, who had previously served several terms as speaker, which post he had resigned a few months previously, and who was by far the most influential member of the house, proposed, on January 29, 1821, a special committee of thirteen, of which he was made chairman by the speaker, John W. Taylor of New York. The committee reported a resolution to admit Missouri on the funda- mental condition that it should never pass any law preventing any persons' settling in the state who were citizens of any state- that is, that the discrimination in Missouri's constitution against free negroes in Missouri should never be put into operation-but the resolution was rejected on February 13. But Clay was not discouraged at this reverse. On February 23, on his motion again, a committee of twenty-three members was appointed in the house, to which the senate added seven members, and this body made a report substantially similar to that of the first committee. As the country by this time was tired of the struggle, and alarmed at the possible consequences of failure, the house accepted the report on February 26, and the senate did it two days later. Mis- souri, through its legislature, accepted congress' fundamental condition, and, on Monroe's proclamation, it entered the Union as a state on August 10, 1821. This second compromise was Clay's part in the Missouri admission adjustment.
In view of the South's subsequent position on the slavery ques- tion in the territories, and the consequences to which it led, it will be of interest here to mention two queries which President Monroe put to his cabinet just before he placed his signature on the Missouri bill on March 6, 1820. Those were: (1) Has con- gress the constitutional power to exclude slavery from a territory ? (2) Does the word "forever" in the Thomas amendment shutting
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TIIE PROVINCE AND THE STATES.
out slavery from all the Louisiana region north of 36 degrees and 30 minutes of latitude, except Missouri, prohibit slavery in the states which may be found out of that locality, or does it apply to the territorial condition only ?
To the first of these queries all the members of the cabinet, including Calhoun, the secretary of war, answered in the affirm- ative. On the second query the secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, declared that the "forever" applied to states as well as territories, and the same view was advanced in 1854 in the house of representatives by Thomas 11. Benton, in the contest which led to the repeal of the Missouri compromise. Calhoun, Craw- ford, the secretary of the treasury; and Wirt, the attorney gen- eral, thought it applied to the territorial status of the locality only, but when, on Calhoun's suggestion, the query was altered to, Is the eighth section of the Missouri bill (the part which contained the whole compromise provision) constitutional? all the cabinet took the affirmative side.
Calhoun changed his ground on these points in after years. From 1847 until his death in 1850 he contended that neither congress nor the legislature of a territory had the constitutional power to shut out slavery from a territory, and that this power could only be exercised by the people when framing their state constitution, or afterward when they became a state. Chief Justice Taney, in the Dred Scott case in 1857, sanctioned this later Calhoun view, so far as an obiter dictum can give sanction to anything. Douglas and his allies, stopping short of the extreme position taken by Calhoun in 1847 and afterward, con- tended that congress had no right to interfere with slavery in a territory, but insisted that the people of a territory, through their legislature, possessed this authority, and this was the ground taken in the Kansas-Nebraska act of 1854 which repealed the Missouri compromise of 1820.
Missouri was the eleventh state admitted since the foundation of the government, and brought the entire number of states up to twenty-four. It was the first state entirely west of the Mis- sissippi. No other state was let in until fifteen years after Mis- souri's entrance, and the state then created, Arkansas, had formed part of Missouri territory until a short time before Missouri was advanced to the statehood dignity.
Among the Missouri adjustment's consequences were these: It convinced the South that the salvation of slavery demanded a strict construction of the constitution, and that locality at once abandoned the broad construction of that charter which it adopted
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MISSOURI'S FIGHT FOR STATEHOOD.
during the war period of 1812-15; and afterward most of it opposed protective tariffs, the United States Bank, internal im- provements at the national expense, and the other assertions of power which would strengthen the federal government at the expense of the states. It made the new northwest free territory, just as the old northwest had been made free by the ordinance of 1787, put off for a generation the inevitable conflict between free- dom and slavery, and thus allowed the North and the West to gain the strength which gave freedom the victory when the con- flict came.
IV-3
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THE PROVINCE AND THE STATES.
CHAPTER III
The New State, Its People and Politics
U NDER the authority of congress's enabling act of March 20, 1820, delegates were elected in May of that year to a con- vention which met in June in St. Louis, the territory's capital, to frame a state constitution. Missouri's population, which was 20,845 in 18to, was 66,557 in 1820, 10,569 being negroes, nearly all of whom were slaves. Its five counties of 1810 had been expanded to fifteen-St. Louis, St. Charles, Ste. Genevieve, Cape Girardieu, Cooper, Franklin, Howard, Jeffer- son, Lincoln, Montgomery, Madison, New Madrid, Pike, Wash- ington and Wayne-in 1820. The population of St. Louis, Mis- souri's largest town, in 1820 was 4,598. St. Louis county's dele- gates to the convention were David Barton, Alexander McNair, Pierre Chouteau, Jr., Bernard Pratte, Edward Bates, Thomas F. Riddick, William Rector and John C. Sullivan. The members from the other counties who were then or later prominent in Missouri's business or politics included John Scott, the territory's delegate in Washington, who was sent there by the state for three terms afterward; Alexander Buckner, Duff Green, Benjamin H. Reeves and Daniel Hammond.
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