USA > Missouri > A History of Northeast Missouri, Volume I > Part 22
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THE FALL OF THOMAS HART BENTON
The fruits of the Mexican war, California and New Mexico, raised the slavery and sectional issues in national politics in a new and most dan- gerous form; the same issues were the occasion in Missouri for attack on Benton. This opposition to Benton had been smoldering for ten years and was in part personal and in part political. Benton's own positive and domineering personality made him a difficult man to work with and created an ever growing number of personal enemies. Then he was no politician in. the ordinary sense of the word. Soon after his first election he practically moved to Washington, returning to St. Louis for a visit every summer and making an occasional triumphant progress through the state. He never showed any keen interest in the patronage and absolutely refused to consult or placate the local leaders. As a result the younger men in the Democratic party came to look upon Benton as a positive obstacle to their political advancement. Benton built his influence on his direct appeals to the people of the state, through his speeches and newspaper articles. As long as Jackson dominated the
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party and Benton was Jackson's trusted friend and spokesman in the senate, Benton was impregnable; but after 1840 he steadily lost ground. The national Democratic party came more and more under the influence of the younger southern leaders, whose unionism Benton regarded with suspicion. As he grew older he was less and less willing to submit to party discipline and in the late forties quarrelled openly with the ad- ministration and Calhoun tried to read him out of the party. Benton also refused to bow to public opinion in Missouri, and offended very many by his insistence on hard money and his opposition to the imme- diate annexation of Texas. When after the Mexican war he insisted that California be admitted at once as a free state, quite irrespective of the extension of slavery into Utah and New Mexico, his enemies made their attack.
As early as 1844, when Benton was to come up for re-election, there was a paper money, anti-Benton state ticket in the field, but John C. Edwards, the Hard Money, pro-Benton candidate was elected governor. The opposition to Benton does not seem to have figured in the state cam- paign in 1848, when Austin A. King was chosen governor. But when Benton's fifth term as United States senator drew toward its close, his enemies closed in for a fight to a finish. Their method was very adroit. They succeeded in 1849 in passing through the assembly the famous Jackson resolutions which endorsed the southern contentions as to the power of congress over slavery in the territories, pledged Missouri to stand by the South whatever came, and instructed Missouri's senators to vote accordingly. These resolutions were no more radical than those passed in several other states and indeed were probably regarded by the majority of those voting for them as merely an earnest protest against northern anti-slavery and abolitionist agitation. But Benton, as his enemies hoped, took them as a challenge. He indignantly refused to be bound by the resolutions because, as he insisted, they savored of disunion and did not represent the will of Missouri, and made a dramatic appeal from the legislature to the people.
The result in the election of 1850 was a legislature divided between the Whigs and the two Democratic factions, no one having a majority. After a long deadlock enough anti-Benton Democrats voted for the Whig candidate Henry S. Geyer to elect him United States Senator, and Ben- ton's long service was over. He, however, refused to admit defeat. He took no part in the campaign electing Sterling Price as governor in 1852, but was himself in that year returned to Washington as representative from the St. Louis district. Two years later the term of senator D. R. Atchison, one of Benton's most determined enemies, expired, and Benton entered the race against him. Again the assembly showed no majority, but this time . no compromise was possible and no senator was chosen. In 1856, Benton made his last stand; he ran for governor, but was beaten by the regular Democratic candidate, Trusten Polk, and for senator, also unsuccessfully. Polk and James S. Green, both anti-Benton Demo- crats, were chosen.
Although Benton was sixty-five years of age when the Jackson reso- lutions were passed, he fought with all his old-time courage and violence, twice stumping the state from end to end. In spite of his undoubted faults of extreme egotism, violence and demand for absolute power, he is the greatest Missourian. His unflinching courage, his patriotic devotion to the Union and his services to the West make him a national figure of commanding importance. His defeat was due in no small measure to his stanch adherence to his Jacksonian Democracy when his own party had drifted away from it.
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THE KANSAS TROUBLES
Meanwhile Missouri politics were still further confused and the state thrown into a turmoil by the Kansas troubles. When in 1854 Stephen A. Douglas in his Kansas-Nebraska bill repealed the Missouri Compro- mise and provided for the organization of Kansas and Nebraska terri- tories where the people themselves should decide as to slavery, he re- opened the whole slavery question in a form of peculiar interest to Missourians. They assumed, as did the whole country, that the under- standing was that Kansas was to be slave and Nebraska free; moreover, they saw that if Kansas were to be free and Missouri thus surrounded on three sides by free territory, slavery, already a declining institution in Missouri, would be doomed. Accordingly when anti-slavery settlers backed up by anti-slavery societies began to pour into Kansas and soon set up a separate government looking toward the immediate admission of Kansas as a free state, the people of western Missouri were up in arms. They felt that their interests were too closely involved to permit them to sit idly by while the free-soilers, contrary to the intent of the law, as they understood it, were getting control of Kansas. At first the Missourians contented themselves with crossing over at election time, outvoting the Kansas free-soilers and returning home, but after actual civil war broke out in Kansas the Missourians took an active part in the fighting and captured Lawrence, the free-soil headquarters. While this interference in Kansas was quite outside the law and many Missourians were guilty of unnecessary violence, it must be remembered that they felt they were justified by the intent of the law and their own interests, and that these invasions of Kansas had the approval of such men as ex- Senator Atchison and General Doniphan. In the end the steady stream of free-soil immigrants decided the issue in Kansas in their favor, and before the war Missouri was repaid for her interference by raids of adventurers from Kansas along her southwestern border and still more heavily during the war when Kansas volunteer regiments served in Missouri.
THE COMING OF THE RAILROADS
In spite of this confusion in politics the development of the state was going steadily on. The population from 1850 to 1860 increased over three-fourths to nearly twelve hundred thousand; in rank Missouri rose from the thirteenth to the eighth state in the Union. The river trade was at its height and St. Louis had become the largest city in the middle west. Independence and St. Joseph were growing rapidly under the stimulus of the rapid growth of California and Oregon and the trans- continental traffic. The proportion of slaves to total population had fallen to less than one-tenth : slavery was holding its own in only about twenty-five of the river counties. Over a seventh of the whites were foreign born, nearly a seventh were natives of northern states, and for the first time a majority were native born Missourians. The state was rapidly becoming a cosmopolitan western community, although the sen- timental attachment to the South was still very strong. The absence of any staple crop and therefore of the plantation system was fatal to the development of slave labor.
The most important advance in the decade was the coming of the railroads. The lack of capital was overcome in two ways; by very lib- eral land grants by the national government and, after long hesitation, by the direct aid of the state. In 1851 the legislature began to issue bonds, which the railroads could sell in return for mortgages to the state. On the fourth of July the first spade full of earth was
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turned for the Pacific road and late in 1852 the first locomotive west of the Mississippi was placed on the rails at St. Louis. Railroad build- ing proved unexpectedly expensive, work went on very slowly, and even before the war most of the roads were in difficulty. Altogether the state before 1860 issued between twenty-three and twenty-four millions of bonds for the railroads and already several of them were unable to pay their interest. Only one, the Hannibal and St. Joseph (now the Burl- ington) was in successful operation across the state; the Pacific (now the Missouri Pacific) had reached Sedalia, the North Missouri (the pres- ent Wabash), Macon, and the Southwest Branch (now the Frisco), Rolla.
THE CIVIL WAR CLOUD
As the national election of 1860 approached the national parties were hopelessly disorganized; the Whig party had succumbed to the rising sectional hostility, the Democrats, in reality just as hopelessly divided, were to come to an open rupture in the approaching campaign, while in the North a new sectional party. the Republican, was growing very rapidly. In Missouri the new elements in the population and the bitter- ness from the Benton fight were additional local complications. Even in the special election of 1857 the regular anti-Benton Democratic can- didate for governor, Robert M. Stewart, defeated James S. Rollins, an old line conservative Whig, by less than four hundred votes. In the state election of 1860 the Democratic candidate for governor, Claiborne F. Jackson, was forced to come out for Douglas, the northern Demo- cratic candidate for president; the Breckenridge or southern Democrats ran a separate ticket; Frank P. Blair organized the Republican party in and around St. Louis; the Conservative Whig or Constitutional Union men nominated Semple Orr. The contest was between the first and the last, with Jackson the successful candidate. In the presidential cam- paign much the same lines were drawn, and the more conservative Demo- crat Douglas defeated the ultra-conservative Bell by a few more than two hundred votes. In all this confusion one fact at least was clear; the great majority of the Missourians opposed the radicals, north and south, and stood for conservatism and compromise on the sectional ques- tions.
NORTH OR SOUTH ?
The secession of South Carolina from the Union in December, 1861, forced an extremely difficult decision on the people of Missouri. Their traditions and, sentimental attachment were still for the most part southern; the Benton fight had forced the leaders of the dominant Democratic party into a support of the southern interests. On the other hand the material interests of the state were predominatingly western : it seemed illogical to secede to protect slavery, a decaying institution and plainly doomed if Missouri were surrounded on three sides by foreign free territory, and Benton, like Clay in Kentucky, had left an invaluable heritage of devotion to the Union. Missouri's decision was of extreme importance to North and South alike. Having within her boundaries the control of the Missouri and the transcontinental routes, the center of trade of the northwest, and the largest number of white men of fight- ing age of any slave state, her adherence was indispensable to the South and invaluable to the North.
The theatre of war in this fight for Missouri was threefold; the governor and assembly at Jefferson City, the convention elected to de- cide on secession, and the United States arsenal at St. Louis. Governor Jackson, although nominally a Douglas Democrat, was a strong southern
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, sympathizer and believed that Missouri should prepare to leave the Union in case all attempts at compromise failed and the Union was dissolved. His plans demanded for their success legislation putting the state on a war footing and the seizure of the United States arsenal to arm state troops. The assembly was hopelessly divided, with' the Breckenridge or southern Democrats the most numerous, but outnum- bered by the combined votes of the more conservative Douglas and Bell members. The assembly in January by a large majority authorized the election of a convention to pass on secession, with the proviso that any ordinance of secession should be submitted to a popular vote. It then adjourned to await the decision of the people.
They decided against immediate secession by a majority of over eighty thousand, with not a single delegate elected in favor of immedi- ate withdrawal from the Union. The factions in the convention reflect very accurately the opinion of the people. Less than a third of the delegates might fairly be classed as southern sympathizers, i. e., they believed if attempts at compromise failed Missouri ought to declare herself for the South. Another much smaller group declared that Mis- souri must remain in the Union under all circumstances. The majority of the convention were the conditional Union men, who admitted that the contingency might arise under which Missouri ought to secede, but for the most part refused to discuss or define that contingency and bent all their efforts in support of some or any compromise that would pre- serve the Union. Sterling Price, president of the convention, Hamilton R. Gamble, drafter of its resolutions, and John B. Henderson, leader on the floor, were all conditional Union men. The repeated attempts of the southerners to pledge Missouri to secession in case of the failure of compromise or of civil war were all voted down and the convention con- tented itself with a declaration that there was no immediate reason for Missouri's secession, that she besought both North and South to re- unite, and that she would support any compromise that would preserve the Union, The convention then adjourned to await the outcome of the national crisis.
The decision of the convention paralyzed the activities of the gov- ernor until the firing on Fort Sumter and the opening of the Civil war. He then indignantly refused to obey the call of Lincoln for troops to "coerce" the South and thus regained much of his lost ground. But although thousands of conditional Union men now rallied to an uncon- ditional support of the South, the majority in Missouri as in Kentucky leaned toward a policy of neutrality. The border states were to stand by the old Union, take no part in this unholy contest and to present a barrier to actual fighting. Impossible as this policy was in the long run it appealed strongly to the people and the assembly still refused to pass the laws the governor desired.
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT PARTICIPATES IN STATE AFFAIRS
Missouri, however, unlike Kentucky, was not allowed to make her de- cision without interference. Frank P. Blair and the radical Union men secured Lincoln's reluctant consent that the Federal government take a part in the fight for Missouri. Blair realized as well as Gov- ernor Jackson the importance of the St. Louis arsenal. The United States army officers there were men of southern sympathies, long resi- dent in St. Louis and Blair feared they would offer no effective resist- ance to an attack by the state troops. He accordingly organized an effective fighting force on the basis of the marching clubs of the presi- dential campaign. These clubs, composed mainly but not exclusively of Vol. 1-11
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Germans, met regularly for military drill and needed only arms to be a. formidable force. During these same months of late winter and early spring, Blair was persistently urging the authorities at Washington to place a more trustworthy officer in command of the arsenal. Lincoln finally appointed Captain Nathaniel Lyon, a more aggressive Union man than even Blair himself. When Governor Jackson refused to fur- nish Missouri's quota of troops after Fort Sumter, Blair offered his military clubs as a substitute. They were mustered into the United States service and armed from the arsenal. In this contest also the gov- ernor was defeated. He did not give up his plans, however. In May he ordered the militia to assemble for a week of drill. One detachment went into camp just outside of St. Louis. While this encampment was strictly according to state law, there seems little doubt that the militia were to be used as a rallying point for armed resistance to Lyon and Blair, inasmuch as guns and munitions of war obtained from the Con- federate authorities at New Orleans were smuggled into the camp. At any rate Blair and Lyon regarded the force as threatening an attack on the United States and promptly surrounded the camp with their troops and compelled the militia to surrender. On the return march to the city the United States troops were hooted at and stoned, and fired on the crowd, killing or injuring some twenty-five, including women and children.
For a few days it seemed as if Blair and Lyon had accomplished all that Governor Jackson had been trying in vain to bring about. This open attack on the militia of the state and most exaggerated reports of the atrocities of the German volunteers sent a flame of indignation through the state. The assembly at a single session passed the laws putting the state on a war footing and giving the governor dictatorial powers. Thousands rushed to enlist in the new state militia, as much perhaps to defend the autonomy of the state as from any desire for secession. After a few days when the truth about the unfortunate inci- dents at St. Louis were better known, excitement decreased and the old desire for neutrality reasserted itself. Jackson and Sterling Price, now commander of the state forces, either to gain time or from a sincere desire to avoid bloodshed, made the so-called Price-Harney agreement with General Harney, commanding at St. Louis, by which Harney agreed that the state government should not be interfered with in local affairs. But at Washington this was regarded as tantamount to a recognition of neutrality, Harney was removed and Lyon at last put in supreme com- mand and given a free hand. He absolutely refused to agree to any limitations on the power of his government to recruit troops or carry on war in Missouri, Jackson and Price were as unyielding in their demands for such neutrality, Lyon moved his troops on Jefferson City and war began.
Evidently it is very difficult to describe with any certainty the real wishes of the Missourians, for they were not permitted to make a free choice. It may very well be that with opinions so evenly balanced if Governor Jackson and the state government, supported by constantly growing armed forces at Camp Jackson and throughout the state, had finally come out for secession, that the majority of the people would have acquiesced and Missouri would have seceded. If this be true, Lyon's attack on Camp Jackson was not only justifiable, from the Union point of view, but necessary. On the other hand, it is more prob- able that the people would have resented this attempt to force the state out of the Union in defiance of the still existing convention, and as in Kentucky, where Lincoln refused to interfere, have changed their senti- ment of neutrality to a moderate Unionism. Out of the confusion of
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evidence perhaps only one safe opinion emerges, that whichever way the constituted authorities decided, a very large element would have refused to submit and so a local civil war was inevitable.
CIVIL WAR IN MISSOURI
The state guards were undrilled and very poorly armed and except for a skirmish at Boonville were unable to oppose Lyon. Jackson and Price retreated into the extreme southwestern corner of the state gather- ing recruits on their way. Hither Lyon followed them, after occupy- ing the river towns on the Missouri and thus cutting off the northern part of the state. Price induced McCulloch with a well armed Confed- erate force to come to his aid from Arkansas and together they de- feated Lyon at the battle of Wilson's creek near Springfield, one of the most sanguinary battles of the war, in which Lyon lost his life. Price then marched northward to the Missouri, captured Lexington but was soon forced to retreat. Early in 1862 he was driven from the state and the Confederate army in Arkansas defeated and scattered at the battle in the Boston mountains in Arkansas. In 1864 Price re- turned to Missouri, entering the state from the southeast, threatening St. Louis and marching rapidly westward before the fast gathering Federal forces. The people did not rise in his support as he hoped and expected, he was forced to retreat rapidly to Arkansas and his raid accomplished nothing beyond the destruction of railroads and. public property. Except for the opening campaign of Wilson's creek, the fighting in Missouri had little influence on the war in general.
Meanwhile, especially in the first two years of the war, the state was convulsed with an internal civil war, where neighbor fought against neighbor and brother against brother. Armed bands in various parts of the state destroyed railroads and public property, cut off detach- ments of Federal troops and destroyed the property of Union sympa- thizers. Some of these bands were men who were trying to fight their way south, others, while irregular, were bona fide southern sympathizers but too many of them were simply outlaws fighting under the southern flag for plunder or to satisfy private grudges. The western border suf- fered severely from Kansas maurauders of much the same type though nominally Unionist, and indeed the officers and men of the Kansas and Iowa regiments were too willing to regard Missouri as a disloyal and conquered state. To put down this guerrilla warfare the Federal com- manders put much of the state under martial law, and dealt with spe- cial outbreaks with extreme severity, such as the Palmyra massacre and Order Number Eleven. In 1861 and 1862, it almost seemed as if the Federal authorities were deliberately making it difficult for any mod- erate Missourian to support the Union.
GOVERNOR GAMBLE AND THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT
The flight of Governor Jackson and the assembly from Jefferson City before Lyon's advance left the state without any organized gov -. ernment. While Lyon was driving Price down to Arkansas the con- vention reassembled, declared the seats of the governor and assembly vacant and appointed Hamilton R. Gamble provisional governor. The Union men of the state now had a regular government to recognize and support. The situation was still further simplified when late in 1861 a fragment of the old assembly assembled at Neosho and passed an ordi- nance of secession. Price now accepted a Confederate commission, his men either entered the Confederate army or returned home, and Mis-
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souri sent representatives to the Confederate congress. With an empty treasury, disorganized local government, a large part of the population in active resistance, and the northern half of the state garrisoned by a distrustful Federal government, Gamble faced a task of extreme diffi- culty. The convention authorized a loan, and imposed an oath of loyalty on all officeholders, Gamble won Lincoln's confidence and succeeded in substituting loyal Missouri militia supported from Washington for the Federal garrisons, and gradually restored confidence and order over most of the state. Missouri's debt to this patient and conservative gov- ernor is hard to overestimate.
The convention did not dissolve itself until 1863. In 1862 law and order had so far been restored that a new assembly was elected, but no election for governor was held until 1864. The convention imposed a new qualification for voting in this 1862 election, an oath of allegiance and that the voter had not been in arms against the Union. At this same session the convention laid on the table Lincoln's favorite plan of eman- cipation with compensation. By this time the convention was lagging behind public opinion, but consented at its last meeting in 1863 to a plan of very gradual emancipation.
EMANCIPATION AND THE DRAKE CONSTITUTION
Meanwhile slavery was dead in all but name; it was impossible to recover runaway slaves. In the election of 1862 the emancipationists were in a large majority but not agreed as to the method. Two new parties soon appeared, the conservatives supporting Governor Gamble in his moderate policy believing in gradual emancipation, and the radi- cals, who denounced Gamble as at least lukewarm in his Unionism, de- manded stringent test oaths and immediate and unconditional emanci- pation. Although Lincoln steadily refused to interfere in their favor, the radicals were the better organized and more aggressive, with a more definite platform, the increasing bitterness as the war dragged on aided them, so that in 1864 they secured control of the assembly and elected their candidate, Thomas C. Fletcher, governor. At the same election a new and radical convention was elected which in January, 1865, passed an ordinance of immediate emancipation. Slavery, already dead to all intents and purposes, was thus legally destroyed by state action shortly before the thirteenth amendment to the national constitution destroyed it in the whole nation.
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