USA > Missouri > Centennial history of Missouri (the center state) one hundred years in the Union, 1820-1921, Volume I > Part 76
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Reynolds became the Confederate governor of Missouri without a capital. Part of the time he marched with the army, and part of the time he was in Richmond, issuing occasional proclamations and messages to the people of Mis- souri and to his traveling legislature. Brown was made a brigadier general in the Union army. In 1863 he became United States senator from Missouri. Before the convention of 1864, he supported the ordinance for emancipation of slaves in Missouri.
Toward the close of the war Reynolds did staff duty with General Shelby. After the war he went with Shelby and a considerable force of Missourians to Mexico, remaining in that country several years. In 1868 Reynolds returned to
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St. Louis. Two years later the Liberal Republican movement was inaugurated with Brown as the nominee for governor. The platform was restoration of civil rights to ex-Confederates. The Democrats made no nominations. Brown was elected and served two years. In 1872 the effort was made to give the Missouri idea national application and Brown was put forward for the Presidential nomina- tion. The convention, held in Cincinnati, gave first place to Greeley and put Brown on the ticket for Vice President. In 1874 Reynolds, with his civil rights restored by the movement which Brown had headed, was elected to the Missouri legislature from St. Louis. During the administration of President Arthur he was appointed the Democratic member of a commission sent to investigate pos- sible improvement of commercial relations with Latin-American countries.
Brown and Reynolds were on friendly terms after the war. From having been as far apart as possible politically, they came to have common political pur- poses. During the closing years of their lives their professional work was similar. They performed such duties as masters in chancery and commissioners.
Political Honors Not Satisfying.
Brown and Reynolds gave the best of their years and talents to politics. When age came on, neither felt that his career had brought a satisfying degree of suc- cess. Brown thought he should have devoted himself to mathematics. He had a natural bent in that direction. A treatise on algebra which he wrote attracted much notice. "Governor Brown," said Enos Clarke, who knew him intimately, "should have been a college professor. He would have done honor to the chair of mathematics at any American university."
Reynolds was a linguist of no ordinary ability. He possessed natural aptitude for acquiring other languages. During the high tide of German immigration to St. Louis, he used his knowledge of that language to considerable effect in local political campaigns. He made many German speeches. William E. Curtis, the traveler and writer, was one of Reynolds' colleagues of the Central and South American Commission. He told of the surprise which Reynolds caused, as the commission went from capital to capital, by his responses in several languages to the addresses of welcome. Reynolds replied officially in English and then trans- lated his remarks into one language after another until everybody present under- stood him.
Reynolds was a man of much sentiment. At the time of the death of his first wife, he wrote a sketch of her life, had it printed and sent copies to his intimate friends. In the spring of 1887 he went to the Federal building in St. Louis. ostensibly on legal business; he was found at the bottom of an elevator shaft. A short time before his death he wrote this memorandum :
"I am troubled with insomnia and frequent nervousness. I suffer from per- sistent melancholy. My mind is beginning to wander. I have hallucinations and even visions, when I am awake, of materialized spirits of deceased ancestors, urging me to join them in another world. Life has become a burden to me. I am now still sound of mind and I write down this statement so that should I do anything rash, my friends may feel assured it was done in some temporary dis- order of mind. In that event I commend myself to the mercy of God and the charitable judgment of men, soliciting for my excellent and devoted wife the sympathy of my friends."
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CHAPTER XXI
MISSOURI IN 1861
"You Can't Coerce a Sovereign State"-An Extraordinary Vote-Advice from Two Gover- nors-The Secession Program-Three Kinds of Democrats-The Contest for the Arsenal-General Frost's Report-Archbishop Keurick Applies Scriptures-The Com- mittee of Public Safety-General Farrar's Reminiscences-Some Aggressive Journal- ism-Home Guards and Minute Men-Isaac H. Sturgeon's Warning-An Insult to Missouri-Harney Restores Quiet-The Testing of Sweeny-A Commissioner Before the Legislature-John D. Stevenson Interrogates Lieutenant-Governor Reynolds-A Loaded Military Bill-General Lyon Arrives-The State Convention-Election of Delegates-Missouri Goes Union by 80,000 Majority-Dismay of the Southern Rights Democrats-Blair's Appeal to Lincoln-John F. Philips on the Delegates-Sterling Price Elected President-Minute Men Raise a Secession Flag-Riotous Scenes in Front of Headquarters-The Legislature Refuses to Pass the Military Bill-Prompt Action by the Convention-Secession "Is Annihilation for Missouri"-Colonel Broadhead's Pre- diction-Price to Shackleford-The Convention Denounced in the Legislature-Police Control Taken from St. Louis-Lyon Promises Arms to Home Guards-The April Election.
There never was in this world a struggle in which time was more the essence of things than in the fight for Missouri. The people were divided into something like three equal parts-one for the Union, another for secession, while the minds of the third were not made up, but were in a plastic condition. This halting, wavering third became decisive of the contest. To control it Blair and his opponents waged a battle royal. If, in the beginning, Blair could have aroused the federal government to a realization of the vast strategic importance of Missouri and to the necessity for early action, his task would have been easy. If, in the beginning. his antagonists could have aroused the Missouri legislature to a comprehension of the situation and could have induced the state authorities to seize the United States arsenal at St. Louis before General Nathaniel Lyon was placed in command, their task would have been easy; but when Lyon appeared upon the scene, their one golden opportunity was gone .- Champ Clark.
South Carolina had passed the ordinance of secession on the 20th of December. Other Southern States were preparing to follow in January. What shall Mis- souri do? All Missourians were asking that when the new state administration came in. "You can't coerce a sovereign state." echoed through the valley's and ran like flame over the prairies. "Armed neutrality" was the slogan that winter of 1861.
The Presidential election of 1860 brought to the polls nearly the entire voting population of Missouri. The census that year gave the state 1, 182.912. Of this population 114,935 were slaves. A vote was cast for every six white persons, an extraordinary proportion to be accounted for by the intense interest felt in the issues. But the vote was divided in a most remarkable manner. Douglas carried the state, yet he received only about one-third of the votes cast, 58,801. This was the strength of those Missourians who believed in "squatter sovereignty"-in giving to the territories and new states the right to decide for themselves whether
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they would have slavery. The anti-slavery party cast 17,028 votes for Lincoln, nearly all of them in St. Louis and by Germans. "Southern Rights democrats," as they preferred to be called, Missourians who sympathized with the South, believed in the right to secede and were willing to join, in this movement, polled only 12,000 more votes than the republicans. They joined issue with the Douglas democrats by declaring in favor of protecting "property" in every part of the Union. They gave John C. Breckinridge 31,317 votes. But there was another element in Missouri. It was almost as strong as the Douglas following. It cast 58.372 votes for John Bell and "Constitutional Union." These Bell men held that agitation of the slavery question was not only unnecessary but dangerous. Some of them had been whigs. Others had been Benton men. All of them were against the extremists, whether republicans or Southern Rights democrats. While 17,000 Missourians were against extension of slavery and 31,000 demanded extension of slavery or secession, 117,000 Missourians were against the two extreme minorities. Five-sevenths, or nearly that, of the Missouri body politic, was hostile to the radical elements of the North and the South. Thus it was that Missouri, at the beginning of 1861, presented conditions of public sentiment that were unlike those of any other state.
Conflicting Advice from Two Governors.
Missouri changed state administrations on the 3d of January, 1861. The retiring governor, Robert M. Stewart, and the incoming governor, Claiborne F. Jackson, in their messages, had much to say of what Missouri should do. "Bob" Stewart was a northern democrat, a New Yorker by birth, but long a resident of Missouri. "Claib" Jackson was of Kentucky descent, a tall, fine-looking man, with a dignified bearing and considerable power on the stump. He had led the anti-Benton fight against free-soilism. Stewart didn't like slavery, but he had strong convictions that the Constitution guaranteed to slaveholders protection of their "property" and that they had the right to take that "property" into the territories. South Carolina had seceded. Other southern states were preparing to follow when Stewart, on the 3d of January, said in his retiring message :
"As matters stand at present Missouri will stand by her lot, and hold to the Union as long as it is worth an effort to preserve it. So long as there is hope of success she will seek for justice within the Union. She cannot be frightened from her propriety by the past unfriendly legislation of the North, nor be dragooned into secession by the extreme South. If those who should be our friends and allies undertake to render our property worthless by a system of prohibitory laws, or by re-opening the slave trade in opposition to the moral sense of the civilized world, and at the same time reduce us to the position of an humble sentinel to watch over and protect their interests, receiving all the blows and none of the benefits, Missouri will hesitate long before sanctioning such an arrangement. She will rather take the high position of armed neutrality. She is able to take care of herself, and will be neither forced nor flattered, driven nor coaxed, into a course of action that must end in her own destruction."
On the same day that the retiring governor defined the position of Missouri on the question of secession, his successor took the ground that the slaveholding states should stand together. In his inaugural Governor Claib. Jackson said of the republican party which had triumphed in the election of Lincoln:
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"It is purely sectional in its locality and its principles. The only principle inscribed upon its banner is Hostility to Slavery-its object not merely to confine slavery within its present limits ; not merely to exclude it from the territories and prevent the forma- tion and admission of slaveholding states; not merely to abolish it in the District of Co- lumbia, and interdict its passage from one state to another; but to strike down its exist- ence everywhere; to sap its foundation in public sentiment; to annoy and harass, and gradually destroy its vitality, by every means, direct or indirect, physical and moral, which human ingenuity can devise. The triumph of such an organization is not the victory of a political party, but the domination of a section. It proclaims in significant tones the destruction of that equality among the states which is the vital cement of our federal Union. It places fifteen of the thirty-three states in the position of humble recipients of the bounty, or sullen submissionists to the power of a government which they had no voice in creating, and in whose councils they do not participate. It cannot, then, be a matter of surprise to any-victors or vanquished-that these fifteen states, with a pecuniary interest at stake reaching the enormous sum of $3,500,000,000 should be aroused and excited at the advent of such a party to power. Would it not rather be an instance of unprecedented blindness and fatuity, if the people and governments of these fifteen slave- holding states were, under the circumstances, to manifest quiet indifference, and to make no effort to avoid the destruction which awaited them?"
The Secession Leader.
The new lieutenant-governor, Thomas C. Reynolds, was more outspoken than Governor Jackson. While Reynolds had been nominally for Douglas in the state campaign, he took the leadership of the secessionists as soon as the assembly met. He issued an address the opening day of the session, declaring against the peace policy of the Buchanan administration. He argued for immediate and thorough militia organization "putting the state in complete condition of defense." Plainly indicating what this meant, he said that if there was not an adjustment between the North and South before March 4, the inauguration of the republican admin- istration, Missouri "should not permit Mr. Lincoln to exercise any act of govern- ment" within the state.
Reynolds' address to the public appeared a few hours before the messages of the retiring and the incoming governors. He had prepared himself well for the part he was to take. In the December preceding, while Congress was in session, Reynolds passed some time in Washington, conferring with the southern leaders. He fully assured himself that the South would secede and that hostilities would follow the inauguration of Lincoln. Confident that he knew the situation, the lieutenant-governor did not hesitate to take the most advanced position of the Southern Rights democrats of Missouri. His address was out on the 3d of January. The 4th of January was a "Day of National Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer," so appointed by President Buchanan in the hope of averting war. No- where was it observed more devoutly than in Missouri. On the 5th of January bills in line with the suggestions of Reynolds were introduced in the legislature. They were received with enthusiasm by the younger democrats. Reynolds ap- pointed the senate committees with strong southern rights chairmen to carry out' his policy. The lieutenant-governor was in his fortieth year, "a short full- bodied man, with jet black hair and eyes shaded with gold-rimmed glasses. He spoke French, German and Spanish fluently, wrote profusely and with consider -. able force." He was particularly insistent that Missouri should declare her posi- tion on the question of "coercion." In his address he held that the national
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government had no right to compel any state to remain in the Union against its will ; that it could not use force in any way to collect revenues or execute laws in a seceding state. He even denounced the course of President Buchanan and said : "To levy tribute, molest commerce, or hold fortresses are as much acts of war as to bombard a city."
For a short time it seemed as if the southern rights policy of Reynolds would sweep the legislature. George G. Vest was a member; he introduced a resolu- tion declaring so "abhorrent was the doctrine of coercion, that any attempt at such would result in the people of Missouri rallying on the side of their southern brethren to resist to the last extremity." The resolution passed with only one negative in the senate and fourteen in the house.
Another of the lieutenant-governor's recommendations was that a state con- vention be called. In a few days after the organization of the assembly one of the committees brought in a bill for such a convention "to consider the relations of the State of Missouri to the United States and to adopt measures vindicating the sovereignty of the state and the protection of her institutions." This measure passed with only two negatives in the, senate and eighteen in the house.
The legislature which met at Jefferson City the beginning of 1861 was over- whelmingly democratic, as the members classified themselves. In the senate were twenty-five democrats, seven unionists, and one republican. In the house were eighty-five democrats, thirty-five unionists and twelve republicans. Most of the republicans were from the German wards of St. Louis. But there were three kinds of democrats, as in the Presidential election. There were democrats who believed in local option on the slavery question in the territories ; democrats who condemned "all this fuss about the nigger"; democrats who were ready to go out of the Union now that Lincoln had been elected. In the early days of the session the lines of cleavage in the Democratic party shaded so fine that the sentiment of the majority seemed to drift one way and then the other as the questions of policy were presented.
One of Blair's utterances in 1861 was "Let us have a country first, and then we can talk parties."
The Arsenal Issue.
In the matter of property rights as well as in other relations between the United States and the states this country has traveled far since 1861. According to the southern rights view, the right of secession carried with it ownership of government property within the seceding state. Missouri secessionists had no doubt that the arsenals as well as other government property would belong to Missouri the day that they adopted an ordinance of secession. They had, the first two months of 1861, no doubt Missouri was going to secede. But pending that action possession of the arsenals and the disposition of the contents gave great concern.
The United States had two arsenals in Missouri. One, the smaller, was at Liberty. This had been of considerable importance when Liberty was on the border of the Indian country and the principal frontier community, previous to the Platte purchase. At the beginning of 1861, the Liberty arsenal contained
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MISSOURI IN 1861
seme hundreds of muskets, ten or twelve cannon and a large amount of powder for those days.
But the St. Louis arsenal was one of the most important in the whole country .. Those were the days of river transportation, it must be remembered. The St. Louis arsenal was the supply depot of war material for the entire West. It occu- pied fifty-six acres of ground, was surrounded by a massive stone wall, except upon the river frontage. Within the enclosure were four great stone buildings forming a square. In January, 1861, the St. Louis arsenal contained 60,000 stands of arms, nearly all of them Enfield and Springfield rifles. In all of the "South, outside of Missouri, there were only 150,000 muskets. In addition to these rifles the arsenal contained 1,500,000 cartridges, 90,000 pounds of powder, several siege guns, the field pieces to equip a number of batteries, a large stock of equipment of various kinds. There were ordnance shops and machinery for the manufacture of war material. The arsenal was on a slope to the river's edge with hills of considerable height to the west and south. In the growth of the city these heights were afterwards graded down.
Maj. William Haywood Bell, a West Pointer, a native of North Carolina, an ordnance, officer, had been in command at the arsenal for a long time. With him were a few staff officers. The workmen were unarmed. There was practically no guard save watchmen at the beginning of 1861. The few United States soldiers were stationed at Jefferson Barracks, several miles below the city. Bell had been at the arsenal so long that he felt himself a St. Louisan. He had in- vested in St. Louis real estate.
Southern rights leaders in Missouri were fully agreed that the arsenals at Liberty and St. Louis, with their contents would become state property when secession took place. They disagreed as to the policy which should be pursued by them before secession. The younger and more impetuous wanted immediate action. They planned to get control of the arsenals before the state seceded. They advocated forcible seizure, arguing that such course would insure secession. The older leaders counseled waiting for secession sentiment to develop. They insisted upon legal forms.
On the 8th of January, Brigadier-General Frost, commanding the state militia at St. Louis, went to the arsenal and had a talk with Major Bell. He reported to Governor Jackson that the interview was satisfactory. He said :
"I found the major everything that you or I could desire. He assured me that he considered that Missouri had, whenever the time came, a right to claim it (the arsenal) as being on her soil. He asserted his determination to defend it against any and all irre- sponsible mobs, come from whence they might, but at the same time gave me to under- stand that he would not attempt any defence against the proper state authorities. He promised me, upon the honor of an officer and a gentleman, that he would not suffer any arms to be removed from the place without first giving me timely information, and I promised him, in return that I would use all the force at my command to prevent him being annoyed by irresponsible persons. I, at the same time, gave him notice that, if affairs assumed so threatening a character as to render it unsafe to leave the place in its comparatively unprotected condition, I might come down and quarter a proper force there to protect it from assaults of any persons whatsoever, to which he assented. In a word the major is with us, where he ought to be, for all his worldly wealth lies here in Set Louis (and it is very large), and then again, his sympathies are with us."
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Frost immediately issued a confidential notice to the militia officers that "upon the bells of the churches sounding a continuous peal, interrupted by a pause of . five minutes, they should assemble with their men in their armories and await further notice." A copy of the notice was carried at once to Blair. In those days each side had trusted men who reported promptly every move of one to the other. Archbishop Kenrick was seen and asked to prevent this use of the Catholic bells. Blair sent a copy of Frost's notice to General Scott with his interpretation of it as meaning the plan of the state to get possession of the arsenal. Montgomery Blair in Washington. Governor Richard Yates of Illinois and President-elect Lincoln indorsed Frank Blair's request that somebody be sent to supersede Bell. In a few days Major Bell was ordered East and Maj. Peter B. Hagner of the District of Columbia was sent to the arsenal as ordnance officer in control.
St. Louis Organizers.
Among the leading citizens of St. Louis who were against both secession and coercion were Hamilton R. Gamble, Uriel Wright, Robert Campbell and James E. Yeatman. They called a monster mass meeting in St. Louis early in January. Resolutions were'adopted declaring that "the rights and property of. all sections of the country could be better protected within the American Union than by destroying the government." They also indorsed the new Crittenden peace propo- sitions, entreated the government and the seceding states to stay the arm of military power, and advised a state convention "to protect the union of the states and the rights and authority of this state under the Constitution."
On the 11th of January Mayor O. D. Filley sent to the common council the following :
"A very general and unusual excitement prevails in our community, and, although I do not apprehend that any actual disturbance or interference with the rights of our citizens will ensue, yet I deem it best that all proper precautionary measures should be taken to prepare for any event. I would, hence, recommend that the members of the council, from each ward, select from among their best citizens such a number of men as the exigencies of the case may seem to require and organize them to be ready for any emergency. Our citizens are entitled to the full protection of the laws and must have it."
On the 12th of January Archbishop Kenrick published a card to the Catholics of St. Louis advising them to avoid all occasions of public excitement :
"To the Roman Catholics of St. Louis : .
"Beloved Brethren: In the present disturbed state of the public mind, we feel it our duty to recommend you to avoid all occasions of public excitement, to obey the laws, to respect the rights of all citizens and to keep away, as much as possible, from all assemblages where the indiscretion of a word, or the impetuosity of a momentary passion might en- danger public tranquillity. Obey the injunction of the Apostle St. Peter: 'Follow peace with all men and holiness, without which no man can see God.'
"PETER RICHARD KENRICK, "Archbishop of St. Louis."
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