2004
The Dissertation Committee for Holly Zumwalt Taylor Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:
Neither North nor South:
Sectionalism, St. Louis Politics, and the Coming of the Civil War, 1846–1861
Committee:
Neither North nor South:
Sectionalism, St. Louis Politics, and the Coming of the Civil War, 1846–1861
by
Dissertation
of the University of Texas at Austin
in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
May 2004
That extensive Valley is one politically and commercially incapable of division. No man can draw a line on the map by which any two of its parts, however apparently hostile for the moment, would agree to separate. It is one and indivisible, it is neither North nor South, nor the appendage of either. It is the Mighty West, at once the guarantee of perpetuity to the Union and the balance wheel of its governmental machinery.
—Missouri Republican, September 8, 1848
v
Neither North nor South:
Sectionalism, St. Louis Politics, and the Coming of the Civil War, 1846–1861
Publication No. __________
The University of Texas at Austin, 2004
Supervisors: Ron C. Tyler Shearer Davis Bowman
St. Louis played a central role in the sectional conflict that escalated in
the United States in the years between the Mexican War and the Civil War. The
acquisition of western territory placed St. Louis close to the geographical center
of the United States. The city played the same role politically, as northern,
southern, and eastern factions battled for its control. Most of Missouri
remained loyal to the Democratic party and its proslavery southern leaders,
but many St. Louis Democrats supported the Free Soil party, which later
solidified into a base of Republican voters that helped keep Missouri in the
Union in 1861. As residents of a state that owed its very existence to sectional
compromise, Missourians hoped nationalism would prevail, and boosted plans
for internal improvements, including a transcontinental railroad, in order to
take attention away from the slavery issue.
However, neutrality proved not to be an option in St. Louis. Leaders
like Thomas Hart Benton, Frank Blair, and B. Gratz Brown emphasized the
vi
city’s ties to the West but could not ignore its ties to the North and South. St.
Louis, with its ties to all sections of the country, became a political battleground
as parties and sectional factions struggled to control the future.
Missouri was the only state in the country to give all of its electoral
votes in the 1860 presidential election to northern Democrat Stephen Douglas.
Many voters in St. Louis cast their ballots for Republican Abraham Lincoln,
who was not even on the ballot in most slave states. Missouri also was the only
state to hold a secession convention and vote not to secede. The Civil War
forced a North vs. South division on areas of the country that considered
themselves part of neither section. As Missouri strove for compromise
nationally, so did St. Louis within the state. From the Mexican War to the Civil
War St. Louis found itself consumed by a contest of sections; between 1846 and
1861 the city’s residents were forced to choose sides for a fight they were at the
same time desperately trying to avoid.
vii
Chapter One: “The heart of the Republic”................................................................................................................27
Chapter Two: “Can any one tell what we have gained in this war?” .............................................51
Chapter Three: “Let our ranks be kept firm and united” ..............................................................................70
Chapter Four: “In order to achieve the overthrow of Benton”..........................................................103
Chapter Five: “The whole country is in commotion”.................................................................................140
Chapter Six: “The eyes of America are turned to our elections”...................................................170
Chapter Seven: “To make Kansas in all respects like Missouri”.............................................................193
Chapter Eight: “A general state of hostility between the two sections of the Union”....215
Chapter Nine: “Shall it submit forever to be the sport of contending factions?”...............237
Chapter Ten: “To save our State from the nullifiers”..................................................................................255
Chapter Eleven: “The city should be put politically in harmony with the State”......................281
Chapter Twelve: “Is Missouri prepared for a separation?”...........................................................................313
Chapter Thirteen: “The crisis which is now upon us” ...........................................................................................345
viii
Chapter Fourteen: “The civil government of this State is at an end”........................................................363
Conclusion........................................................................................................................................................................389
Bibliography....................................................................................................................................................................402
Vita ..........................................................................................................................................................................................411
1
Introduction
The years between the Mexican War and the Civil War are some of the
most significant in American history. The sectional conflict about slavery
escalated into “a long, devastating, bloody war, between Americans on one
side and—Americans on the other.”1 But the war was not strictly about
slavery, nor did it involve solely the North versus the South. The issue of the
extension of slavery into new territories had been a constant issue in American
politics since the Missouri controversy in 1819–1820, which was believed to be
settled with the Missouri Compromise. The agreement made Missouri the only
slave state north of the 36o30' line in the territory that had been part of the
Louisiana Purchase. The line, the state’s southern border, was sufficient for a
time. However, the reintroduction of the issue of slavery in the territories after
the Mexican War proved that the Missouri Compromise had not settled the
issue; neither did the Compromise of 1850. The nation’s political parties
became fragmented along sectional lines, with members disagreeing chiefly on
the issue of slavery but also on ideas about nativism, internal improvements,
and economic policy. Enmeshed in the conflict about slavery in the territories
was an escalating debate about the roles of the federal government and the
state governments. The issue of slavery, particularly its extension into new
territories, became part of a much larger debate that, in some parts of the
country, transcended sectionalism. The border states had ties to both the
1 Missouri Republican, Apr. 16, 1861.
2
North and the South. For people in those states, the conflict was about more
than slavery, more than North versus South. It was about what it meant to be
an American.
In Michael Morrison’s Slavery and the American West he argues that
“the territorial issue contributed to the coming of the Civil War” by
sectionalizing American politics, which led to the election of Abraham Lincoln.
From the Missouri Compromise onward the territorial issue reared its head
periodically, with the acquisition of territory from Mexico in 1848 bringing the
issue back to the center of attention. Ironically, many politicians had supported
the Mexican War in part because they believed it would help alleviate some of
the sectional disputes. With the sections uniting against a foreign power, they
could concentrate on their identity as Americans, not northerners or
southerners. The unity did not last, for it was the debate about the territory
acquired from Mexico that led to the sectional crisis that was only temporarily
calmed by the Compromise of 1850. As Morrison demonstrates, the territorial
issue continued to dominate national politics in spite of the compromise.
Subsequent controversies, such as the debates surrounding the
Kansas–Nebraska Act and the Lecompton constitution, kept the issue of
slavery in the territories—and the federal government’s role in the matter—at
the forefront of American politics.2
2 Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of
Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), quotation on 276.
3
Part of the political landscape between 1846 and 1861 was the
emergence of several alternatives to the established Whig and Democratic
parties. In 1848 the Free Soil party fielded a national ticket. The appeal of this
party was that it showed the adverse effects of slavery on white laborers. The
potential of the territory acquired from Mexico was vast, and white settlers did
not want their chance to strike it rich to be pre-empted by southern
slaveholders who could send slaves to work the land or mines. Unlike the
Liberty party, which had nominated abolitionist James G. Birney for president
in 1840 and 1844, the Free Soil party did not focus on the morality of slavery.
The Free Soilers also avoided the Liberty party issues of black rights and
became the first antislavery party to combine white supremacist arguments
with those of the abolitionists. Although the Free Soil candidate in 1848, former
president Martin Van Buren, was not successful at the ballot box, nonetheless
his 10 percent of the vote indicated that there was a small but dedicated group
of voters willing to cast their votes to stop the spread of slavery.3
3 Betty L. Fladeland, James Gillespie Birney: Slaveholder to Abolitionist
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1955); Frederick J. Blue, The Free Soilers: Third Party Politics, 1848–54 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973); Richard H. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); John Mayfield, Rehearsal for Republicanism: Free Soil and the Politics of Antislavery (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1980); Joseph G. Rayback, Free Soil: The Election of 1848 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970); Theodore Clarke Smith, The Liberty and Free Soil Parties in the Northwest (New York: Russell and Russell, 1897), 18–65; Lawrence Frederick Kohl, The Politics of Individual Parties and the American Character in the Jacksonian Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 6.
4
Michael Holt has aptly described the decade before the Civil War as “the
political crisis of the 1850s.” Holt and David M. Potter have written overviews
of the era that witnessed the demise of the second American party system,
while Eric Foner and William Gienapp have focused specifically on the
development of the Republican party. Potter argues that slavery was the most
important sectional issue but also discusses the contributions of the American
party to the political realignment. Gienapp, however, argues that slavery
played a far less significant role in the realignment than ethnocultural issues
such as nativism, temperance, and anti-Catholicism. Foner concurs that the
developing ethnic and cultural diversity that resulted from an influx of
immigrants contributed to political realignment and states that the
combination of anti-slavery, nativist, and temperance ideology brought about
results none of the issues could have produced individually. Nativist issues
played such an important role in antebellum politics that in 1854, when it
became apparent that the Jacksonian party system was disintegrating, most
people believed that the nativist American (or Know-Nothing) party, not an
antislavery party, would become the next major party.4
4 Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: John Wiley
and Sons, 1978); David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, completed and edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Harper and Row, 1976); William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).
5
The American, or Know-Nothing, party began its rise to national
prominence in 1854, when it attracted Whig and Democratic voters who were
opposed to the Kansas–Nebraska Act, as well as former supporters of the Free
Soil and Liberty parties. Although attempts to form a national fusion party of
anti-Nebraska voters failed, which Gienapp attributes to the strength of
nativist ideology, voters proved, as they had indicated with the votes for the
Free Soil party in 1848, that they were willing to desert the traditional parties to
support particularly divisive issues. At the time, the Know-Nothings stood as
the only organized party with a significant base of support that provided an
alternative to the Whigs and Democrats. Gienapp views the antebellum third
parties, particularly the Know-Nothings, as way stations for voters reluctant to
desert the traditional party coalitions. Holt also discusses the increased
willingness of voters to abandon the traditional party alignments. Voters who
had spent their entire political lives fighting against the other party became
disillusioned with the sectional concessions evident within the parties over
issues such as the Compromise of 1850. Holt argues that the abnormally low
turnout in 1852, when Democrat Franklin Pierce was elected president,
indicated that the American people were losing faith in the ability of the
traditional party system to bring about significant change and were looking
for political alternatives.5
5 Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party; Holt, The Political Crisis
of the 1850s; W. Darrell Overdyke, The Know-Nothing Party in the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1950).
6
carefully define their ideology. The Republicans realized that a strictly nativist
platform would gain the support of many Know-Nothings but would not
receive the support of enough former Whigs and northern Democrats to
defeat the southern Democrats, who controlled the national party after the
1854 elections. The first way Republicans defined themselves was by what they
opposed: slavery, liquor, Catholics, and foreigners. Ultimately, however, the
Republicans were forced to redefine themselves in order to gain widespread
support and campaigned in 1856 and 1860 with a platform based on an
ideology committed to defending the Union, containing slavery, and
promoting economic development, which was in direct contrast with the social
values and systems in the South. Slavery, while not the primary concern of
many voters, became representative of the many sectional differences
between the North and the South because it was an issue with great emotional
appeal, which the Republicans exploited.6
The second party system was mostly successful in keeping sectional
issues out of politics until the 1850s. The Whig party proved to be more
susceptible to sectionalism, which was exacerbated in 1852 when southern
Whigs were offended by the nomination of Gen. Winfield Scott and his refusal
to endorse the Compromise of 1850. By the time Scott was defeated in the
election, both Daniel Webster and Henry Clay had died. The loss of the two
6 Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men.
7
leaders who had helped the Whigs maintain party unity, as well as mediated
disagreements between the party’s northern and southern factions,
contributed to the disintegration of the Whig party. By 1856 the Whigs were
no longer a bisectional party and hardly qualified as a national party at all,
although Whigs continued to draw support in some state contests. The
disintegration of the Whigs also contributed to the demise of the Jacksonian
Democratic party because the Democrats were left without significant
opposition. Conflict was a vital part of the second party system, which enabled
the Whigs and Democrats to construct their ideologies around opposition to
the other party. Not until party unity became secondary to sectional concerns
did the parties fail to function as they had traditionally, which happened at
different times in different parts of the country. Additionally, the Democratic
party, without a strong leader who could appeal to both sections, found itself
increasingly divided.7
When sectional issues such as the Compromise of 1850 and the
Kansas–Nebraska Act threatened the party unity of the Whigs and Democrats,
7 Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party:
Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); James L. Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System: Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United States (rev. ed.; Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1983). Democratic Sen. Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois attempted to position himself as a leader who could appeal to both sections. In doing so, however, he lost the support of both. Northerners opposed Douglas’s support for the Kansas–Nebraska Act, while southerners were angered by Douglas’s opposition to the Lecompton constitution.
8
alternative parties stepped in to fill the gaps. The Know-Nothings appeared
poised to take on the role of a major party, but their northern and southern
coalition also split because of divisiveness and indecision on the slavery issue.
The Republicans, particularly the radical leaders, decided to take advantage of
sectional differences in order to solidify a Republican base of support, even if it
meant sacrificing some of the nativist ideology that lingered from the Know-
Nothing platform. The moral argument against slavery was transformed into
a political and economic one. White northerners who had no strong moral
opinions about slavery were nonetheless receptive to the idea that southern
slaveholders posed a threat to the country because of their political influence.
Also, southern plans to expand slavery were considered a threat to free white
labor. The racism inherent in the Republican antislavery rhetoric indicates the
conflicting views within the party, but also represents Republican attempts to
achieve consensus. By broadening their appeal in the North to include
elements from the previous attempts at fusion parties, the Republicans were
able to become a major party. In many state elections, issues such as nativism
and temperance played a much more important role than slavery. It is a
tribute to the Republican leaders that they were able to convince voters that
the “Slave Power” was more of a threat to the future of the republic than
foreigners, rum, or Catholics. The Republicans rose to prominence by agitating
and exploiting sectional differences, which the Whigs and Democrats had taken
great pains to avoid.
9
In contrast to the major parties, which tried to avoid agitating the
sectional conflict, the Republicans were able to succeed because of their ability
and willingness to confront sectional issues. Holt and Foner argue that the
Republicans were able to emerge as a major, if sectional, party because of the
particular ideology they created. The destruction or perpetuation of black
slavery was not a primary concern of many Americans in the North and West,
which explains why they were willing to join new parties based on nativism or
temperance, issues they believed had more of an impact on their daily lives. It
was only when the northerners began to view the Slave Power as a threat to
their liberty and way of life, and the southerners began to view the
abolitionists as a threat to their liberty and way of life, that faith in sectional
balance and the willingness to compromise disappeared and the two major
parties collapsed. The Republicans responded to an electorate that was
disenchanted with the political process and the breakdown of consensus within
the Whig and Democratic parties by reshaping the elements of the political
debate. By representing the North and South as social systems with conflicting
values and plans for the future of the republic, the Republicans were able to
agitate and intensify northern hostility toward the South. By making slavery
an example of the threat the South posed to republican ideology and the
Union, the Republicans were able to achieve the necessary coalition of support
to succeed where previous sectionally divisive parties had failed.8
8 Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s; Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free
Men; Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party; Susan-Mary Grant,
10
Michael Morrison argues that the political debates about the expansion
of slavery into the territories polarized the sections of the country by forcing
them to identify themselves as “the negation of what the other side stood for.”
Consequently, the debate escalated into both sections defining themselves as
the true defender of American principles. To the South, the North was not just
opposed to slavery, but to the American way of life. To the North, the South
and its protection of slavery threatened American ideals of liberty. One of the
reasons that the Republicans were able to succeed was that they played into
this new dynamic of what was and was not American. Democrats who joined
the Republicans argued that their new party was in the tradition of Jefferson
and Jackson. According to Morrison, “the meaning of freedom and democracy
was at stake.”9
Susan-Mary Grant’s North over South addresses the idea of a northern
nationalism that was based on opposition to the South. Ultimately, the
Republicans used these negative views of the South to transform the northern
identity into an American one. By redefining the terms of the debate, the
northerners transformed the South from a part of the country into a threat to
the country. The country, however, was not easily divided into only North and
South. The Midwest and the West were poised as the balance of power in the
country, Grant argues, and the Northeast successfully won over many of these
North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000).
9 Morrison, Slavery and the American West, 278.
11
voters to join the movement against the South.10 In The Emerging Midwest
Nicole Etcheson discusses how northerners and southerners worked together
in the Midwest to promote western interests. She argues that the sectional
crisis forced westerners to search for middle ground upon which they could
reach a compromise. Etcheson also details the “disintegration of westernness”
as the midwesterners were forced to support either the North or the South.
Ultimately, she argues, the sectional conflict reshaped the midwesterners’
identity into a national identity.11
William W. Freehling also addresses the issue of regional identity, but
he argues that the border states were the balance of power. In The South vs.
the South Freehling argues that there were three Souths, with most of the
region’s slaves concentrated in the lower South, which he defines as South
Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. The
Middle South comprised Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas.
The border South, which had fewer than 12 percent slaves in 1860, was made
up of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. The border states, with
their position between the North and the South, reaped the benefits and
suffered the drawbacks of each section. The three largest cities in the South
after New Orleans were all in border states—Baltimore, Louisville, and St.
10 Grant, North over South, 4–18. 11 Nicole Etcheson, The Emerging Midwest: Upland Southerners and the
Political Culture of the Old Northwest, 1787–1861 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 57, 108, 117 (quotation), 139–141.
12
Louis. All featured low numbers of slaves and a higher percentage of free
blacks and foreign immigrants compared to the rest of the South. The cities
also developed manufacturing enterprises and traded extensively with the
North. Consequently, as both the North and the South tried to paint the other
section as un-American, the border states were caught in the middle.12
Freehling further argues that the border South’s lack of support for the
Confederacy during the Civil War compromised the South’s military efforts.
Approximately 200,000 whites from the border South served in the Union
army, in marked contrast to the 90,000 who joined the Confederate army. If
the Confederacy had been able to gain control of Baltimore, Louisville, and St.
Louis, the South would have doubled its industrial capacity. The unionism of
the border states dramatically compromised the Confederacy in terms of
manpower, industrial concerns, and strategic locations.13 What factors kept the
crucial border states from accepting the southern definition of the North as an
aggressive threat to liberty and property? Likewise, were the border state
residents convinced that their friends and neighbors in the South embodied the
antithesis of American ideals of freedom? What defined their unionism, and
was neutrality ever a reasonable option?
12 William W. Freehling, The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate
Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
13 Ibid., 61–64.
Missouri in particular bridged two important dividing lines—North and
South as well as East and West. While the East and West were moving closer
together in the 1840s and 1850s, thanks to technological advances such as the
telegraph and railroad, ideological differences were pushing the North and
South further apart. North and South both had accepted the Missouri
Compromise of 1820 that made Missouri the only slave state north of the
36o30' line west of the Mississippi River. The state’s presence north of the line
proved to southerners that slavery could be extended to areas not generally
considered suitable for slave labor. To the North, Missouri’s presence above
the line was proof that southerners would take their “peculiar institution” into
the North if given the opportunity. The line itself was a compromise, for
allowing at least some restrictions on slavery in the Louisiana Purchase
territory was a concession to northern concerns. The acquisition of new
western territory as a result of the Mexican War placed Missouri in the
geographical center of the United States. Consequently, St. Louis, the state’s
largest city, played the same role politically, as northern, southern, and eastern
factions battled for its control.
The country’s sectional conflict was evident in the affairs of St. Louis and
the rest of Missouri. The urban economic center had strong political and social
ties with the North and East, while the rest of the state remained
predominantly rural and agrarian, and was therefore more closely allied with
the South. Businessmen, merchants, and bankers from Philadelphia and New
14
York moved to St. Louis, while farmers from Virginia, Kentucky, and
Tennessee moved to the rest of the state. With the addition of a sizeable
number of German and Irish immigrants, St. Louis was easily the population
center of the state. As sectional issues became more divisive, St. Louis became
more isolated from the rest of Missouri, which prompted Jeffrey Adler’s
description of the city as “a Yankee outpost in a Southern province and a
Northern city in a slave state.”14
Faced with such sectional problems, St. Louis and Missouri chose their
traditional course, neutrality. After all, the state owed its very existence to
sectional compromise. Problems with the banking system and the need for a
national railroad to pass through St. Louis received much more publicity from
some publications and politicians during the late 1840s than did the slavery
issue. However, the 1848 presidential election made it clear that a sizeable
number of St. Louis voters opposed the extension of slavery into the territories
acquired as a result of the Mexican War. Although St. Louis Free Soilers failed
to get their candidates on the ballot, they proved that there was a group of
Democratic voters who were not satisfied with the party’s proslavery views.
Many St. Louis Democrats supported the Wilmot Proviso, which most
southern congressmen and voters opposed, including Democrats in the rest of
Missouri.
14 Jeffrey S. Adler, Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West:
The Rise and Fall of Antebellum St. Louis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 109.
15
The issue of the extension of slavery complicated many existing conflicts
in the Democratic party. It provided a convenient excuse for those city and
state Democrats opposed to U.S. Sen. Thomas Hart Benton, for a variety of
personal and political reasons, to call for his removal from office. St. Louis
remained the stronghold of Benton’s supporters, but the rest of Missouri’s
Democrats, led by Claiborne Fox Jackson and David Rice Atchison, allied
themselves with southern extremist views such as those espoused by Sen. John
C. Calhoun of South Carolina.15 By 1850 the Missouri Democratic party was
split into pro- and anti-Benton factions, which for the most part corresponded
to views on the extension of slavery. In 1851 the Missouri legislature voted
Benton out of the Senate seat he had held for thirty years.
The Whig party also joined the battle about Benton. The St. Louis Whig
newspaper, the Missouri Republican, urged Whigs to remain neutral in the
hope that the Democratic infighting would provide the Whigs an opportunity
to gain control.16 Whigs, however, only had a power base in St. Louis. The rest
of the state had been dominated by the Democratic party since Missouri
entered the Union in 1821. Some St. Louis Whigs did lend their support to the
Benton camp, preferring Benton’s views to those of Atchison and Jackson. The
crisis of 1850 caused many men to re-evaluate their party loyalties. Most of
Missouri’s Whigs took advantage of the pro- and anti-Benton split in the state
15 William Nisbet Chambers, Old Bullion Benton: Senator from the New
West (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1956), 359–389. 16 Missouri Republican, Oct. 5, 1849.
16
Democratic party to gain a plurality in the state legislature, which elected Whig
Henry S. Geyer, a St. Louis lawyer, to replace Benton.17
Politicians as well as voters were forced to evaluate their stance on the
important issues of the day. Throughout his political career, Benton asserted,
like his friend Andrew Jackson, that the Union was more important than
slavery. He blamed both northern abolitionists and southern secessionists for
agitating the issue and encouraged compromise. Benton’s alleged support for
Martin Van Buren’s Free Soil nomination in 1848, proven only by his
lukewarm support for Democratic nominee Lewis Cass and his long friendship
with Van Buren, made Benton guilty of agitating the slavery issue, his
opponents claimed. Benton’s other offenses included his support of a bill to
admit Oregon as a free territory, which appeared to endorse the Wilmot
Proviso, and his opposition to the Jackson Resolutions the Missouri Legislature
passed in 1849. Benton said the resolutions, in which the legislature asserted
that Congress had no power over slavery, were secessionist and drafted by
Calhoun, a charge their primary supporter, Claiborne Jackson, denied.18
17 P. O. Ray, “The Retirement of Thomas H. Benton from the Senate and
Its Significance,” Missouri Historical Review, 2 (Jan., 1908), 103–106. 18 Claiborne Jackson, a Missouri state senator in 1849, presented the
resolutions to the Missouri legislature. The resolutions probably were written by Missouri Supreme Court Judge William B. Napton. David D. March, The History of Missouri (4 vols.; New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1967), I, 829; Christopher Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of Southern Identity in the Border West (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 170–171.
17
Once branded as an agitator, Benton declared that he would do
whatever was necessary to preserve the Union. He chose to emphasize
Missouri’s westernness, and called for the state to embrace the spirit of
compromise on which it was founded and to rise above the North–South
conflict.19 Benton’s proposed solution to the sectional crisis was a national
railroad linking East and West, with St. Louis in the center. By strengthening
the country’s eastern and western ties, Benton hoped the conflict between
North and South would cease. However, Benton was clearly out of step with
the national Democratic party and, with the exception of one term in the U.S.
House of Representatives, never again held public office after he left the
Senate. He continued to oppose agitation of the slavery issue and rebuffed
attempts by the northern wing of the Democratic party to make him a Free
Soil nominee in 1852. In 1856 Benton refused to promote agitation by
supporting the sectional Republican party and supported Democratic candidate
James Buchanan instead of Republican candidate John C. Frémont, Benton’s
son-in-law, who had received the nomination partly because it was believed
Frémont’s candidacy would encourage Benton to support the Republicans.20
One of Benton’s protégés, however, thrived on agitation. Francis
Preston Blair Jr., the son of Jacksonian editor Francis Preston Blair, inherited his
19 Milton Eugene Bierbaum, “The Rhetoric of Union or Disunion in
Missouri, 1844–1861” (Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri, 1965), 76–78. 20 Elbert B. Smith, Magnificent Missourian: The Life of Thomas Hart Benton
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1958), 312–313.
18
father’s love of politics. Frank Blair studied law in Benton’s St. Louis law office,
as did his older brother Montgomery Blair, and in the early 1840s both of the
Blair brothers were active members of the St. Louis Democratic party.21 Yet
Frank became an avid Free Soiler in 1848 and started a Free Soil newspaper,
the Missouri Barnburner, in St. Louis, the only such publication in the West.22
In spite of Frank’s efforts, Missouri failed to put the Free Soil candidates on the
ballot. However, a substantial base of St. Louis Democrats was mobilized.
Immigrants and northerners opposed to the extension of slavery welcomed
the opportunity to support a candidate with similar views. The Free Soil
doctrine was the ideal antislavery position to present in St. Louis. Many of Van
Buren’s supporters, like Frank Blair, refused in 1848 to take a stand on the
morality of slavery. People who had come to St. Louis from Europe or the
northern states in search of a way to improve their lot in life did not want to
compete with slaves for jobs. Many northern Democrats were susceptible to
the free labor argument, but many of these Democrats also refused to
abandon their party. Benton was one such example, as were Preston and
Montgomery Blair, although all were believed to be Free Soilers.23 Another
21 Ibid., 122–123. William E. Parrish, Frank Blair: Lincoln’s Conservative
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 15–16. 22 William Ernest Smith, The Francis Preston Blair Family in Politics (2 vols.;
New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933), I, 240; Parrish, Frank Blair, 37–38. 23 Smith, Blair Family, I, 216, says all of the Blairs were Free Soilers. Elbert B.
Smith, Francis Preston Blair (New York: The Free Press, 1980), indicates that Montgomery Blair and his father sympathized with the Free Soilers but could not bring themselves to vote for the third party. Blue, The Free Soilers and
19
Benton protégé, B. Gratz Brown, came to St. Louis in 1849 to join the law
practice of his cousins Frank and Montgomery Blair. Brown, like the Blairs a
native of Kentucky, was an emancipationist Whig who became a Benton
Democrat. In 1852 he and Frank started the Missouri Democrat newspaper, a
pro-Benton sheet. Brown was a staunch supporter of free labor and eventually
became a Republican.24
Benton’s reaction to the troubling sectional crisis was to minimize it, by
emphasizing nationalism and love for the Union. Frank Blair and Gratz Brown
were strong Benton supporters, but they were willing to agitate the issue
because of the popular response they received. After the passage of the
Kansas–Nebraska Act in 1854, Benton suffered his last political defeat when he
ran for governor of Missouri in 1856 and dedicated the rest of his life to writing
about his years in the Senate and tried to avoid becoming involved in the
sectional conflict. Frank Blair, on the other hand, was emboldened by the
increase in Republican voters throughout the United States. His father and
brother joined the cause after the Kansas–Nebraska debacle and the Blair
family was instrumental in recruiting former Democrats to the Republican
Rayback, Free Soil agree. Elbert Smith’s biography also distinguishes between the two Francis Preston Blairs by calling the father Preston, the name he preferred, and the son Frank. The father and son are frequently confused because each signed his letters “F. P. Blair.” Matters are further complicated because the father often wrote political speeches for his son as well as for himself. See Parrish, Frank Blair.
24 Norma L. Peterson, Freedom and Franchise: The Political Career of B. Gratz Brown (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1965).
20
party.25 Frank’s St. Louis base of Republican voters supported Lincoln in 1860,
although Missouri as a whole cast its vote for Stephen Douglas. Frank Blair and
Gratz Brown converted the St. Louis Lincoln supporters into Union clubs, and
began secretly drilling and arming them. These mainly German troops fought
with Gen. Nathaniel Lyon in 1861 to defeat secessionist forces led by Gov.
Claiborne Jackson in order to maintain control of the St. Louis arsenal, which
helped keep Missouri in the Union.26
The main problem for St. Louis Democrats in the 1840s and 1850s was
where their loyalty belonged, whether they owed the most to the North,
South, East, the national Democratic party, or to their senatorial champion
Thomas Hart Benton. State leaders such as state legislator Claiborne Fox
Jackson and U.S. Sen. David Rice Atchison, who endorsed the views of South
Carolina’s Calhoun, convinced many Missouri Democrats that Benton no
longer spoke for everyone in the state, and that the time had come to remove
the senator from his place on the national stage. Benton refused to support
Calhoun’s plans for southern unity, and denied that South Carolina and
Missouri had anything in common. Benton wanted the states of the West to
25 Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 165. 26 Smith, Francis Preston Blair, 263–293; Parrish, Frank Blair, 95–110; Louis
S. Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), 94–123.
21
unite and work for legislation that would be in the interests of those states, not
South Carolina.27
In many ways the St. Louis Democratic party’s troubles mirrored those
in the national party. Views on slavery, personal animosity, and sectionalism
combined to weaken the party, which provided the Republicans the
opportunity to succeed at the polls in 1860. Missouri, like other border states
Kentucky and Maryland, felt torn between the country’s antagonistic sections.
Like Benton, Missouri as a whole hoped it could stay out of the conflict and
remain neutral. A state that had based its entire history as part of the United
States on compromise between the North and South had to hope that a similar
spirit would prevail in 1860. However, as early as 1850, events made it clear
that neutrality was not an option. Like the other border states, Missouri faced
agonizing results when the Civil War began. St. Louis spent most of the war
ruled by martial law, and the sectional conflict was evident on every city block.
Neighbors and families found themselves on opposite sides, with sectional
loyalties affecting even where St. Louis residents chose to attend church.28
The idea of secession per se was not as frightening to residents of St.
Louis as was their uncertainty about which section to support. The dissolution
of the Union always had been a very real possibility in a country whose
27 Missouri Republican, May 10, 1849. 28 Mark E. Neely Jr., The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil
Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 32–50; Galusha Anderson, The Story of a Border City During the Civil War (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1908), 124–134.
22
borders remained unstable. What was unimaginable to the states along the
eastern seaboard remained possible in the West, where territories were
created out of wilderness and remained subject to a series of changes in
boundaries, organization, and government before statehood. From its earliest
days the United States had been considered too big to be a republic, and each
addition of new territory raised the question again. The organization of
California and Oregon prompted speculation about a western empire. The
distance and difficult transportation involved in reaching these areas was
considered by some to be an insurmountable problem.29 The problem for
Missouri in this scenario was that it had ties to both East and West, much like
its ties to the North and South. Thus, any kind of secession left Missouri in the
middle, which is why even if the idea was acceptable in theory, the reality was
not. No matter how the country’s sectional issues were settled, St. Louis and
Missouri would continue to form the dividing line.
The passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act in 1854 repealed the Missouri
Compromise line of 1820 and thrust Missouri once again into the center of the
national debate about the extension of slavery. So called “border ruffians” led
by Missouri Sen. David Atchison crossed the border into Kansas to vote
illegally in the election that gave Kansas the proslavery and hotly disputed
Lecompton constitution. In 1857 the United States Supreme Court issued its
decision in the Dred Scott case, which originally had been filed in St. Louis in
29 Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (New York:
Random House, 1965), 271–272, 420–425.
23
1846, The Supreme Court declared that blacks were not citizens of the United
States and had no right to sue in federal courts. The decision also confirmed the
Kansas–Nebraska Act’s repeal of the Missouri Compromise by declaring that
the 1820 agreement had been unconsitutional. As Missouri issues worked their
way into the national political arena, the state’s political scene became
increasingly confrontational.
As Missouri issues became part of the national political debate the state
acquired a national reputation, thanks to the “border ruffians,” as being
lawless, backward, and southern. Many St. Louis politicians followed in
Benton’s tradition by focusing on the state’s role as part of the West, while
others focused on the city’s economic ties to the North. Wary northern
investors, fearful that any eventual disunion would place Missouri on the side
of the South, chose to funnel their railroad investments to Chicago, a clearly
northern city.30 In much of the rest of Missouri, however, which was
dominated by rural agricultural interests with ties to the South, the state’s
western identity transformed into a southern one. Christopher Phillips
subtitled his biography of Missouri’s secessionist governor, Claiborne Jackson,
The Creation of Southern Identity in the Border West, in a book that argues
that Missourians such as Jackson consciously decided to be southerners. Frank
Blair, like Claiborne Jackson, was a slaveholder, and both were originally from
Kentucky. Yet Blair organized the Republicans in St. Louis and fought for the
30 Adler, Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West.
24
Union army while Jackson elected to have part of the Missouri state
government secede from the Union, in opposition to the votes of the state
convention on the matter, and joined the Confederacy.31
Missouri was the only state in the country to give all of its electoral
votes in the 1860 presidential election to northern Democrat Stephen Douglas.
John Bell, the candidate of the Constitutional Union party, finished second.
Many voters in St. Louis cast their ballots for Lincoln, who was not even on the
ballot in most slave states. Missouri also was the only slave state to hold a
secession convention and vote not to secede. These examples indicate the
complexity of the political situation in Missouri as well as the state’s unique
position in the country’s sectional division.
Before the Mexican War the predominant issues in Missouri politics
were currency policy, economic development, western expansion, and internal
improvements, chiefly of rivers and harbors. The Mexican War raised the issue
of sectionalism and slavery concurrently with a decline in the strength of
political parties. The simultaneous party disintegration and the intensification
of sectional issues combined to create an explosive situation by the end of the
1850s. Sectionalism and slavery joined economic development, internal
improvements, and western expansion as important political issues. By the
outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Missouri had become a battleground. Gangs
of border ruffians roamed the southern and western parts of the state. The city
31 Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate; Parrish, Frank Blair.
25
of St. Louis was placed under martial law. Members of the state government
who had opposed Missouri’s decision not to secede, including Governor
Jackson, formed a Missouri government-in-exile that joined the Confederacy.32
In 1861 St. Louis and Missouri finally were forced to decide which
section they would support. Benton had hoped that the West would be able to
serve as a third section that would stay out of the North and South’s conflicts
and resolve the country’s problems by appealing to nationalism. However,
Frank Blair, like other one-time St. Louis residents William Tecumseh Sherman
and Ulysses S. Grant and fellow border-state politician Abraham Lincoln,
realized that the destiny of the West was to ally itself with the North.33 The
Civil War forced a North versus South division on areas of the country, such as
St. Louis, that considered themselves neither North nor South. Other historians
have referred to Missouri as part of the Midwest or part of the border South.
32 Adler, Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West; William
E. Parrish, Turbulent Partnership: Missouri and the Union, 1861–1865 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1963); Louis S. Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001); Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
33 A notable exception from the alliance of western states was Texas, which had even more ties to the South than Missouri did. Sam Houston, however, often voted with Benton in the Senate and believed that the interests of Texas and the West were not similar to the interests of the Deep South. Houston’s ideas had little support in Texas, where he was removed from his office as governor in 1861 when he refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy. He opposed Texas’s decision to secede. Chambers, Old Bullion Benton, 341; Missouri Republican, Mar. 20, 1849, July 26, 1849; Stephen B. Oates, “Texas Under the Secessionists,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 67 (Oct., 1963), 167–169.
26
Perhaps the main lesson to be learned is that identity is flexible. In the end, as
more westerners (or Midwesterners, or citizens of border states) chose to ally
themselves with the northerners, they created a majority that combined to
contain and defeat the South. The political situation in antebellum Missouri
mirrors the problems the nation faced, with events in St. Louis providing
specific examples of how westerners reluctantly became northerners and
southerners in the face of the country’s greatest crisis.
27
“The heart of the Republic”
Cities were essential to the development of the American West. Often
planned and in some cases built before many settlers arrived, cities provided
an opportunity for land speculators and prospective businessmen to take a
chance. The frontier was up for grabs; conceivably, settlement would
concentrate around an area where there was already a commercial center. The
location of a city and the resources available to it had as much to do with a
city’s success as the people who settled there. Available transportation was
crucial to a city’s success; in most cases this meant proximity to a navigable
river. St. Louis seemed to more than meet the criteria in an age when
commercial potential, not aesthetics, was the primary concern for city planners
and rivers were the lifeblood of American commerce. Pierre Laclede Liguest
selected the site for St. Louis in 1763 and served as the first city planner. Laclede
selected the first elevated bluff south of the junction of the Mississippi,
Missouri, and Illinois rivers for the city. The land sloped toward the river,
providing drainage that helped prevent disease-promoting stagnant water.
The elevated bluff helped protect the city from floods. In addition, an
abundance of trees and farmland in the area increased its appeal to settlers.
Another consideration for the first French settlers was St. Louis’s strategic
28
location in relation to the British fur lines. From its earliest days, St. Louis
played an important sectional role.1
French St. Louis remained a center of the fur trade, as well as an
important supply center for traders and explorers headed West. As part of the
French territory of Upper Louisiana, St. Louis became a pawn in the contest
among European powers for control of the North American continent. France
transferred Louisiana to Spain in 1762 in order to eliminate the financial
problems the territory was causing France and to keep the territory away
from England, which wanted to expel the French from North America. Spain
did not formally assume control of Louisiana until 1770, and the new
government acknowledged the cultural ties of the residents of Upper
Louisiana by sending lieutenant governors to the district who either had been
born in France or had French wives. Thus, early St. Louis had a diverse cultural
and ethnic background.2 The city remained officially Spanish until a treaty in
1800 returned Louisiana to France. Three years later, before France had re-
established control of the territory, Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United
States in order to gain funds to finance his wars in Europe. The United States
1 Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities,
1790–1830 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 3–4, 30. 2 Duane Meyer, The Heritage of Missouri: A History (St. Louis: State
Publishing Company, 1963), 41–46.
29
took possession of St. Louis on March 10, 1804. The city had not existed for half
a century, yet it had been ruled by three different nations.3
In its early years as part of the United States, St. Louis remained a
French city. American explorers, then settlers, moved slowly into the rest of
Missouri. St. Louis was considered a frontier outpost to the rest of the United
States. Skirmishes with Indians still troubled the state, and St. Louis suffered
because of the reputation it acquired by association. Security came to St. Louis
as the result of another battle for control of North American territories. United
States troops were sent to St. Louis during the War of 1812 and brought with
them a sense of security that encouraged immigration. By 1815 the city’s
population had reached two thousand. The fur trade continued to be the most
important commercial enterprise for the city, but lead mining gained
importance as well. Manufacturing may have been limited at this time but
farming was not, and St. Louis acted as a distribution point that sent western
produce to the East and served as a supply base that provided eastern goods
to people in the West.4 While most of the east-to-west trade relied on the Ohio
River, nonetheless it was apparent that St. Louis was very well situated for
trade. In an era when rivers were the primary trade routes, the prospect of
linking St. Louis to the trade center of New Orleans via the Mississippi River
made St. Louis the destination for many young Americans seeking to improve
3 Ibid., 109–113. 4 Wade, The Urban Frontier, 59–64.
30
their economic status by investing in what had the potential to be a productive
center of trade.
Among the Americans who headed to St. Louis after the War of 1812
was Thomas Hart Benton, one of many who thought St. Louis and the frontier
provided the perfect opportunity for enterprising, ambitious men to make a
mark.5 Young lawyer Benton arrived in St. Louis in 1815 determined to make a
fresh start. His expulsion from the University of North Carolina in 1799, a
brawl with popular hero Andrew Jackson in Nashville in 1813, and military
service in the War of 1812 had convinced Benton that, in spite of his one term
as a state senator in Tennessee, he would be better off seeking his fortune in a
new place. Missouri offered adventure and opportunity, and in order to
achieve its potential it would need leadership. Benton planned to fill that role.6
Benton learned French and Spanish, as well as the complexities of a different
legal system. His legal practice involved, among other duties, researching and
helping settle land titles in a region that had changed governments frequently.
Benton was involved with land speculation and was a trustee and stockholder
of the Bank of St. Louis and the Bank of Missouri. The failure of the Bank of
5 Adler, Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West, 17. 6 Smith, Magnificent Missourian, 20–51. Benton was expelled from the
University of North Carolina for stealing money from his roommates, a charge that haunted him throughout his life and may have been the reason he never sought the presidency. The brawl with Jackson followed a duel between Jesse Benton, Thomas’s brother, and Jackson’s brigade inspector, Maj. William Carroll. In the War of 1812 Benton attained the rank of colonel, by which he was addressed throughout his political career.
31
Missouri cost Benton a great deal of money and provided the impetus for his
subsequent oppostion to banks and support for hard currency.7 In 1818
Benton became editor of the St. Louis Enquirer, which he used to advocate
statehood.8 The bitter struggle for statehood, which culminated in the Missouri
Compromise and its 36o30' line, marked the beginning of Benton’s Senate
career. He took his place in the United States Senate in 1821 and remained
there for thirty years.
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 allowed Missouri to enter the Union
as a slave state balanced by the admission of Maine as a free state. It stipulated
that the territory that had been part of the Louisiana Purchase would be
divided along the 36o30' line, which formed Missouri’s southern border. With
the exception of Missouri, states north of the line were to prohibit slavery,
while states south of the line could place no restrictions on slavery. Benton
supported the Missouri Compromise primarily because of the end results—the
admission of Missouri to the Union. Although he was a slaveowner himself,
Benton was ambivalent about the extension of slavery; he considered almost
any discussion about the extension or non-extension of slavery to be
unnecessary agitation. Benton’s ambiguity on slavery matched his emphasis
on compromise. His Missouri constituents supported the idea of compromise
because the resolution of sectional differences about slavery allowed the West
7 Chambers, Old Bullion Benton, 77–90, 145; Adler, Yankee Merchants and
the Making of the Urban West, 31. 8 Smith, Magnificent Missourian, 55–72.
32
to concentrate on economic development. The diverse economic and sectional
views within Missouri encouraged Benton in this ambivalent cause.
Furthermore, Benton’s national political experience had shown him the
importance of compromise, and he believed the same tactics that kept the
national sections out of conflict also would resolve any differences between St.
Louis and the rest of Missouri.
Benton was not the only young American to see the potential St. Louis
offered. By 1830 the steamboat had made the city a regional trade center and
migrants from the northeast had furthered St. Louis’s commercial
development. The economic and cultural gap between St. Louis and the rest of
the state widened. Southern farmers who had settled rural Missouri were
predominantly Democrats, while St. Louis, with its northern-dominated
population, had a substantial number of Whigs.9 By the late 1840s St. Louis was
booming. It was the leading metropolis and commercial center in the West.
The population increased rapidly; ambitious young men from the East and
immigrants from Europe poured into the city. Germans and Irish were the two
main groups of European immigrants to Missouri. By 1860 about one-third of
St. Louis’s population was German, which added another ethnic element to the
city’s already diverse culture.10 The first significant German immigration to St.
9 Adler, Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West, 23–28.
William O. Lynch, “Influence of Population Movements on Missouri before 1861,” Missouri Historical Review, 16 (July, 1922), 515.
10 Edward Conrad Smith, The Borderland in the Civil War (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927), 12–13. The high percentage of foreign-born
33
Louis took place in the 1830s. Enthusiastic travel reports lured the immigrants
to Missouri, where they formed a German community. In the late 1840s
political refugees from the revolutions in Europe fled to the United States,
where a more educated and politically active group of immigrants joined the
established German community in St. Louis. German immigrants in the 1850s
were not revolutionaries and probably only had a vague concept of
democracy if they had one at all. Nonetheless, they were used to the economic
uncertainty and political powerlessness of the lower classes and relished the
idea of equal opportunity in America.11
St. Louis, therefore, was the product of a myriad of influences. The
different sections of the United States, as well as many European countries, had
influenced the settlement and development of the city. No one section was
dominant, however, thanks in part to the efforts of men like Thomas Hart
Benton, who chose to look at Missouri as part of the West, not as a northern or
southern state. To Benton, the Union and the development of western industry
and commerce outweighed sectional concerns.12 The North and East were the
sections that most influenced St. Louis. As Jeffrey Adler pointed out,
citizens in St. Louis made the city particularly susceptible to nativist movements such as the Know-Nothing party.
11 David V. Detjen, The Germans in Missouri, 1900–1918: Prohibition, Neutrality, and Assimilation (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), 7; Walter D. Kamphoefner, The Westfalians: From Germany to Missouri (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 59.
12 Bierbaum, “The Rhetoric of Union or Disunion in Missouri,” 77–78.
34
northeasterners only made up 10 percent of the city’s population in the late
1840s, but disproportionately influenced the city’s development. Northerners
and easterners served in St. Louis as army officers, merchants, land
speculators, newspapermen, bankers, millers, lawyers, notaries, tax collectors,
brewers, ministers, and teachers. Many of these professions were ones that
traditionally accompanied social standing and leadership. The northerners and
easterners brought a tradition of political involvement, in which men of their
social standing were expected to assume a role in community leadership.
Although many of these men considered their residence in St. Louis
temporary, a place to earn some money while waiting for their fathers to
relinquish control of the family business back East, they established a cultural
and social hierarchy in the frontier to match the one they had left. The
northern and eastern businessmen also brought their political views with
them, which resulted in the high number of Whigs in St. Louis in contrast to
the rest of the state’s substantial Democratic majority.13
Most of Missouri, however, was agricultural, rural, Democratic, and had
close ties with the South. Slavery had been an issue in Missouri since before
statehood and had produced a sectional controversy that was settled in 1820
with the Missouri Compromise. Thus, from the day it entered the Union as a
slave state, Missouri served as an example to the North that slavery could be
extended to areas in which it was not generally considered suitable. To the
13 Adler, Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West, 91–103.
35
South, however, Missouri was no further north than other border slave states
Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware, and it seemed logical to extend
cotton and hemp crops, as well as the labor system that went with them, to
Missouri.
Rural Missouri depended on the financial strength of St. Louis, although
the different parts of Missouri had opposing views on the issue of slavery.
Although St. Louis, because of its position on the Mississippi River, played a
role in the interstate slave trade, the number of slaves in the city itself declined
rapidly. While in 1830 blacks made up 25 percent of the St. Louis population,
by 1860 only 2 percent of the St. Louis population was black, free or slave. Free
blacks also outnumbered slaves in St. Louis by 1860; in that year slaves made
up less than 1 percent of the city’s population.14 The highest percentage of
slaves in Missouri in 1860 was in Missouri legislator and secessionist governor
Claiborne Jackson’s home base of Howard County, in which 36 percent of the
population was enslaved. The counties in the Boone’s Lick region along the
Missouri River, known after the Civil War as “Little Dixie,” were settled by
southerners who brought their slaves west with them and grew hemp and
tobacco. Most Missouri slaves, however, were domestic servants; on the whole
fewer than 10 percent of Missouri’s population owned slaves.15 In the 1850s,
however, approximately 75 percent of Missouri’s population had southern
14 Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820–1860 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 19, 327. 15 March, The History of Missouri, I, 810–812.
36
roots and many were receptive to the idea that Missouri had much in common
with the South. Benton’s faction of the Democratic party and St. Louis, because
of its large population, continued to be a powerful influence in state politics,
but the disintegration of the party system and Benton’s perceived weakness
allowed Democrats from the rest of the state to take control of state offices. By
1860 the southern-sympathizing Boone’s Lick Democrats controlled the
governor’s office and state legislature, but they continued to present
themselves as committed unionists. They knew that they relied on the votes of
a nonslaveholding white majority in order to maintain their positions.16
There had been antislavery sentiment in Missouri even before it became
a state, however, and after statehood several prominent abolitionists focused
their attention on St. Louis, if only for a brief time. Abolitionist editor and
antislavery society organizer Benjamin Lundy visited St. Louis several times
during the struggle for statehood, but left Missouri when his attempts to make
Missouri a free state failed in 1820. Also in 1820, Joseph Charles, the editor of
the Missouri Gazette, called for the restriction of slavery and presided at an
antislavery meeting in St. Louis. In 1832 abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld
visited St. Louis; in 1834 Andrew Benton, a Lane Seminary student from St.
Louis (not related to Thomas Hart Benton), was selected as the Missouri
manager for the American Antislavery Society.17 Overtures by antislavery
16 Fellman, Inside War, 5. 17 Benjamin C. Merkel, “The Abolition Aspects of Missouri's Antislavery
Controversy, 1819–1865,” Missouri Historical Review, 44 (Apr., 1950), 233–237.
37
groups declined in the 1830s after St. Louis displayed that it was not ready for
radical abolition. Elijah Lovejoy established his St. Louis Observer in
November 1833 and in 1836 was blamed for the mob violence that resulted in
the murder of Francis McIntosh, a mulatto crime suspect. A mob broke into
the jail, captured McIntosh and burned him to death. Judge Luke E. Lawless,
who acquitted the mob’s ringleaders, blamed Lovejoy and other radical
abolitionists for inciting the mob into a state of panic about what the
consequences of abolition could be. When Lovejoy denounced the judge’s
decision in the Observer, a mob retaliated by destroying his newspaper office
and damaging his press. Lovejoy decided he would be safer in a free state and
moved to Alton, Illinois, where he continued to publish extra editions of the
Observer and to preach at Missouri churches. In November 1837 another
Missouri mob attacked Lovejoy’s newspaper office in Alton and killed the
editor, which made Lovejoy one of the first martyrs to the abolitionist cause.18
The Lovejoy incident evoked a strong anti-agitation response. The
development of the western frontier was considered the most important
concern for the future of St. Louis and abolitionist agitation did not help the
city in its attempts to gain respect nationally. Before the Free Soilers organized
in 1848, the closest thing St. Louis had to abolitionists were its German
immigrants. The Germans were by no means radical abolitionists; they
favored gradual emancipation accompanied by compensation and opposed
18 Ibid., 239–240; March, The History of Missouri, I, 821.
38
what they considered unconstitutional attempts to eliminate slavery. While the
Germans’ position was extremely moderate as far as abolitionists are
concerned, it was radical enough for most Missourians, who resented what
they perceived as German agitation of the slavery issue.19 Anti-agitation
became the most popular Missouri view on slavery. Like Benton, many
Missourians agreed that western geography would naturally limit slavery,
which rendered pointless arguments about whether or not Congress had the
right to prohibit slavery in the western territories. Benton, for one, believed
Congress had the right but should not use it because it would unnecessarily
inflame the sectional conflict.20 The senior editor of the Western Journal, a St.
Louis periodical, referred to the debate about slavery in the territories as “a
war with shadows.” He continued, “there is no danger that slavery will
proceed North, and if it were legalized to the latitude of forty-nine degrees it
would make little or no difference in the final result. Natural laws will in time
overrule all legislative enactments.”21
The Border South, in particular, of which Missouri was a part, often
preferred to discuss the idea that slavery would eventually be contained to the
19 Bierbaum, “The Rhetoric of Union or Disunion in Missouri,” 16–17. 20 Ibid.,71–72. 21 M. Tarver, “Slavery in the United States,” Western Journal, 1 (May, 1848),
235. M. Tarver, senior editor of the Western Journal, was a Democrat, as was the magazine’s junior editor, T. F. Risk. The Journal focused primarily on agriculture and commerce, but included articles on education, social policies, literature and politics as well.
39
Lower South. Indeed, the slave ownership figures indicate that the Border and
Middle Souths lost almost 750,000 slaves between 1790 and 1860, during which
time the percentage of slaves in the Lower South more than doubled. Many
people in the border states expected that slaveowners in those states would sell
their slaves further south. Combined with the colonization of free blacks,
eventually the border states would be left free for white laborers and the only
slaves—possibly the only blacks—would be in the Lower South.22 This would
be best accomplished, however, people believed, by letting the slow slave
drain to the south continue—without timelines, deadlines, or northern
coercion. In St. Louis, in the mid-1850s, there were twenty times as many
whites as blacks. According to the St. Louis Democrat, the small amount of
slaves in Missouri, not just in St. Louis, was not an argument in favor of either
labor system. The percentage of slaves was so low that slaves did not have the
same impact on the economy as they did in the Lower South. At the same
time, many northern investors refused to do business in Missouri simply
because it was a slave state, no matter what the percentage of slaves.23
Slavery declined in St. Louis between 1840 and 1850, due in part to the
fact that northern, German, and Irish immigrants did not bring slaves with
them, and these immigrants made up much of the increase in the city’s white
population. In 1840 slaves had made up 10 percent of the city’s population; by
22 William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, Volume I: Secessionists at
Bay, 1776–1854 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 24, 35. 23 Ibid., 19–20.
40
1850 the percentage of slaves had dropped to 3 percent. In most of Missouri’s
counties, slaves made up less than 5 percent of the population. Only seven
counties had between 25 and 37 percent slaves in 1860. Richard Wade has
discussed St. Louis as an excellent example of the urban slavery cycle, in which
an early rise in the number of slaves accompanies the first substantial wave of
settlers. The rise is quickly followed, however, by stagnation, in which the
number of slaves levels off while the number of whites continues to increase.
The last step is the eventual decline of slavery as urban conditions and the
availability of white immigrant laborers make slavery less and less
economically sound as an urban labor source and more attractive as a source
of plantation labor. By 1860 slaves comprised only 1 percent of St. Louis’s
population. Slaves made up slightly less than 10 percent of the state’s
population in 1860, down from 15 percent in 1820.24
The Western Journal was enthusiastic about the number of immigrants
in St. Louis because they provided cheap labor for the city’s manufacturers.
Immigrant mechanics and laborers who worked for wages “are compelled by
necessity to labor for such prices as they can obtain,” the Journal reported in
1848. The magazine predicted that the continued migration of Europeans to
24 Wade, Slavery in the Cities, 19, 327. Wade cites population figures from
the 1840, 1850, and 1860 censuses for St. Louis that enumerate the white, free black and slave population of the city. R. Douglas Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri’s Little Dixie (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), xii; Meyer, The Heritage of Missouri, 316–317; March, The History of Missouri, I, 810.
41
the West would keep St. Louis supplied with cheap labor for years.25 A letter in
the Missouri Republican confirmed that “the large foreign immigration is
working a great change in the values of slave labor.” St. Louis residents, many
of whom were from free states or European countries, preferred to hire white
servants, the letter claimed. Abolitionists were not the problem for
slaveowners, the letter continued, but support for gradual emancipation was
increasing as slavery declined. Slaves were no longer profitable in St. Louis, the
letter declared, and its author warned people planning to move to Missouri
from southern states to “sell your slaves before coming.”26 Slave prices in
most of Missouri remained high from the 1830s to the 1850s, but were slightly
lower than prices in New Orleans. Slavery remained profitable in St. Louis in
one aspect until the outbreak of the Civil War. The city, because of its
proximity to the Mississippi River, had an abundance of slave traders.
Throughout the antebellum period, St. Louis slave traders made money by
selling and shipping slaves to the Deep South.27
In general, however, St. Louis served as an example of what America
could be. Cities could rise out of the wilderness and bring civilization to the
frontier. The pioneers who staked their money and time toward the
development of St. Louis expected Missouri to ultimately be the home of
25 Western Journal, 1 (Apr., 1848), 230. 26 Missouri Republican, Oct. 18, 1848. 27 Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri’s Little Dixie, 224–230; Wade,
Slavery in the Cities, 202–203.
42
millions of people, with St. Louis destined to play a major role.28 Wade said
western cities like St. Louis “speeded up the transformation of the West from a
gloomy wilderness to a richly diversified region,” and he cited the leadership
the western states received from the cities, with Benton as an example, as
proof that cities played a major role in the development of the West. Benton
combined urban and western influences in his Senate career. The rural settlers
may have outnumbered the city dwellers, but it was the urban settlers, like
Benton, who had the experience and temperament to seek office, and
consequently dominated state leadership positions and congressional
delegations.29
St. Louis leaders enthusiastically championed their city, and hoped it
would soon receive the national respect they thought it deserved. Every new
factory or shop was cheered, especially factories, because their establishment
proved that Missouri was suited for more than agriculture. “The valley of the
Mississippi contains all the elements necessary for manufacturing purposes,”
the editor of the Western Journal stated in 1848, “and at no distant day must
become the great manufacturing district of the United States.” The opening of
a new bellows factory was the occasion that produced such optimistic remarks,
28 Frances Lea McCurdy, Stump, Bar, and Pulpit: Speechmaking on the
Missouri Frontier (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1969), 183. 29 Wade, The Urban Frontier, 339–342.
43
concluding with the exhortation that other merchants and manufacturers
should shape their businesses “to meet this inevitable destiny of the west.”30
Geography was on St. Louis’s side; its location near the junction of the
Missouri and Mississippi rivers was perfect in an age of steamboat-dominated
commerce. However, the development of railroad networks also was seen as
essential for the future of St. Louis, which needed a reliable transportation
network to link the East and West as the Mississippi River linked the North
and South. St. Louis had a vested interest in maintaining harmony between the
sections since the city and its residents found themselves with personal,
political, and economic ties to all sections. Like Benton, the editor of the
Western Journal criticized sectional agitation, especially by the national political
parties. By the late 1840s the West had acquired its own form of sectionalism.
Western residents began to see themselves as having interests not particularly
northern or southern, but western, such as internal improvement projects to
make western rivers more navigable or regulations to make steamboats safer.
“We have no inclination to excite prejudices in the west against any other
section of the country,” the editor of the Western Journal wrote in 1849,
But it is our most ardent desire that the people of this region should escape from the unhappy condition of being divided into northern and southern parties. . . . who shall draw a line across the father of waters and sever this great valley into northern and southern divisions—raise a barrier between the sympathies of those who happen to reside on either side, and disappoint us in the attainment of the glorious destiny which awaits us?31
30 Western Journal, 1 (May, 1848), 284. 31 M. Tarver, “Western Policy,” Western Journal, 2 (Apr., 1849), 212–213.
44
Naturally, in addition to their desire to keep the Mississippi open for trade,
westerners also had a significant economic interest in keeping any east-west
rail lines open. It was simply unacceptable to allow sectional disputes to
hamper economic opportunity.
Sectional agitation threatened to take attention away from western
development, which threatened St. Louis’s bid to be considered one of the
great cities in the United States. “The entire country between our present
settlements and the Pacific Ocean, is to be viewed in a new and different
aspect,” the Western Journal reported after the war with Mexico. “Henceforth,
Missouri is not to be regarded as a frontier State; but, possessing within her
own limits all the elements of a mighty empire, she is destined to become the
heart of the republic.” St. Louis was expected to become “the great commercial
city of the valley . . . the centre of a great system of internal improvements as
well as of commerce.” St. Louis was considered superior to other United States
cities in terms of its location and resources; “it must become the great
commercial emporium of the continent.”32
The different settlers in St. Louis, however, had different ideas about the
path St. Louis should take to prosperity. While all agreed that St. Louis had the
potential for greatness, their concepts of the city’s future varied. The Germans
32 Western Journal, 1 (July, 1848), 363 (1st quotation); M. Tarver, “A System
of Internal Improvements for the West,” Western Journal, 2 (Jan., 1849), 2 (2nd quotation); M. Tarver, “St. Louis—Its Early History,” Western Journal, 2 (Feb., 1849), 85 (3rd quotation).
45
who first migrated to the city in the 1830s wanted to create an ideal political
community with like-minded people, most of whom opposed the institution of
slavery. The 1848 and 1849 political refugees from the revolutions in Europe
came to St. Louis because of the favorable reputation it had acquired based on
the experiences of the earlier immigrants.33 The early German immigration
appealed to subsequent immigrants, who hoped that Missouri would be the
ideal place to establish a German community without the political and
population problems of Germany. St. Louis, perhaps because of its
multicultural past, had acquired a reputation as a stronghold of European
culture. The Germans who came to St. Louis because of this reputation,
especially those who came after 1848, were well educated and politically active.
Those who had been active in the German revolution of 1848 helped politicize
Missouri’s German community when they moved to the United States. St.
Louis’s reputation, then, became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the immigrants
the reputation attracted helped enforce the city’s European ties.34
The presence of such a significant number of Germans in St. Louis,
however, led to a corresponding rise in nativist, anti-immigrant, sentiment.
Germans in St. Louis, like most immigrants in the United States, tended to
33 Robert J. Rombauer, The Union Cause in St. Louis in 1861 (St. Louis:
Nixon-Jones Printing Co., 1909), 88–103. 34 Adler, Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West, 48–49; I. H.
Lionberger, The Annals of St. Louis and a Brief Account of Its Foundation and Progress 1764–1928 (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society, 1929), 45; Detjen, The Germans in Missouri, 7–8.
46
support the Democrats instead of the Whigs, who harbored nativist elements
and supported stricter naturalization laws.35 The Democratic St. Louis Daily
Union criticized Whig attempts in 1846 to enact a twenty-one year waiting
period for naturalization. “It matters not where a man was born,” the Union
declared. “It is enough, if he is an upright and useful citizen, and ready to
engage in upholding the institutions of the country.” To the Democrats, Whigs
who refused to accept the immigrants’ place in American society were only
costing themselves votes. The Democrats welcomed the chance to appeal to
immigrants and took great care to praise German immigrants in response to
Whig allegations that the European countries were sending their poor or
criminals to America. Prussian immigrants in St. Louis were described as “a
people well educated, and celebrated for their morals and their industry” and
praised for leaving Europe, “voluntarily seeking here what is denied to them
in the land of their birth—the rights of freemen.”36 The Whigs, however, used
nativism to their political advantage and often gained control of city offices as a
result. The nativist American, or Know-Nothing, party followed the Whigs’
example in St. Louis and fostered anti-German and anti-Democratic sentiment,
which later translated into anti-Republican sentiment when many Germans left
the Democratic party to support the Republicans.
35 Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 230–231. 36 St. Louis Daily Union, Aug. 19, 1846, Aug. 20, 1846, Sept. 7, 1846.
47
The Germans remained staunchly Democratic until the national conflict
about slavery brought about a realignment of the political parties. St. Louis
Germans supported the Democratic administration’s prosecution of the
Mexican War, although the war was widely considered at the time to be
primarily for the purpose of acquiring more slave territory, which many
Germans opposed.37 The sectional political upheaval that resulted from the
Mexican War was the first sign of the full-blown political crisis that would
emerge in the 1850s. The introduction of the Wilmot Proviso and the debate
about the extension of slavery into any territories acquired as a result of the
war caused all residents of St. Louis to reconsider their political loyalties. The
Free Soil candidacy of Martin Van Buren in 1848 indicated that Germans as well
as other loyal Democrats were willing to go against the party they traditionally
had supported when antislavery and free labor principles were at stake.
While the Germans traditionally have been credited with being the
western voters whose support for the Republican party was crucial for its
eventual success, they were not the only westerners who opposed slavery and
supported the idea of free labor.38 The non-German white population also was
37 Rombauer, The Union Cause in St. Louis in 1861, 91–92; William Jay, A
Review of the Causes and Consequences of the Mexican War (Boston: Benjamin B. Mussey and Co., 1849), 190.
38 Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 259. Foner challenges the idea that German voters were the instrumental factor in helping Lincoln win the e