and altered, and great lakes were formed along the Mississippi. One of these, Reelfoot Lake, east of the river, is 20 m. long and 7 wide, and so deep that boats sail over the submerged tops of tall trees. Indian troubles again disturbed the peace during the second war with Great Britain. By 1808 the Indian title was extinguished to two-thirds of the state, though actual settlement did not extend more than a few miles westward from the Mississippi; in 1825, by a treaty with the Shawnee made at St Louis on the 7th of November, the title to the rest of the state was cleared, and a general removal of the Indians followed. Meanwhile, after the peace of 1815 a great immigration had set in, many settlers coming from the free states north of the Ohio. The application for statehood precipitated one of the most famous and significant episodes of national history—the Missouri Compromise (q.v.). In August 1821, after three years of bitter controversy, Missouri was formally admitted to statehood.
In the four decades before the Civil War, two matters stand out as most distinctive in the history of the state: the trouble with the Mormons, and the growth of river and prairie trade. In 1831–1832 Joseph Smith, the Mormon leader, selected a tract at the mouth of the Kansas river as the site of the New Jerusalem, to which his followers came from Ohio in 1832. They were not welcome. Their “revelations” in their papers predicted dire things for the Gentiles; they were thrifty and well-to-do, and were rapidly widening their lands: they were accused of disregard for Gentile property titles, and they obstructed the processes of Gentile law within their lands. In 1833 the Missourians, in mass meeting, resolved to drive them from the country. The five years thereafter were marked by plunder and abuse of the sect. The militia and the courts gave them no protection. They were driven out, and went to Illinois, but continued to hold part of their abandoned lands. First St Louis, and then other towns on the Missouri river in succession westward, as they were settled and became available as dépôts, served as the outfit points for the Indian trade up the Missouri and the trade with Mexico through Santa Fé. The trail followed by the latter had its beginning about 1812, and (beginning in 1825) was surveyed by the national government. In early days Mexican and American military detachments escorted the caravans on either side of the international line. Independence, Missouri (after about 1831) and Kansas City (after 1844) were the great centres of this trade, which by 1860 was of national importance.[1] After the Civil War the railways gradually destroyed it, the Atchison Topeka & Santa Fé railroad running along the old wagon trail. No steamer traversed the Mississippi above the Ohio until 1817, nor was a voyage made between New Orleans and St Louis, nor the lower Missouri entered, until 1819. In 1832 a steamer ran to the mouth of the Yellowstone, and in 1890 the last commercial trip was made to old Fort Benton (Great Falls), Montana. The interval of years witnessed the growth of a river trade and its gradual decline as point after point on the river—Kansas City, St Joseph, Council Bluffs (Iowa), Sioux Falls (South Dakota) and Helena (Montana)—was reached and commanded by the railways. In 1906–1907 an active campaign was begun at Kansas City for improving the channel of the Missouri and stimulating river freighting below that point.
Among events leading up to the Civil War, first the annexation of Texas and then the war with Mexico left special impress on Missouri history. Since 1828, when national political parties were first thoroughly organized in the state, the Democrats had been supreme, and carried Missouri on the pro-slavery side of every issue of free and slave territory. But there was always a strong body of anti-slavery sentiment,[2] nevertheless; and this took organized form in 1849, when Senator Benton repudiated certain ultra pro-slavery instructions, breathing a secession spirit, passed by the General Assembly for the guidance of the representatives of the state in Congress. From that time until his death he organized and led the anti-disunion party of the state, Francis Preston Blair, jun., succeeding him as leader. The struggle over Kansas (q.v.) aroused tremendous passion in Missouri. Her border counties furnished the bogus citizens who invaded Kansas to carry the first territorial elections, and soon guerrilla forays back and forth gave over the border to a carnival of crime and plunder. Political conditions were chaotic. In the presidential election of 1860, Douglas received the electoral vote of the state, the only one he carried in the Union. The Republicans had little strength outside St Louis, where the German element was strong. A party led by Claiborne F. Jackson, the governor-elect, was resolved to carry the state out of the Union. Such secession, it was supposed, would carry the other border states out also. With equal blindness the Secessionists favoured, and the Republicans opposed, the calling of a special state convention to decide the issue of secession. The election showed that popular sentiment was overwhelmingly hostile to secession; and the convention, by a vote of 80 to 1, resolved (March 4, 1861) that Missouri had “no adequate cause” therefor. Governor Jackson thereupon sought to attain his ends by intrigue, and the national arsenal at St Louis became the objective of both parties. It was won by the unconditional-union men, but a smaller arsenal at Liberty was seized by the Secessionists. Governor Jackson refused point-blank to contribute the quota of troops from Missouri called for by President Lincoln. Aggressive conflict really opened at St Louis on the 10th of May, and armed hostilities began in June. On the 10th of August 1861 at Wilson’s Creek, near Springfield, General Nathaniel Lyon was defeated by a superior Confederate force in one of the bloodiest battles of the war. After this the Confederates held much of southern Missouri until the next spring, when they were driven into Arkansas, never afterward regaining foothold in the state. In the autumn of 1864 Sterling Price led a brilliant but rather bootless Confederate raid across the state, along the Missouri River, and was only forced to retreat southward by defeat at Westport (Kansas City). The western border was rendered desolate and deserted by guerrilla forays throughout the war. Probably 25,000 or 30,000 soldiers served in the Confederate armies, and 109,111 were furnished to the Union arms.[3] This was a remarkable showing. There was more or less internecine conflict throughout the war, and local disaffection under Union rule; and Confederate recruiting was carried on even north of the Missouri.
Altogether, the state offered a difficult civil and military problem throughout the Civil War. An emancipation proclamation issued by General J. C. Frémont at St Louis in August 1861, though promptly disavowed by President Lincoln, precipitated the issue. The state convention, after voting against secession, had adjourned, and after various sessions was dissolved in October 1863. Assuming revolutionary powers, it deposed Governor Jackson and other state officers, appointed their successors, declared vacant the seats of members of the Assembly, and abrogated the disloyal acts of that body. In October 1861 a rump of the deposed Assembly passed an act of secession, which the Confederate States saw fit to regard as legitimate, and under which they admitted Missouri to their union by declaration of the 28th of November. In 1862 the convention rejected the President’s suggestion of gradual emancipation, disfranchised Secessionists, and prepared a strong oath of allegiance. In the summer of 1863 the convention decreed emancipation with compensation to owners. This did not satisfy the Radical Republicans, and on the issue of
- ↑ In 1855 its value was estimated at $5,000,000. In 1860 it was much greater. In the latter year the trade employed 3000 wagons, 62,000 oxen and mules, and 7000 men.
- ↑ Under the constitution of 1820 the General Assembly had power to emancipate the slaves with the consent of their masters. In 1828 Senator T. H. Benton and others prepared a plan for educating the slaves and gradually emancipating them under state law; and undoubtedly a considerable party would have supported such a project, for the Whigs and Democrats were not then divided along party lines on the slavery issue; but nothing came of the plan, and the manner of its defeat proves that it could not possibly have been pushed to success. The trouble over Lovejoy’s printing office at St Louis (1833–1836) put an effectual end to the movement for emancipation.
- ↑ Compare the vote of 1861. The Union death-roll of Massachusetts (troops furnished, 159,165) was 13,942, that of Missouri 13,887.
