The War for Missouri: 1861-1862

By Joseph W. McCoskrie

Missouri was filled with bitter sentiment over the Civil War. Governor Claiborne Jackson had a plan to seize the St. Louis Arsenal and arm a pro-secessionist force. Former governor and Mexican-American War hero Sterling Price commanded the Missouri State Guard charged to protect the state from Federal troops. The disagreements led to ten military actions, causing hundreds of casualties before First Bull Run in the East. The state guard garnered a series of victories before losing control to the Union in 1862. Guerrilla and bushwhacker bands roamed the state at will. Author Joseph W. McCoskrie Jr. details the fight for the Show Me State.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Jul 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781439669747

Joseph W. McCoskrie

Joseph W. McCoskrie Jr. is a Midwest native who graduated from the Virginia Military Institute and subsequently served in the U.S. Army for twenty-eight years, retiring as a lieutenant colonel. After more than twenty-five years as a Midwest banking executive, Whit was hired to become an instructor in leadership and American military history for the Army ROTC program at Illinois State University and the University of Missouri. Whit and his wife have two sons, Brian and Robert, and reside in Fulton, Missouri, where he currently spends some of his time as a volunteer tour guide at the National Churchill Museum.

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INTRODUCTION

A principle had been defeated in Kansas Territory. It was the principle upon which the South had based all its hopes of expansion, the principle of squatter sovereignty or self determination by new states of whether they were to be slave or free.

—Alice Nichols, Bleeding Kansas

Land that was ceded to the United States after the war with Mexico created more problems than it solved. When California became a free state in 1850, leadership in the South realized how much more valuable the New Mexico and Utah Territories would become if slavery was going to continue as an institution. Both territories had been opened to slavery by the Compromise of 1850, but this transition required navigable transportation routes for the facilitation of their settlement as slave states. Sea routes took too long to travel, and the trails west were littered with the grave sites of victims from the long, arduous journeys of covered wagon trains.

America was in the early planning stages of building a transcontinental railroad to facilitate its expansion into the vast territories that were still unsettled in the West. Whoever came up with the most affordable route would certainly have an advantage in attracting the considerable sums of badly needed capital to build it. When he was appointed as the secretary of war, Jefferson Davis learned that a route just south of the New Mexico Territory had provided the least-difficult mountain range to pass through. Davis persuaded President Franklin Pierce to appoint a South Carolina railroad man named James Gadsden as special minister and envoy to Mexico to negotiate a treaty for the land. Santa Anna, who had seemingly held the seat of power in Mexico for forever, was constantly in need of money and negotiated a treaty with Gadsden in 1853 that ceded to the United States a thirty-thousand-square-mile section of land along the New Mexico Territory border with Mexico. Overcoming considerable resistance from the North, the Gadsden Purchase was ratified by Congress and Mexico was paid the tidy sum of $10 million.

Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas, who was a heavy investor in Chicago’s real estate and railroad stock, had also conceived a plan to build a transcontinental railroad through the unsettled Nebraska Territory. Douglas sponsored the Kansas-Nebraska Act with the intention of dividing the territory into two states: Kansas and Nebraska. He also proposed gaining the nation’s support for this plan through a political solution known as popular sovereignty. An attraction for Southern support of this legislation was the fact that Kansas lies directly west of Missouri, a slave state, and Southern supporters assumed that Kansas would choose to become a slave state because of this. It was believed in the North that free-state proponents would be equally satisfied and support Douglas’s designs since Nebraska would logically became a non-slaveholding state.

Douglas’s scheme, while hotly contested due to the suspected ulterior motives of its designer and its alleged breach of faith that was established by the Compromise of 1850, scraped up enough reluctant Southern Democratic support to join in with Douglas’s northern followers to pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Nevertheless, a firestorm of anger came down from Northern antislavery abolitionists and the South’s proslavery activists, as both claimed that the hard-earned gains from the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850 had been stolen. Furthermore, a new party—the Republican Party—emerged in the Midwest as the political vanguard of the antislavery movement. Republicans successfully installed a Speaker of the House in 1856, and they took on the new role as the second major political party in the United States. Time soon demonstrated that any peaceful solutions to the conflict over slavery had already drifted away.

Any debate over the outbreak of violence in Missouri must first reckon with the bitter fight that ensued to establish Kansas’s statehood after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. The slavery controversy in Kansas erupted into violence when the self-proclaimed free-soilers, abolitionist immigrants from New England, symbolized by their breech-loading Beecher’s Bibles (a name given to Sharp’s rifles that were allegedly shipped to antislavery advocates, symbolically representing the power of the Bible as articulated by abolitionist activist Henry Ward Beecher), and the Southern sympathizers, who cried foul at Douglas’s failed assumption that Kansas would become a slaveholding state, immediately clashed.

Bands of proslavery Border Ruffians crossed the border in 1855 to vote for the first Kansas Territory legislature. The first raid on Lawrence, Kansas, was carried out in 1856 by proslavery Border Ruffians from Kansas City, Missouri. They torched much of the town, igniting escalating acts of retaliation. John Brown, a militant abolitionist deeply influenced by the progressive antislavery movement in Springfield Massachusetts and the stories of attacks on antislavery communities, gathered his sons and other followers and descends on a proslavery settlement at Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas. There, they hacked five suspected proslavery settlers to death in retaliation. A few months later, an army of several hundred border ruffians attacked John Brown’s men at Osawatomie, Kansas, and drove them off before they nearly burned and looted the entire town. These Missouri raiders continued to raid towns all the way to Topeka in what became cause for newspapers to describe the territory as Bleeding Kansas. Many historians believe that the nationwide attention garnered from John Brown’s spectacular raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry to arm a slave revolt and his celebrated trial and hanging in 1859 were sufficient causes for the secessionist movement to move forward in the South. But, by 1857, the free-soilers had finally prevailed over the proslavery contingent in Kansas, and the state was admitted to the United States as a free state in 1861.

President Abraham Lincoln could not have conceived how vast the chores that awaited his administration on the day of his inauguration, March 4, 1861. Lincoln had inherited a war department that would cause grave concern for any sovereign leader. Lincoln was soon intimately involved with establishing a war department that would plan and oversee dozens of military campaigns and the raising, organizing and training of an army of hundreds of thousands of men before sending them off to fight thousands of military engagements. But first Lincoln must come to grips with the sobering realization he only possessed an army of 1,080 officers and 14,926 enlisted men scattered across seventy-nine outposts with nearly all located west of the Mississippi River. A quarter of these officers, who were considered the cream of the crop by their peers, resigned and joined the Confederacy. This realization came to an individual whose sole military experience boiled down to an uneventful period as a captain in the Illinois militia when Blackhawk natives briefly raided the state in 1832.

The Confederacy, on the other hand, was in what seemed like the much more experienced and capable hands of West Point graduate, Mexican War regimental commander and former secretary of war and Mississippi senator Jefferson C. Davis. Seven southern states had already seceded from the Union and formed an alliance to challenge the political legitimacy of the federal government before Lincoln’s inauguration. While the results of the presidential election showed that Republicans had captured 60 percent of the popular vote in the North, it was more politically alarming to the South that Republicans had swept three-fourths of the northern congressional seats. The South’s sentiment, as expressed by the proslavery Southern press, concluded convincingly to its readers that this could mean only one thing: the North was seeking to eradicate the institution of slavery.

Barely a month after Lincoln’s inauguration, Fort Sumter fell after a thirty-four-hour bombardment in Charleston Harbor. Fort Sumter was a legacy of the War of 1812, and was not constructed to fight a battle against the harbor it was intended to protect. Lincoln, without any readily available military resources, called for state militias to suppress the rebellion. However, four of the most heavily populated slave states—Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas—joined the Confederacy; it was an alarming event that Lincoln had not anticipated. Within three months of Lincoln’s inauguration, the president was confronted with a crisis that was greater than any his predecessors had faced: the actual separation of the United States into two distinct governments, the loss of one-third of the nation’s population and the existential challenge to the Constitution as the supreme governing document of the land.

Although the moral tenor of the Constitution that all men—not some—are granted equal protection under the law, thirteen states believed that this statute did not include all men. While Lincoln’s army was woefully unprepared for any major conflict, article 1, section 8 of the Constitution specifically granted Congress the power to compel the states to address this matter.

First:

To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions; to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States.

Second:

Reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.

And third:

To exercise like authority over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state in which the same shall be, for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dock-yards and other needful buildings.

The president’s role as commander in chief during a conflict is manifested in article II, section 1, by virtue of the following oath or affirmation.

I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States…

And he is empowered to follow this oath in section 2.

The President shall be commander in chief of the army and navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States…

Finally, the prohibition of individual states to act alone in times of war is addressed in the last paragraph of article 1, section 10.

No state shall, without the consent of Congress, lay any duty of tonnage, keep troops or ships of war in time of peace, enter into any agreement or compact with another state, or with a foreign power, to engage in war, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as will not admit of delay.

Constitutional scholars may find that this statement raises the possibility of misinterpretation if viewed separately from article 1, section 8.

The popular sentiment in Missouri strongly suggested the state should remain in the Union and out of any future conflict, and this was legally manifested during a special Missouri Constitutional Convention in late February and early March 1861, when the legislature overwhelmingly voted (ninety-eight to one) to remain in the Union. But Missouri’s leaders had also made a fatal error in judgment when they assumed that Missouri could somehow stay out of the conflict. Missouri’s legislators failed to fully comprehend the state’s unique, geographic location, and its abundance of resources could not be idly ignored, particularly by Abraham Lincoln, a man who quickly recognized the strategic importance of possessing these advantages.

The matter of slavery’s economic importance in Missouri was more complex than it was in the rest of the southern proslavery states, which were dominated by the economic clout of large cotton plantations. For example, by 1860, Callaway, a rural county along the fertile valley of the Missouri River in central Missouri’s Little Dixie region, had a population that was 40 percent black, with 4,523 slaves. However, two-thirds of these slaves were owned by farmers who were engaged in non-cotton agricultural production and owned ten or fewer slaves. There were simply too few white laborers available for hire in Missouri to engage in the backbreaking work of growing and harvesting hemp, tobacco and a variety of food crops. This contrasted with a large urban area like St. Louis, Missouri’s largest city and the seventh-largest city in the nation, which was inhabited by an African American population that benefited from freer social interaction with white people. Slaves were even allowed a degree of independence and were able to hire themselves out.

Prior to the outbreak of violence, Missouri’s unique labor circumstances enabled African Americans to fend for themselves, which provided them with opportunities to find their own lodging, market their skills and retain a portion of the fruits of their labor. St. Louis offered African Americans the opportunity to earn a respectable livelihood by working along the riverfront, on riverboats, in lead and salt mines and as handymen, janitors, porters, maids, nannies and laundresses. The Missouri and Mississippi River communities provided slaves and black freeman the economic mobility that few could expect on the large plantation institutions of the South.

In addition, Thomas Buchanan provides readers with an illuminating picture of a rising black culture along the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers in his book Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks and the Western Steamboat World. From the dangerous fueling of steams engines to the endless backbreaking demands of roustabouts and deckhands to load and unload, African Americans provided the essential labor that was necessary to sustain a thriving steamboat industry along the nation’s interior waterways. Because a ship captain’s success relied solely on the safe passage of his passengers and cargo, both slaves and freedmen benefited from the unique opportunity to be financially rewarded for their efforts.

These economic, social and cultural developments enabled African American communities along the Mississippi River to grow and thrive. But as Missouri’s population enjoyed an almost 100 percent growth in its population every decade after it achieved statehood, the growth of its slave population noticeably slowed to where the enslaved people represented less than 10 percent of the state’s total population, in stark contrast to one-third of the entire population of the South by 1860.

Missouri’s history should also draw the reader’s attention to a darker sentiment regarding the moral justification among the state’s elected representatives for slavery: The racial view that black people were less intelligent than white people. This sentiment became reality when Missouri’s state legislature banned the education of slaves and freedmen in 1847. As antislavery sentiment was rising in the North, Missouri became the focus of one of the most widely followed legal cases involving the controversy of slavery in American history. An enslaved woman from St. Louis named Harriet Scott and her husband, Dred Scott, were worried about what would happen to their two children when they grew to an age at which they would be more valuable for their owner to sell. Dred Scott, a porter, and Harriet sued for their freedom and their children’s freedom from Irene Emerson in a Missouri court. This case was named Scott v. Emerson, but it is more commonly known as the Dred Scott Case.

Missouri had set a precedent in earlier rulings that once slaves had resided in a free state for a prolonged period of time—which the Scotts had done for two years in Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin—they had earned their