“History is written by the camp followers of victorious
armies”; a sentiment often attributed to Winston Churchill but almost
certainly more ancient in origin. Since the end of The War Between the States
the text of the story has changed over time. Revisionism by the victors was
handled gently at first but in the last century something more virulent
surfaced. The story of Missouri that evolved in the 20th century is an
important part of a curtain of deception which was installed to obfuscate
certain activities that took our country in directions not contemplated by the
Founders. The following monograph is an attempting to adjust that view and to
aim the light of truth at those malevolent forces who have sought to control
the story of the South. DSR
A frontier Territory carved out of the Louisiana Purchase
Missouri was always on the front line. She entered the Union on 10Aug1821 as a
result of the so-called “Missouri Compromise” a euphemism for the political
battlefield that lit the fuse for the explosive events that would transpire four
decades later. Would the States decide their own course and institute their own
laws or would the Central Government decide the status of individual States?
That question would open a Constitutional fault line that remains active and
unresolved to this day.
In the intellectual arena Missouri was on the front line as
well. In the book, The Idea of a Southern Nation, Nathaniel Beverley
Tucker is profiled as an important figure in the development of a Southern
consciousness. Like so many early Missourians he was born in Virginia. Tucker
graduated from the College of William and Mary in 1801 his eyes on the idyllic
vision of the West. In 1815 "...Tucker departed for Missouri, where he served as
a circuit court judge. He deplored the immigration of …Northerners to Missouri
and ridiculed their attitudes and mannerisms. Tucker vehemently opposed the
Missouri Compromise in 1820. In that campaign he became one of the earliest
Southern nationalists [emphasis added]” (1) Later in his life he wrote two
novels. The first George Balcombe (1836) is a set in both Missouri and
Virginia and is said to be a cornerstone in the development of the Southern
literary mind.
Missouri was also on another border that was about to become
the front line. The Mason-Dixon Line extended across the continent would put the
vast majority of Missouri in the South. Yet the western border was equally
significant. Vernon county (MO) historian Patrick Brophy states that, “The
Missouri-Kansas border is no ordinary state line…For a decade it was the
battle-line between North and South.” It is geographically important as well.
Missouri is the western margin of the eastern woodlands so that, “Roughly, the
timberline follows Missouri’s northern and western edges…” (2) making it the
last bastion of Celts who settled the mountain South and favored the forests
above the prairie to the west.
In the 1850's Missouri was the frontier. To Southerners
Missouri was the northwest outpost of their domain, a part of the Upper South, a
bastion of traditional Christian civilization in an increasingly materialistic
world. It was rich in agriculture land, the limit of cotton cultivation, and a
bonanza of mining. It formed the northern terminus of the famous St. Louis to
New Orleans trade route that was the commercial dynamo that drove the economic
growth of the Mississippi River basin.
The census data reveals that 85% of her citizens were either
born in Missouri or were immigrants from other Southern states. Mostly from
Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia these people brought with them their culture,
values, and politics. Yet Missourians were also molded by their borders.
Surrounded by Illinois, Iowa, and Kansas she was the constant targets of
adventuring by ideologues of an aggressive new materialism nurturing in the
neighboring states.
To the Eastern aristocrats Missouri was the symbol of
everything that was evil. The dreaded Southerner had colonized the virgin West
and controlled the mouth of the Missouri River and it was the key to the
Pacific. Any expansion of Eastern market monopolies had to go through Missouri.
The bankers of Boston and the stock mongers in New York rankled at the thought
of having to deal with a lot of loathsome Southerners controlling the West with
their position in Missouri. It was a blockade against their ambitions and blow
to their pride knowing that they had been out maneuvered by what they considered
a lesser people.
Missouri was the fountainhead for the trails that lead to the
untapped West, that vast land waiting to be explored and the gold-fields of
California, Colorado, and New Mexico. All the major trade routes issued forth
from lush, green, hilly, and prosperous Missouri. Her determined people settled
eastern Kansas and considered it an extension of their culture and the future
for their children.
Too important for sentimentality and not deterred by the law,
Kansas was manipulated as a geopolitical pawn. At stake was the West, the course
of the railroads, and the dream of unlimited expansion. In the Ivy League
culture there was a deliberate campaign undertaken to recruit immigrants to
"rescue" Kansas. Underwritten by wealthy institutions in New England artificial
movements such as the Emigrant Aid Society manipulated by Eli Thayer, Charles
Robinson, and others started to send Northern Unionists to colonize Kansas and
destabilize Missouri.
Missourians were demonized as retrograde primitive creatures
called “Pukes” by the sophisticated Eastern press. Losers in the march of
cultural evolution Pukes were dirt-wallowing elemental brutes “…described as
being like animals rather than fellow humans. They are a queer-looking set,
slightly resembling human beings but more closely allied to wild beasts” (3)
Dehumanized Missourians could be killed without legal or spiritual consequences.
The manifestos of the materialist and the racist oratory of zealots did not
accomplish the desired purpose of backing down the Missourians. Finally the
slight depth of the Yankee philosophy was revealed and money began to flow away
from words and into guns.
The words of Samuel Crawford (who would become the second
governor of Kansas in the 1860’s) are an example of the effectiveness of the New
England propaganda campaign to justify a war against Missouri. When he left the
East for Kansas he wrote, “...I turned my face to Kansas, a new planet rising in
the West, struggling to throw off the barnacle of slavery and take her proper
position among the Free States of the Union.”(4) Yet after the War a more grown
up Crawford would blame “…the whims of ambitious politicians”(5) for the long
war he had just endured. Hung out to dry by polemics many people were duped by
the pretentions of Yankee materialism.
By the mid-1850's armed action had taken the place of
persuasion and bombast. The newly arrived inhabitants of Kansas and their allies
from New England invaded Missouri "jayhawking" (looting) and murdering as they
went. The people of Missouri engaged them and a War Between the States
commenced. It was the opening scene in what would eventually develop into a much
wider War only five years later.
From the halls of the Ivy League and the offices of
Northeastern industrialists issued forth a steady stream of money and materiel
to be used for the purpose of destroying Missouri. Missourians primarily stood
by themselves and fought the onslaught of Eastern materialism, briefly put, the
men and women of Missouri bled.
The action on the Kansas border ebbed but the issues lie
unresolved. The flow of political events shifted to the other areas of the
South. A realization came to the citizens of the Lower South that among other
things the events on the frontier were not isolated. They were part of a pattern
of constant probing and provocation against the integrity of the individual
States by powerful elements who promoted the unique notion of an insoluble
Union. The rest of the South finally understood what Missourians already
knew.
In 1861 as events unfolded elsewhere in the Greater South and
states began to formally secede from the Union the people of Missouri had
elected the fire-eating secessionist governor Claiborne Fox Jackson who favored
immediate entry into the Confederate alliance. But the lessons of the still
smoldering war with Kansas had chastened them. Knowing that they were surrounded
on three sides by hostile States and smarting from a lack of outside support
during that conflict Missouri was forced to conspire against fate and buy time
to raise an adequate internal army and seek political cover through
negotiations.
Missouri had formidable internal enemies as well. A tiny but
powerful Republican Party had established a beachhead. Their numbers included
turncoat Southerners like Frank Blair (whose brother was Lincoln’s Postmaster
General) and an unlawful "Federal militia" headed by some of the recent German
immigrants. These were no ordinary Germans most of whom were decent hardworking
neighbors. The leadership of this group like Franz Sigel was kicked out of their
own country for supporting a Marxist revolution in 1848 (6). They were dedicated
socialists. Some were friends of Karl Marx. So important to the European
socialists was Missouri that in Karl Marx’s book The Civil War in the United
States he mentions it numerous times. Fredrick Engle once wrote to Marx, "If
they get Missouri, they get the Territories too, and then the North can pack it
up". Lincoln would gratefully employ the socialists in his campaign to
exterminate Confederates in Missouri.
Help from the newly formed Southern Alliance was tentative.
President Davis demanded a time consuming formal ordinance of Secession to be
passed before he would send troops. This would not have been difficult under
different circumstances but Missourians already knew what had happened in
Maryland. Lincoln had invaded that State and jailed the legislature preventing
Secession.
Governor Jackson knew that Union General Nathaniel Lyon and
his troops were in St. Louis for the purpose of forcing compliance to the Union.
Lyon had the reputation of a cruel unstable military tyrant who delighted in
bizarre discipline practices. He would, “…march delinquent soldiers bareheaded
across the parade ground with honey in their hair and barrels over their
shoulders to prevent them from brushing away the flies” (7). He was a fanatical
Lincolnite and a ruthless enemy.
Missouri was not ready to fight the U.S. Army alone but
without any alternative and no help in sight they would try. After taking steps
to activate the small but tough Missouri State Guard Governor Jackson and
General Sterling Price confronted the full authority of the Federal government
in a dramatic scene that few outside Missouri know about.
Meeting at the Planter's House in St. Louis Jackson and Price
confronted General Lyon who had orders from Lincoln to hold onto Missouri at all
cost. After the legally elected Governor of Missouri refused to allow any
Missouri troops to join the Union effort of subduing other Southern States Lyon
rose and said that he would see every man, woman, and child in the state dead
before Missouri would secede from the Union.
Following their meeting with Lyon; Jackson and Price left for
the capital at Jefferson City burning the railroad bridges as they went. Lyon
pursued but Jackson cleaned out the capitol taking files, legislative records,
treasury, State Seal, and moved the government into exile. Meanwhile Price
busied himself with raising and equipping an army.
After many skirmishes and a major victory on 5July1861 at the
Battle of Carthage (pre-dating First Manassas) Jackson and Price teamed up with
Texas and Louisiana troops and defeated the Union Army at Oak Hills (Wilson's
Creek). Even though half the Missourians at the battle showed up with only pitch
forks and clubs for weapons Price's corps turned the tide at Bloody Hill and
routed the well equipped U.S. Army. During the battle on 10Aug1861 Pvt. Robert
Breckinridge of the Missouri State Guard shot and killed the would-be mass
murderer Lyon exactly 40 years to the day that Missouri entered the Union. The
battle would be won crushing Franz Sigel the Marxist general appointed by
Lincoln.
Price went on to defeat another Federal force at the Battle
of Lexington (Hemp Bales) and with most of Missouri under his control Governor
Jackson called the legislature back into session at Neosho (MO). On 25Oct1861 a
quorum was achieved (8), legislation passed, and on 31October the Governor
signed the Ordinance of Secession and sent it on to the Confederate Legislature.
On 28Nov1861 the Confederate Congress admitted Missouri as the twelfth state of
the Confederacy.
By January of 1862 fully one quarter of the entire army at
the disposal of President Lincoln was in Missouri. He threw everything he could
spare at her. For political reasons he did not recognize the secession of
Missouri so he branded all who opposed the Union outlaws, criminals, and
traitors. Then he and his generals began a premeditated campaign of repression
against the civilian population. The ensuing policy of organized terror, murder,
and ethnic cleansing would today be called genocide.
Scores of thousands enlisted into the Confederate Army.
Official records of Confederate pensioners show only about 40,000 applicants but
heritage groups have uncovered records suggesting more than 100,000 Missouri
troops and Partisans were in Confederate service. It took in excess of 50,000
Bluecoats to enforce a toehold in Missouri.
During the War her soldiers distinguished themselves with
such heroic conduct that the Southern press called them "the South's finest" and
the elite of the Confederate service. At Elkhorn Tavern, Iuka, Corinth, Port
Gibson, Vicksburg, Kennesaw, Blakely, and at Franklin the Missourians did the
impossible when called upon. They were Gen. N. B. Forrest's personal guard.
Their reputation for bravery was unchallenged: their honor beyond question.
Today the record remains clouded and confused. Perhaps no one
wants to look deeply into the policies of President Lincoln. Maybe it is better
to emphasize the political bewilderment of internal fratricide rather than to
view the situation in Missouri without the pretensions of modern materialism.
Leftists say Missouri is a Union state to underscore the accomplishments of the
Marxist soldiers who served Lincoln and to discourage investigations into their
questionable activities. Even some Southerners flinch when the subject comes to
Missouri. Many speak of an eleven state Confederacy as if what took place in
Missouri didn't happen; it was only a nightmare. This revisionist view saddens a
lot of people and is evidence of the depth materialist disinformation has
penetrated the psyche of our collective consciousness.
The issue of Missouri is the linchpin to the understanding of
the greater causes and consequences of the War. The situation in the front-line
South was frightful. Kentucky, Missouri, and Virginia suffered the political and
military depredations of a failed Confederate alliance and their continued
geographical vulnerability made them easy targets for revisionism.
However, the curtain of deceit is being lifted revealing
among other facts a Confederate flag with thirteen stars on it; one for each
state of the Confederate alliance; Missouri being number twelve. That is a
testament for all to witness and a statement that can never be taken away even
by the most vigorous revision of history.
