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215 eight v Reconciliation and Promises By฀late฀autu mn฀1864,฀General Sterling Price’s dream of a Confederate Missouri had ended. The state was safe in the Union and free from the burden of slavery, but still tormented by guerrilla and criminal violence. Refugees who had fled or been forced out of the western counties were slowly beginning to return, but they faced severe hardships due to the missed planting season and depredations committed on their livestock and food supplies by traversing armies. Money was scarce, prices were high, and some agricultural industries, such as hemp and tobacco, had nearly died out. In addition, because so many men had left to fight and so many slaves had fled to St. Louis or across the border to Kansas, there were labor shortages throughout the state. The urgent need for labor proved to be a benefit to some; the freed slaves who had left the northwestern farms and plantations often found paid work near cities and along the rivers. Economic problems were less evident in cities like St. Louis, where contracts for warships and other military matériel kept the economy lively. It was the subsistence farmers who faced the toughest challenges.1 Farmers still remained on the front lines of guerrilla attacks. Many Missourians believed that the solutions to the ongoing problems of criminal gangs and their sympathizers were tied to the future of slavery: the destruction of slavery, they reasoned, would bring an end to the war. These economic, military, and political problems forced Missourians to recognize that their long-standing desire for neutrality and moderation on controversial issues was simply no longer realistic. War-weariness, fear and grief over continuing brutalities, and internal divisions over the issues of equality and civil rights for black people made it necessary to consider new ideas. Missourians were willing to General Sterling Price. O’Neill, steel engraving. Courtesy of Missouri Historical Society 216 missouri’s฀war accept changes that would have seemed far too radical only five years earlier. Then, moderates such as Provisional Governor Hamilton Gamble and General Henry Halleck had been popular and respected in Missouri because they were reasonable men who understood the people. But Gamble had died, under sharp (and often unfair) criticism by radicals, and Halleck was back in the eastern theater of the war. Another important factor in postwar politics in Missouri was the effective silencing of the conservative opposition, which included not only those who had favored the Southern cause but also loyal Democrats and even some moderate Republicans. The 1864 state elections had been a stunning victory for the radicals, at least in part because the name of the Democratic Party had become tainted with treason and the test oaths prevented many Missourians who might otherwise have opposed radical policies from voting. Democrats decided to keep quiet and wait—what historian William E. Parrish called “playing possum”—until internal divisions in the Republican Party brought about its downfall. As a result, the radicals enjoyed great success in politics for at least five years after the end of the war. They gained control of Congress as well as a majority in the Missouri state legislature and local government offices.2 When Thomas Fletcher entered the race for the governorship in 1864, he ran against the unfortunately named Thomas L. Price (who actually had no connection with the Confederate general). Because of his military record and staunch dedication to the cause of emancipation, Fletcher won an easy victory by a margin of more than forty thousand votes. Historians attribute the sweeping radical victories to war-weariness, the previous year’s increase in bushwhacker violence (the worst since the beginning of the war), and the general sense that Gamble’s moderate policies had not kept Missourians safe from the guerrillas’ murderous rampages.3 It was true that the Democrats, or Conservative Unionists as many of them began to call themselves, commanded little influence in Missouri’s political arena. But the Republicans were also divided. Those called Liberal Republicans proposed a progressive program that included votes for black people, education reform, and a moderate policy toward former rebels. They also believed in measured progress for black people, but not immediate political and social equality. After Lincoln’s death in 1865, the liberals supported President Andrew Johnson’s moderate Reconstruction policies. They believed that their divided state’s only hope of recovering peace and prosperity lay in the reconciliation of former enemies. Those known as Radical Unionists wanted not...

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