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8 Chapter One “Your First Allegiance” Small-scale slavery flourished in Missouri in 1860. In the state’s largest slaveholding counties, small slaveholders defined and defended a distinctive southern culture in close proximity to Free State communities in Illinois and Kansas—and in St. Louis, a booming city at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers that identified itself economically and politically with the Northeast. With the exception of Cape Girardeau and New Madrid Counties in the Boot Heel and Greene County in southwest Missouri, slaves and slaveholders in Missouri clustered in the Mississippi River counties bordering Illinois from Lewis County south to St. Charles County and then along the Missouri River westward from Warren County to Buchanan, Platte, and Jackson Counties on the border with Kansas.1 In the presidential election of 1860, Missouri’s small slaveholders showed little sympathy for the Southern Rights candidate John C. Breckenridge. None of Missouri’s largest slaveholding counties supported Breckenridge. Several supported the Unionist Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, including Chariton, Howard , and Cooper Counties in central Missouri and Franklin, Lincoln, St. Charles, and Jefferson Counties near St. Louis. All the rest of Missouri’s largest slaveholding counties supported the Constitutional Unionist candidate, John Bell. Abraham Lincoln carried two counties in Missouri (St. Louis and Gasconade, both with large German populations) but Lincoln carried only 10 percent of the vote across the state and posted the smallest tally of the four presidential candidates.2 Outside of St. Louis, small-scale slaveholders commanded Missouri’s agricultural economy and its politics. These Missourians viewed themselves as southerners , and during the 1850s they had become increasingly radical in their defense of slavery. In the secession crisis they sympathized with the southern cause. But Missouri’s small slaveholders were not eager for the civil war that soon engulfed them. Their support for Douglas and Bell reflected their desire to avoid a sectional conflict. This pairing of proslavery radicalism and conservative Unionism produced a distinctive demeanor, at once wary of secession and hostile toward the intrusion of outside influences. As the secession leader Basil Duke noted, Missourians were “ardent” in their sympathy for the southern cause but they “Your First Allegiance” 9 were not “open and active” in expressing it. Impatient for action, Duke soon left Missouri to fight with his father-in-law, John Hunt Morgan.3 Throughout the war Confederates similarly found Missourians friendly but cautious. Missourians often lent their aid and support to those who took up arms against the Federal government but they never fully embraced the Confederacy. Missouri’s Confederate leaders never enjoyed the outpouring of popular support that they exhorted and seemed to expect. Federal forces found the populace sullen: undemonstrative but hostile and subversive in the face of a Federal military presence. For North and South in the Civil War, Missouri remained an unpredictable, unstable, and contested border. Claiborne Fox Jackson, the man Missourians elected governor in 1860, understood the temper of his state. In his political campaign, Jackson declared his support for Douglas. But those who knew Jackson well recognized him as a strong supporter of Southern Rights. He was, in his heart, a Breckenridge man. In the state senate in 1849, it was Claiborne Jackson who lent his name to the “Jackson Resolutions” that attacked Senator Thomas Hart Benton for his opposition to the expansion of slavery. In the words of Thomas Snead, who worked with Jackson to lead Missouri into the Confederacy, the Jackson Resolutions had taken “high Southern ground” to support extending slavery into the West. Jackson, wrote Snead, “was ever after recognized as one of the ablest leaders of the . . . Southern Rights’ Democrats.”4 In his inaugural address, Jackson unequivocally broke with Stephen Douglas . As Douglas lent his support to the new Lincoln administration, Jackson declared that Missouri would “stand by her sister slave-holding States.” Missouri, said Jackson, would remain “devoted to the union . . . so long as there is any hope that it will maintain the spirit and guarantees of the Constitution.” But, if the “Northern States” were determined that no new slave states should be admitted or if they otherwise intended to interfere with slavery in existing states, it was they who had “abandoned the Union” and Missouri would not submit to a government “on terms of inequality and subordination.”5 The governor did not yet openly embrace secession, but he left no doubt that he wanted to mobilize the resources of his state to support the Confederacy. A resource of enormous importance...

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