The Civil War in Missouri: A Military History

Conclusion

205 Conclusion Frank Blair, arguably the most aggressive Unionist in Missouri during the secession crisis, returned to the state in June 1865 after three years of military service in the field. Blair had led the fight against Governor Claiborne Jackson’s policy of armed neutrality in the spring of 1861, and he had briefly seen military action in Missouri at the battle of Boonville. Elected to Congress in 1860, Blair left Missouri after the Federal victory at Boonville and hastened to Washington, DC, to attend the special session of Congress called by President Lincoln. Initially delighted by Lincoln’s appointment of John C. Fremont as Federal commander in Missouri, Blair soon became a fierce foe of the imperious general and successfully maneuvered to secure Fremont’s removal from Missouri in October 1861. When Congress went into recess in July 1862, Blair accepted a military command and served in the field for the next three years, rising to the rank of major general. He led his Missouri, Illinois, and Ohio troops at Vicksburg, Chattanooga , Atlanta, and in the march across Georgia. He was a prominent commander in a Federal army that marched across the South from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic coast. The war ended for Blair in North Carolina, and he bid farewell to his troops at Louisville on July 11, 1865, as they mustered out of Federal military service.1 Blair returned to Missouri eager to regain his antebellum prominence in public life. His lengthy absence from the state required a new burst of political energy , the more so because he returned a determined foe of the Radical Republicans. Radicals in Missouri had drafted a new state constitution, which imposed an ironclad loyalty oath on voters and on all professional men practicing with a license from the state. The intent was clear: to establish and maintain the ascendance of Unionists in public life. In Blair’s view the vanquished rebels in Missouri were unjustly disenfranchised. And under Radical control, the Republican Party had become a cabal, plundering public coffers and intent upon suppressing the democratic will of the people. Blair quickly returned to his conservative Democratic Party roots and became a leading figure in Missouri and across the nation, advancing the postwar Democratic opposition to Republican political hegemony . Blair returned to Missouri on June 20. Two days later, three hundred guests gathered at the Lindell Hotel in St. Louis to attend a banquet in his honor and to hear him speak in support of President Andrew Johnson’s lenient Reconstruction 206 The Civil War in Missouri: A Military History policies. No one had done more than Blair to defeat the southern rebellion. No one would do more than Blair to limit the political and social consequences of emancipation and the military defeat of the Confederacy.2 With the military defeat of the rebellion, Blair favored a swift restoration of the antebellum rights of the states. He had made his conservative views clear early in the war. As a congressman he had supported compensated emancipation in the District of Columbia and for Missouri, and he later accepted the necessity of the Thirteenth Amendment. But he continued to argue in favor of colonizing African Americans outside of the United States, and he bitterly opposed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Now back in Missouri, Blair eagerly forged political alliances with former rebels.3 Eventually, returning Confederates like John Marmaduke benefited from Blair’s efforts. Captured by Federal forces during the Confederate retreat after the Battle of Westport in October 1864, Marmaduke remained a prisoner of war at Johnson’s Island in Ohio until the end of war. Once freed, he returned to Missouri , settled in St. Louis, and became active in Democratic politics. Conservatives in Missouri succeeded (through court orders and legislation) in defeating the Radical loyalty oath and thereby restored the antebellum political rights of former rebels. Blair died in 1875, but had he lived, he would undoubtedly have supported Marmaduke in his victorious 1884 campaign for governor. Ironically, Marmaduke’s capture may have eased his return to civilian life. For Jo Shelby and Sterling Price, the war ground on after their defeat at Westport. They continued their retreat from Westport through Arkansas to Texas. Defiant to the end, both men were loath to surrender. Shelby managed to hold together a disciplined brigade. Once in Texas, he believed that Confederates could assemble a well-equipped, battle-tested army of sixty thousand men to continue the fight. It was not to...