The story of a border city during the Civil War

by Galusha Anderson

The Georgia commissioner made a vow that he would never buy a new hat until Missouri seceded from the Union. In 1900 he was still living. The silk hat that covered his obfuscated brain when he represented seceded Georgia before the Convention in St. Louis had been fixed over three times. He was still proud of it and of the cause that he represented in 1861. Whether he now lives, we do not know. He has died, or will die, in the faith. He was made of stern stuff. If he has, or when he shall have, departed to the land where silk hats are not needed, and from which no one ever secedes, every one who admires pure grit will heartily breathe the prayer, Requiescat in pace.

We return now from this peculiar and important transaction, unexpectedly thrust upon the attention of the Convention from without, to notice that, by the time it had fairly begun its work in St. Louis, the secession legislature which had created it, repented of what it had unwittingly wisely done, and began to agitate the question whether it had the power to repeal the ordinance that called the Convention into being, and thus permanently dissolve it. They saw of course that the Convention was not of their way of thinking. They refused to vote the necessary means for the publication of its proceedings. Mr. Foster of the Convention said in debate, “Although the legislature of Missouri called this body into existence, yet, sir, its complexion so very materially differs from the complexion of the legislative body, that, if they had the power, in my judgment, they would crush us out of existence to-day.” To the Union men of St. Louis and the State this growing antagonism of the two law-making bodies was a cheering symptom. The legislature, however, soon learned from its legal advisers that it could not efface the wisdom into which it had blindly blundered; that the chicken which it had so fondly hatched and fostered into maturity could not be put back into the shell again; that, in short, there was no political power in Missouri superior to the sovereign Convention which it had evoked into being, and which was now calmly and wisely deliberating in the great commercial city of the State.

All parties were finally convinced that though the legislature had created the Convention, it could not destroy it. So the work of this sovereign body moved on undisturbed. On the eighth day of its sittings the Committee on Federal Relations reported through its chairman. In their report the Committee, with but partial success, detailed the political events which led to the secession of the Cotton States, and had raised the question of secession in the remaining slave States. But they presented with cumulative force many cogent reasons why Missouri should not follow her erring sisters in seceding from the Union, and finally crystallized their recommendations on the whole subject of secession in seven resolutions, the first and chief of which was, “That at present there is no adequate cause to impel Missouri to dissolve her connection with the Federal Union.” This resolution seems to us now tame and timid. But a more sweeping and positive resolution could not have been carried through the Convention. Its very weakness was its strength. Its apparent obeisance to the doctrine of secession made it acceptable to many conditional Union men. When the loyal men of St. Louis heard it, they were lifted up with hope.

However the Committee was not unanimous. On the next day some conditional Union men on the Committee presented a minority report. Then numerous amendments were offered, and for eight days longer the debate went on, more earnest and vigorous than ever, but each day it was evident that the more positive secession sentiment was slowly vanishing, so that when on the sixteenth day of the Convention, the vote was taken on the resolution quoted above, while nine members of the Convention were absent, all present but one voted for it. George Y. Bast, a farmer from Rhineland, Montgomery County, has the unenviable distinction of being the minority of one that voted for the secession of Missouri. The other resolutions of the Committee, with varying majorities, were also adopted.

On the 22d of March the Convention adjourned to meet on the third Monday in December following; but it also appointed a committee of seven, one from each congressional district, to whom the power was delegated to call the Convention together before the third Monday in December, if, in their judgment, the public exigencies demanded it.

The reasons urged by the Convention against the secession of Missouri as we gather them from its reported proceedings, briefly stated, were these:

First: the geographical position of Missouri. She was so far north that her climate was better adapted to the white man than to the black. Moreover, she was shut in on three sides by free States, into which, if she seceded from the Union, her slaves would flee and from which they could not be brought back.

Second: she had other, and far greater interests than her slaves. They numbered only one hundred and twelve thousand, while she had within her borders more than one million, one hundred thousand white men. During the then preceding decade her slaves had increased twenty-five per cent; while her white population had increased one hundred per cent. The taxable value of her slaves was only forty-five million dollars, while that of her other property was three hundred and fifteen million dollars. Most of her slaves were engaged in raising tobacco and hemp, while her white population, which, through immigration, was rapidly increasing, was developing her mining, manufacturing, and commercial interests. The members of her sovereign Convention, from whose brains the cobwebs had at last been swept, and whose vision had become clear, saw that the immigration of free white men to Missouri would nearly, if not wholly, cease, if the State by secession should be placed under the political domination of the Confederacy, whose corner-stone had been declared by its brilliant Vice-President to be African slavery.

Third: timid men were everywhere crying out for compromise. And most of the members of the Convention still hugged the delusion that the political antagonisms, which were then shaking the nation to its foundations, and had already severed seven States from the Union, might be overcome by compromise. To inaugurate measures by which such compromise might be effected some advocated a convention of the border slave States; others of the border slave and border free States; and still others of all the States, and, so long as they cherished hope of such a peaceful adjustment of difficulties, they thought it inexpedient for Missouri to secede.

Fourth: most of the Convention believed that the seven States which had already seceded had been carried out of the Union by ambitious politicians; that the people had not been permitted fairly and fully to discuss the question of secession, and freely to cast their ballots for or against it. During the deliberations of the Convention extreme Southern politicians, like Yancey of Alabama, were roundly and bitterly denounced. Moreover, the State pride of the Missourians had been deeply stung by the seceded States. Those States, they affirmed, had rudely snapped the tie which bound them to the Union, without any consultation with the border slave States, and then after they were out of the Union and had gone so far as to set up a Southern Confederacy, they complacently turned around and invited the States whose counsels they had ignored to join them. Missouri felt that she should have been consulted before secession was enacted, and some strong pro-slavery members of the Convention declared in unmistakable terms that they were utterly opposed to following the cotton lords of the South Atlantic and Gulf States. Thus the precipitancy of the hot-headed Southern politicians became no inconsiderable element of the force which kept Missouri in the Union.