Claiborne Fox Jackson

• 1. Introduction

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  Claiborne Fox Jackson won Missouri's governorship in 1860 as the safe, moderate choice. He ran on Stephen A. Douglas's anti-secession platform and defeated his nearest challenger, Sample Orr, by nearly ten thousand votes. Voters trusted him. They could not see his secret correspondence with Confederate President Jefferson Davis. On the 3rd of January 1861, Jackson delivered his inaugural address. He declared that Missouri could not separate herself from the slaveholding states if the Union dissolved. He called for a state convention to decide the question. Within months, he was arranging for Confederate artillery to arrive in St. Louis by steamboat and dispatching secret envoys to Richmond. How had a frontier pill salesman become the man most dangerous to the Union in all of Missouri? And how close did his plot actually come to succeeding?

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• 2. The Sappington Web

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  In 1826, Claiborne Fox Jackson left Fleming County, Kentucky, and moved with several older brothers to Franklin, Missouri. The brothers opened a general mercantile store in the Howard County town. Jackson's father had been a wealthy tobacco planter and slaveholder, and Claiborne Fox carried those values west. Five years after arriving, he married Jane Breathitt Sappington in Arrow Rock, in early 1831. Her father, Dr. John Sappington, was among the frontier's most prominent physicians. He was also a major slaveholder with thousands of acres and a growing business empire. Jane died just months after the wedding. Jackson moved to Saline County to stay near his father-in-law and work in the family businesses. That part of central Missouri, along the Missouri River, was known as "Little Dixie." In 1833, Jackson married Louisa Catherine Sappington, a younger sister of his late wife. Together with his father-in-law and brother-in-law Erasmus Sappington, he manufactured and sold "Dr. Sappington's Anti-Fever Pills." The pills were filled with quinine from ground cinchona bark imported from Peru. Malaria was prevalent throughout the Missouri and Mississippi valleys. Traders and emigrants heading out on the Santa Fe Trail were eager customers. The pills became best sellers. Louisa died in May 1838, likely from complications of childbirth. Their infant son, Andrew Jackson, died the following month. That same year, Jackson married Elizabeth Sappington Pearson, also a daughter of Dr. Sappington and his wife. They had two daughters together: Louisa Jane, born in 1841, and Annie E. Jackson, born in 1844. His brother-in-law Meredith M. Marmaduke was also drawn into Missouri Democratic politics through this extended family network. The Sappington connection gave both men statewide reach before Jackson had won a single election.

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• 3. Twelve Years in the House

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  Jackson first won election to the Missouri House of Representatives in 1836, representing Saline County. He served a total of twelve years there, including terms as Speaker in 1844 and 1846. In 1838, he moved to Fayette, the Howard County seat and then a center of political power in Missouri. He went to work for the local branch of the state bank. In 1840, writing anonymously to a Fayette newspaper, he accused John B. Clark, the Whig candidate for governor, of election fraud. Clark challenged him to a duel over it. The matter was settled without gunplay, and after Clark switched parties to the Democrats, the two became political allies. Jackson was elected to the state senate in 1848. As leader of the pro-slavery Democrats, he targeted US Senator Thomas Hart Benton, a powerful Union loyalist. Benton had blocked Calhoun's pro-slavery resolutions at the federal level. Jackson chaired the state senate's committee on foreign relations. When Missouri State Senator Carty Wells of Marion County introduced the Calhoun resolutions, that committee received them first. Jackson then brought them to the full senate on the 15th of January 1849. They asserted that Congress had no constitutional right to legislate on slavery in the states. They rejected the Missouri Compromise and mandated that Missouri's federal representatives support those positions. History came to know them as the "Jackson Resolutions." The joint legislature voted for Whig Henry S. Geyer, and Benton lost his Senate seat. As payback, Benton's supporters blocked Jackson's bids for the Democratic congressional nomination in 1853 and again in 1855. In 1857, the governor appointed Jackson to a new post that would take him out of the legislature and across the whole state.

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• 4. Six State Banks

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  In 1857, the governor appointed Jackson as Missouri's Banking Commissioner. He established a system of six state banks, each with branch locations. The banks stabilized the currency shortages that had periodically hurt commerce, especially in rural parts of the state. As Commissioner, Jackson traveled widely to inspect banking facilities. He turned each visit into a political opportunity. He built support for a gubernatorial run in communities he could not have reached from a legislative seat. His resignation in the fall of 1860 freed him to run for governor. He had been preparing for that moment with every bank inspection and political handshake.

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• 5. Governor and Conspirator

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  On the 18th of February 1861, Missourians voted to convene a special state convention on secession. That body voted 98-1 against leaving the Union. Jackson accepted the result in public and announced that Missouri would be an "armed neutral," providing no men or arms to either side. Confederate forces bombarded Fort Sumter in South Carolina on April 12-13, and President Abraham Lincoln called on the states for 75,000 troops. Jackson's written reply called Lincoln's requisition "illegal, unconstitutional, and revolutionary in its object, inhuman, and diabolical." He promised not one man would come from Missouri. On April 26, under orders from Secretary of War Simon Cameron, Captain Nathaniel Lyon removed 21,000 of the Arsenal's 39,000 small arms. He shipped them across the Mississippi River to Alton, Illinois, before Jackson could act. Jackson had called the Missouri Volunteer Militia to assemble on May 3 in Lindell's Grove, on St. Louis's western outskirts. Confederate artillery had been secretly delivered to Camp Jackson, seized from the U.S. Arsenal in Baton Rouge. On May 10, Lyon surrounded Camp Jackson with pro-Union Home Guards, mostly German immigrants from St. Louis, and took the militia prisoner. Two days of rioting and gunfire followed, killing soldiers, prisoners, and civilian bystanders alike. The Missouri Legislature responded by authorizing Jackson's State Guard bill. On May 11, Jackson appointed Sterling Price as Major General of the Missouri State Guard. The next day, Price met with Federal commander William S. Harney and agreed to a truce allowing Missouri to remain nominally neutral. Jackson had also secretly dispatched envoys to Confederate commanders in Arkansas, asking for an immediate invasion. Price was simultaneously promising Federal authorities he would hold the state for the Union. Harney was removed from command on May 30 and temporarily replaced by Lyon, now promoted to brigadier general. When Jackson met with Lyon on June 11 hoping to extend the truce, Lyon refused. Lyon marched on Jefferson City on June 13. Jackson fled. On June 17, Union forces routed the State Guard at Boonville, where it was commanded by Jackson's nephew, John Sappington Marmaduke. On July 5 at Carthage, Jackson personally commanded 6,000 State Guardsmen and drove back a smaller Union detachment led by Colonel Franz Sigel. That made him only the second sitting U.S. governor to lead troops in battle. The first had been Isaac Shelby of Kentucky during the War of 1812. Lyon kept pressing, chasing Jackson and Price to the far southwest corner of Missouri. The Missouri State Convention was about to take matters into its own hands.

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• 6. Exile and Rump Government

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  On the 22nd of July 1861, the Missouri State Convention reconvened in Jefferson City. Nine days later, on July 31, it declared the governor's office vacant. Hamilton R. Gamble, former Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court, was appointed provisional governor that same day. Jackson did not recognize any of it. On August 5, he issued a proclamation declaring Missouri a free republic and dissolving all ties with the Union. He traveled to Richmond, Virginia, to meet personally with Confederate President Davis and seek military support for General Price's forces. On the 28th of October 1861, secessionist members of the Missouri General Assembly gathered in Neosho with Jackson and passed a formal ordinance of secession. The Confederate government recognized Missouri as its twelfth state on November 28, with Jackson as its governor. The Neosho group elected senators and representatives to the Confederate Congress. Union forces occupied nearly all of Missouri at the time, making those offices largely moot. General Samuel R. Curtis kept pressing Jackson's forces south. At the Battle of Pea Ridge in March 1862, Union armies soundly defeated the Missouri secessionist forces. Jackson retreated to southern Arkansas in the spring of 1862. He met with wealthy Missouri secessionists to discuss a new campaign to retake the state. But illness overtook him before any invasion could be launched. Thomas C. Reynolds had succeeded Jackson as governor in exile. He moved the exile government from its temporary capital at Camden, Arkansas, to Shreveport, Louisiana. From there it shifted again to Marshall, Texas, where it was formally disbanded at the end of the Civil War. By November 1862, Jackson himself had traveled to Little Rock, and his health would not allow him to leave.

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• 7. Death and the Sappington Cemetery

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  On the 6th of December 1862, Claiborne Fox Jackson died at age 56 in a Little Rock rooming house. Pneumonia killed him, accelerated by stomach cancer. The invasion of Missouri he had been planning died with him. Missouri initially denied him burial within its borders, given his role in the secession movement. He was interred instead at Mount Holly Cemetery in Little Rock. After the Civil War ended, his remains were exhumed and transported back to Missouri. He was reinterred in the Sappington Cemetery in Saline County. Dr. John Sappington had founded the two-acre burial ground in 1831; it holds 111 plots. All three of Jackson's wives are buried there. His brother-in-law Meredith Miles Marmaduke, also a governor of Missouri who died during the Civil War, rests there too. In 1967, the state of Missouri acquired the cemetery as part of an effort to recognize the burial places of the state's governors. It has been preserved as a State Historic Site. A provisional camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Caimito, Panama, was named after Claiborne Fox Jackson.

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