Confederate government of Missouri

• 1. Introduction

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  The Confederate government of Missouri never actually governed Missouri. It existed as a government in exile, a political body that claimed to speak for a state it had largely lost before its claim was even formally recognized. The story begins with Governor Claiborne F. Jackson and the collapse of a fragile peace that Missourians desperately wanted to preserve. What drove a sitting governor to flee his own state? How did a legislative session in a small Ozarks town end up placing Missouri's star on the Confederate flag? And what did it mean to govern a place you could not hold?

• 2. The Price-Harney Truce

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  On the 21st of May 1861, Missouri's most powerful factions tried to stop the slide toward war with a formal agreement. The so-called Price-Harney Truce expressed what many leading citizens wanted: a neutral Missouri, standing apart from both the Union and the Confederacy as the nation tore itself apart. The truce bore the names of two men whose cooperation was meant to hold the peace in place. It did not hold. Within weeks, the conflict consuming the rest of the country had made neutrality impossible to sustain. On the 11th of June 1861, leading Missourians gathered at Planters' House in St. Louis, and the meeting made plain that every man in that room would have to choose a side.

• 3. Secession at Neosho

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  Governor Claiborne Jackson and other Missouri secessionists convened in the fall of 1861 in Neosho, a small town in the southwestern corner of the state. The gathering presented itself as the Missouri General Assembly, though it was a rump body of pro-Confederate members. On the 28th of October 1861, this assembly enacted an ordinance of secession. Missouri's Union supporters did not accept the legal standing of that ordinance then, nor would they later. The Confederate states, however, saw an opportunity. On the 28th of November 1861, Missouri was granted admission to the Confederacy as its purported twelfth state, and a twelfth star was placed on the Confederate flag to mark the occasion.

• 4. Military Reality

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  Admission to the Confederacy gave Jackson's government a seat in the Confederate Congress and a star on the flag, but it could not give it control of Missouri's territory. The jurisdiction of the Confederate government of Missouri extended only as far as Confederate military strength could physically reach. That reach proved limited. The Battle of Pea Ridge, fought in March 1862, was particularly consequential. After the fighting at Pea Ridge, Confederate forces could no longer press their claim over much of the state, and Jackson and his government were pushed into exile.

• 5. Government in Marshall, Texas

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  The exiled Missouri government set up operations in Marshall, Texas, joining what was called the Trans-Mississippi bloc of Southern civil governments. These were the governing bodies of Confederate states whose leadership had been driven from their home territory and were now administering their claims from across the river. Missouri's exiled legislators continued sending representatives to the Congress of the Confederate States, maintaining the legal and political fiction of Confederate Missouri from hundreds of miles away. The government persisted in this form until the 26th of May 1865, when General E. Kirby Smith surrendered all Confederate troops west of the Mississippi River at New Orleans, ending the last organized Confederate resistance in the region and dissolving the purpose that had kept the exile government alive.