Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1861–1863

• 1. Introduction

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  The Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1861-1863 was elected to answer a single question about secession, and it ended up running a state at war. Its delegates met in Jefferson City and St. Louis across five sessions. They voted down disunion, and then they found themselves without a governor they could trust, a legislature that would cooperate, or a quiet border to hide behind. For several years they acted as a stand-in for the legislature. Yet the document they were gathered to write never appeared. That job passed to a later convention. How did a one-purpose assembly become a government? Who were the men who sat in it? And what did they do with the most explosive issue of their day, slavery?

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• 2. A Legal Puzzle

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  Missouri has had four constitutions, adopted in 1820, 1865-1875 and 1945. The last came in the wake of the fall of the Pendergast Machine. The first, written when the state joined the Union in 1820, allowed small changes by amendment but demanded an elected special convention for any general revision. When secession became a live question, the General Assembly reasoned that leaving the Union was as drastic as a general revision. Lawmakers decided they lacked the power to settle it themselves. The bill calling the convention passed on the 17th of January 1861, and voters went to the polls on the 18th of February. Each state senate district sent three delegates, for a total of 99. A senator named Charles H. Hardin added a safeguard: any declaration of secession would need approval from a majority of the state's qualified voters. His amendment survived the state senate by just two votes, 17 to 15.

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• 3. Three Camps

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  Voters faced three kinds of candidates. The first camp wanted Missouri to follow South Carolina and the other Deep South slave states out of the Union at once, without waiting for Abraham Lincoln to take office. The second, known as unconditional unionists, rejected secession under any circumstances. The third, the conditional unionists, opposed leaving immediately but would consider it if the disputes over slavery were not settled on terms the slave states could accept. The two unionist camps took nearly every seat. The outgoing governor, Robert Marcellus Stewart, and the incoming governor, Claiborne Fox Jackson, had both said Missouri should stay neutral between the Union and the Confederacy. The delegates were hardly strangers to the South. Of the 99, 82 had been born in slave states, and 53 of those came from Virginia or Kentucky. They convened in Jefferson City on the 28th of February 1861, and on the 1st of March they elected former governor Sterling Price, a conditional unionist, as their chairman.

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• 4. No Adequate Cause

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  On the 4th of March 1861, the delegates reassembled in the Mercantile Library in St. Louis. Fifteen days later they voted 89-1 against secession. Their resolution said there was no adequate cause to push Missouri to dissolve her connection with the Federal Union, and that she would work for an adjustment securing peace and the equality of all the states. A federal relations committee, chaired by the unconditional unionist Hamilton Rowan Gamble, supplied the reasoning. It conceded that most Missourians might sympathize with the South. But it warned that Missouri bordered states that would stay in the Union. Its report put the danger bluntly: "In a military aspect, secession and connection with a Southern confederacy is annihilation for Missouri." The committee argued that the state's interests lay in preserving the Union, while its kind feelings lay with the people of the South. Having said so, the convention adjourned. Its neutrality would hold only so long as no shooting began between the two sides.

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• 5. When Fighting Came

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  On the 13th and the 14th of April, Confederate forces bombarded and captured Fort Sumter in South Carolina. The next day Lincoln declared a state of rebellion and asked the states for troops, including several regiments from Missouri. Governor Jackson refused, calling the request illegal because the constitution gave Washington no power to make war on states. On the 20th of April, secessionist militia companies seized the U.S. Arsenal in Liberty, Missouri. Jackson, meanwhile, plotted to take the St. Louis Arsenal. He called out the militia, placed pro-secession officers in command and obtained artillery from the Confederacy. On the 10th of May, Captain Nathaniel Lyon of the U.S. Army surrounded the militia and took its members prisoner in the Camp Jackson Affair. The General Assembly answered with Jackson's military bill, which reorganized the militia as the Missouri State Guard under Sterling Price. Price then struck the Price-Harney Truce with General William S. Harney, the senior Union commander, until Lyon replaced Harney. Lyon met Jackson and Price, gave them one hour to leave the city and said he meant to take control of the state. He marched on Jefferson City and entered the undefended capital on the 15th of June.

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• 6. A Convention That Governed

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  With Jackson and Price in retreat, the convention's executive committee summoned a new session for the 22nd of July 1861. Twenty members had left with the governor and the general, so the pro-Union vice chairman, Robert Wilson, took the chair. The remaining delegates declared every elective state office vacant and filled them with provisional appointees, some of whom were not even in Missouri. Gamble became governor, Willard P. Hall lieutenant governor, Mordecai Oliver secretary of state and the painter George Caleb Bingham treasurer. They also vacated the offices of the General Assembly and ordered November elections. The session ended on the 31st of July. When the delegates met a third time, on the 10th of October in St. Louis, they abolished many state offices, cut state employees' pay by 20 percent and created a new pro-Union militia. They also postponed the planned election to August 1862 and required a loyalty oath of all state officials. The fourth session, held in Jefferson City in June 1862, extended that oath to teachers, attorneys, bank officers, preachers and voters. The effect was a dependable Union majority at the polls. Lincoln had won only 10.3 percent of Missouri's vote in 1860, but he took 70 percent in 1864.

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• 7. The Slavery Question

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  In 1861, General John C. Frémont issued an emancipation decree for Missouri. Lincoln rescinded it, fearing it would alienate unionists in Missouri and Kentucky. In 1862, the convention tried to abolish slavery in the state and failed. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves only in Confederate-held territory, leaving those in Union-held places such as non-seceding states. So the convention returned in June 1863 to try again. The main obstacle was a constitutional provision requiring the owner's consent and payment of compensation, and the state lacked the money. The delegates chose an ordinance of gradual emancipation with compensation, to finish on the 4th of July 1870. That plan enraged the Radical Republicans, who demanded immediate abolition and carried their complaint to Lincoln. He declined to take sides.

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• 8. Radicals Take Over

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  Provisional governor Gamble offered to resign during the dispute, but the convention refused his offer. He died in office on the 31st of January 1864. The Radicals blamed Lincoln's inaction and, in the 1864 presidential race, nominated John C. Frémont against him. Frémont withdrew a few weeks later. The Radicals also arranged elections for a new constitutional convention, and in November 1864 they won two-thirds of its seats. The same vote chose their leader, Thomas Clement Fletcher, as governor. The new body met in the Mercantile Library on the 6th of January 1865. On the 11th of January, it voted 60-4 to abolish slavery in Missouri with no payment to owners. A month later it ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to end slavery across the United States. The charter this convention wrote governed Missouri until 1875.

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