Missouri secession

• 1. Introduction

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  Missouri secession sits at one of the strangest intersections in American history: a state that voted 98-1 against leaving the Union, yet ended up with two rival governments, two rival delegations in Congress, and a Confederate legislature meeting in exile on the Texas plains. How does a state become both Union and Confederate at the same time? The answer runs through a governor who wanted secession, a captain who saw war coming before almost anyone else, a peace meeting that collapsed into a death threat, and a legislature whose very quorum remains disputed to this day. By the time the guns fell silent, Missouri had produced a secession ordinance that historians still debate, a provisional Union government of questionable legal authority, and a Confederate "state" that existed mostly on paper in a distant Texas town.

• 2. A Governor's Gambit

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  Claiborne Fox Jackson was inaugurated as governor of Missouri in the winter known as the Secession Winter, and from the outset he pushed for a state convention that he hoped would take Missouri out of the Union. Jackson was a Southern sympathizer who requested authorization for a constitutional convention to reconsider Missouri's relationship with the federal government. Delegates were duly elected. Then his plan ran into an obstacle he had not anticipated: not one avowed secessionist won a delegate seat.

  Former governor Sterling Price led the convention when it convened in February 1861. Price's views were typical of most Missourians at the time, a position the source describes as "conditional Unionist": neither favoring secession nor willing to support the United States making war on the Confederacy. Jackson argued personally before the convention for secession and failed to persuade it. On the 19th of March 1861, the delegates voted against secession by a margin of 98 to 1. That lopsided result would not end Jackson's ambitions. Within weeks he was secretly coordinating with the newly declared Confederacy to arm pro-Confederate elements of the Missouri State Militia, and he was ordering that militia to begin mobilizing by the 1st of May.

• 3. Lyon and the Arsenal

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  In early February 1861, United States Army Captain Nathaniel Lyon arrived in Missouri and was stationed at the St. Louis Arsenal, one of the largest caches of military supplies in the western part of the country. The arsenal nominally fell under Brevet Major Peter V. Hagner and Brigadier General William S. Harney, commander of the U.S. Army's Department of the West. Both men believed appeasement would hold Missouri in the Union; Harney had deep personal ties to the Missouri elite through his wife's family. Lyon disagreed. His time dealing with the violence of "border ruffians" during the Bleeding Kansas crisis had convinced him that conflict was inevitable and that appeasement was a dangerous error.

  Lyon started building toward confrontation from the moment he arrived. In early March of 1861, working in secret, he began training and arming a pro-Union militia whose ranks were drawn largely from anti-slavery German immigrants and pro-Republican members of the St. Louis chapter of the Wide Awakes. He had a powerful political ally in Congressman Frank Blair, whose brother Montgomery Blair was Abraham Lincoln's Postmaster General. Through that connection Lyon pressed to have Hagner and Harney sidelined. After Harney failed to act on War Department orders to organize Federal militia and faced criticism from Blair, Secretary of War Simon Cameron recalled Harney to Washington.

  On the 21st of April 1861, with the arsenal now under his effective control, Lyon moved fast. The night before, pro-secession members of the Missouri State Militia had seized the smaller Liberty Arsenal. Lyon responded by arming his militia under cover of darkness and shipping the bulk of the arsenal's weapons upriver to Illinois for safekeeping. By the 23rd of April, with the guns secured and his militia formally mustered into the Federal Army, Lyon held the most important military position in the state.

• 4. Camp Jackson and Its Aftermath

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  On the 10th of May 1861, Lyon arrested an entire Missouri State Militia encampment outside St. Louis called Camp Jackson, after discovering Confederate artillery that had been secretly delivered there the previous day. Governor Jackson had publicly described the encampment as a routine training exercise, but the Confederate equipment told a different story: it had been sent to help those forces seize the St. Louis Arsenal by force. The arrest of the militia became known as the Camp Jackson Affair.

  As Lyon marched the captured militiamen through the streets of St. Louis toward the Arsenal, a pro-secession riot broke out. That violence handed Jackson a political opening. He used the disorder to push through a bill giving himself near-dictatorial powers, and he ordered a new Missouri State Guard into existence under the command of Sterling Price. This was a significant shift: Price had been president of the constitutional convention that had just voted against secession, and he had previously resisted Jackson's calls to leave the Union. The Camp Jackson Affair ended Price's neutrality. He and Jackson now secretly requested that Confederate forces move into Missouri.

  Harney returned from Washington on the 12th of May and tried to restore calm through negotiation. On the 16th of May, the mayor of St. Louis asked President Lincoln to relieve Lyon of his Missouri command. Montgomery Blair and Simon Cameron intervened on Lyon's behalf, and Lincoln sided with them. A week later, Harney met with Price and drafted the Price-Harney Truce, which assigned Price's militia authority over order throughout the state while restricting Federal troops to St. Louis. Lyon and Blair found the arrangement unacceptable. Blair held a card Lincoln had quietly given him the previous month: written authorization to dismiss Harney at Blair's own discretion. Blair used it on the 30th of May, making Lyon Harney's successor. Before leaving, Harney protested to the Lincoln administration that unnamed persons "who clamored for blood have not ceased to impugn my motives."

• 5. The Meeting That Ended in a Threat

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  Governor Jackson and General Lyon met for a last attempt at peace in St. Louis on the 11th of June 1861. Jackson brought Price and a staffer named Thomas Snead. Lyon was accompanied by Frank Blair and his own staff officer, Major H. L. Conant. Jackson and Price restated the terms of the Price-Harney Truce and offered Missouri neutrality in exchange for Lyon pulling Federal troops from the state entirely. Lyon interpreted this as secession under a different name, particularly given his suspicion that Jackson and Price had already invited Confederate forces into Missouri.

  After four hours the meeting broke apart in spectacular fashion. Lyon rose from his seat and, pointing at Jackson, Price, and Snead in turn, delivered a speech the source records verbatim: "Rather than concede to the State of Missouri the right to demand that my government shall not enlist troops within her limits, or bring troops into the State whenever it pleases, or move troops at its own will into, out of, or through the State; rather than concede to the State of Missouri for one single instant the right to dictate to my government in any matter, however unimportant, I would see you, and you, and you, and you and every man, woman and child in the State, dead and buried. This means war. In an hour one of my officers will call for you and conduct you out of my lines."

  Jackson and his delegation hurried back to Jefferson City to prepare a defense. The state government and legislature, fearing the speed of Lyon's advance, began evacuating to nearby Boonville, which offered better defensive terrain. Price retreated from the rear, destroying bridges to slow the Federal pursuit. Lyon captured the capital on the 15th of June. When his troops arrived, only two state officers remained in the building, among them the Attorney General.

• 6. Two Governments

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  On the 30th of July 1861, the Missouri State Convention declared all existing state offices vacant, installed Hamilton R. Gamble as military governor, appointed new state officers, declared every seat in the legislature vacant, and called for new elections. The man who had been the duly elected Attorney General, named Knott in the source, was still present in Jefferson City; he was arrested and then removed from office for refusing to swear an oath to the new government.

  Meanwhile, Jackson's government had fled southwest. Confederate troops crossed into Missouri in early August 1861 and linked up with the Missouri State Guard, culminating in the Battle of Wilson's Creek near Springfield in August 1861. By fall, Jackson had set up a provisional capital in the small town of Neosho. On the 28th of October, the legislature took up a secession bill citing "outrages" committed against the state and Lyon's overthrow of its government. The bill passed on the 30th of October and was signed by Jackson on the 31st of October, producing the Neosho Secession Ordinance.

  Acting on that ordinance, the Confederate Congress admitted Missouri as its 12th member state on the 28th of November 1861. Jackson's government named senators to the Confederate Congress. But Union forces had already established permanent control over most of the state by 1862, and the Confederate Missouri government was driven into exile. Jackson himself died in Arkansas not long after. The exile government eventually reconstituted a legislature in Marshall, Texas, where it sat until the end of the war.

• 7. The Mystery of the Quorum

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  Historians have never fully resolved whether Jackson's legislature at Neosho had enough members present to legally conduct business. The vote on secession was delayed until the end of October 1861 specifically because a quorum had been lacking, as surviving letters from earlier that fall confirm. The journals of both legislative chambers, which would have contained roll call records, disappeared during the war. The Senate journal was rediscovered in recent years among artifacts at the Wilson's Creek National Battlefield. The House journal has only recently been found in the collections of the State Historical Society of Missouri.

  The newly recovered House journal is a complete handwritten record of the session from beginning to end, and it never reports a roll call vote. That absence makes it impossible to verify the quorum from the document itself. The journal does, however, record that Speaker of the House John McAfee presided over the session and that Clerk Thomas H. Murry attested to the bill's engrossment. The bill was sponsored in the House by legislator George Graham Vest.

  Some newspaper accounts reported a quorum and even vote totals. The Charleston Mercury of the 25th of November 1861 claimed that 23 members of the Senate and 77 members of the House were present, and that the ordinance passed without a single dissenting voice. Former Confederate Colonel John C. Moore, writing one of the earliest historical accounts of Missouri in the Civil War, also asserted that every procedural requirement had been met. The Columbia Missouri Statesman of the 15th of November 1861 had already reported that a quorum was reached by the 22nd of October.

  The lone legislator the House journal identifies as having voted no on both secession and affiliation with the Confederacy was Isaac N. Shambaugh of DeKalb County. The Columbia Missouri Statesman covered a speech Shambaugh gave to his constituents on the 31st of January 1862, in which he claimed the quorum was fraudulent: at best 39 House members and 10 senators had been present at either Neosho or the nearby town of Cassville, and the names of members who voted in favor had been deliberately excluded from the journals. Shambaugh said he had been the lone no vote on both bills, which matches the House journal's record. The legal question of which Missouri government was the legitimate one, and whether the Neosho proceedings were valid even under state law, remains unresolved.