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The State Historical Society of Missouri Missouri Historical Review Staff Editorial Advisory Board
Gary R. Kremer Lawrence O. Christensen Editor William E. Foley Alan R. Havig Lynn Wolf Gentzler Patrick Huber Associate Editor . . Virginia J. Laas Blaire Leible Garwitz Bonnie Stepenoff Information Specialist Arvarh E- Strickland
EDITORIAL POLICY
The editors of the Missouri Historical Review welcome submission of articles and documents relating to the history of Missouri. Any aspect of Missouri history will be considered for publication in the Review. Manuscripts pertaining to all fields of American history will be considered if the subject matter has significant relevance to the history of Missouri, the Middle West, or the West. Genealogical studies, however, are not accepted because of limited appeal to general readers. Authors should submit two double-spaced copies of their manuscripts. Footnotes, prepared according to The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed., also should be double-spaced and placed at the end of the text. Authors are encouraged to submit manuscripts, preferably in Microsoft Word, on a disk or CD. Two hard copies still are required. Originality of subject, general interest of the article, sources used, interpretation, and style are criteria for acceptance and publication. Manuscript length, exclusive of footnotes, should be between 4,000 and 7,500 words. The editorial staff will not evaluate manuscripts that have been published elsewhere or have been submitted to another publication for consideration. Articles that are accepted for publication become the property of The State Historical Society of Missouri and may not be published elsewhere without permission. The Society does not accept responsibility for statements of fact or opinion made by the authors. Articles published in the Missouri Historical Review are abstracted and indexed in America: History and Life, Writings on American History, The Western Historical Quarterly, and The Journal of American History. Manuscripts submitted to the Missouri Historical Review should be addressed to Dr. Gary R. Kremer, Editor, Missouri Historical Review, The State Historical Society of Missouri, 1020 Lowry Street, Columbia, MO 65201-7298.
Cover Description: The cover illustration is a detail from an 1853 map of St. Louis that shows the city "at the time of its first major geographic expansion. " Included in that expansion was properly owned and developed by James H. Lucas. Lucas Marketplace and Lucas Place, two developments that bore his name, are in the center of the map. Lucas s influence on St. Louis is the subject of Joseph C. Thurman s article, "James H. Lucas: Eminent St. Louis Entrepreneur and Philanthropist, " which begins on page 129. The map from which the detail is taken is a part of the Society's current Art Gallery exhibit, The Stories They Tell: Understanding Missouri History through Maps. The exhibit includes over thirty maps, dated from 1818 to 2006, from the Society's collection. [Map of the City of St. Louis, Mo. and Vicinity. 1853. J. H. Fisher, Engraving]
The Missouri Historical Review (ISSN 0026-6582) is published quarterly by The State Historical Society of Missouri, 1020 Lowry Street, Columbia, MO 65201-7298. Receipt of the Missouri Historical Review is a benefit of membership in The State Historical Society of Missouri. Periodicals postage is paid at Columbia, Missouri. Postmaster: Send address changes to Missouri Historical Review, 1020 Lowry Street, Columbia, MO 65201-7298.
Copyright © The State Historical Society of Missouri, 2007 Missouri Historical Review
Vol. 101, No. 3 • April 2007
Contents
James H. Lucas: 129 Eminent St. Louis Entrepreneur and Philanthropist By Joseph C. Thurman
Hickory Wind: 146 The Role of Personality and the Press in Andrew Jackson's Bank War in Missouri, 1831-1837 By Stephen Campbell
William J. Thompkins: 168 African American Physician, Politician, and Publisher By Gary R. Kremer
From the Stacks: 183 Western Historical Manuscript Collection-Columbia The National Women and Media Collection By Jennifer Lukomski
Book Reviews 187 William J. Spillman and the Birth of Agricultural Economics. By Laurie Winn Carlson. Reviewed by Michael L. Cook
Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South. By LeeAnn Whites. Reviewed by Virginia J. Laas
Recasting a Craft: St. Louis Typefounders Respond to Industrialization. By Robert A. Mullen. Reviewed by Rosemary Feurer
Book Notes 191 A History of Pierce City through Post Cards, Photographs, Papers, & People. By David H. Jones. Book Notes (continued) Evolution of the Missouri Militia into the National Guard of Missouri, 1804-1919. By John Glendower Westover.
Mark Twain in Paradise: His Voyages to Bermuda. By Donald Hoffmann.
Monroe County, Missouri: Then & Now, 1831-2006. By the Monroe County Historical Society.
Harry S. Truman and the Cold War Revisionists. By Robert H. Ferrell.
An Opportunity Lost: The Truman Administration and the Farm Policy Debate. By Virgil W. Dean.
The Essence of Liberty: Free Black Women during the Slave Era. ByWilmaKing.
Graduate Theses Relating to Missouri History, 2006 192
News in Brief 194 James H. Lucas: Eminent St. Louis Entrepreneur and Philanthropist
JOSEPH C. THURMAN*
Throughout its long and storied history, the city of St. Louis has been associated with several prominent families. Among these was the Lucas family, whose exploits touched virtually every facet of the city's early life, from politics and banking to real estate and the law. For example, John Baptiste Charles Lucas was a well-known land developer, banker, and judge; son Robert was an army officer; sons William and Charles were both lawyers; and son Adrian was a farmer. Despite the impressive array and scope of these accomplishments, it was John's youngest son, James, who engaged in the widest variety of business and cultural affairs. As an entrepreneur and philanthropist, James H. Lucas helped transform the physical landscape of St. Louis, was a leader in its private banking industry, played a seminal role in instituting its first railroad, and made numerous contributions to its religious and cultural growth, thereby distinguishing himself as one of the city's most noteworthy nineteenth-century public figures. James Lucas was born in 1800 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where his father had settled after emigrating from Normandy, France, in 1784. The elder Lucas worked in this area for a number of years as a land speculator, judge, and politician, serving in the Pennsylvania legislature from 1792 until 1798 and as a U.S. congressman from 1803 until 1805. Immediately prior to John's congressional term, Thomas Jefferson sent him on a surreptitious journey to the St. Louis area to ascertain public sentiment about a possible purchase of the region by the United States.1 Subsequent to the completion of the purchase, in March 1805, Jefferson, evidently pleased with John's previous work, appointed him to the position of "judge of the Territory of Louisiana."2 On June 7, 1805, the Lucas family began a long and tedious journey down James H. Lucas the Ohio River on what daughter Anne later described as a "flat boat" that [SHSMO 027856]
*Joseph C. Thurman is an adjunct professor of history at Jefferson College in Hillsboro, Missouri, and at Lewis and Clark Community College in Godfrey, Illinois. He received a BA degree and an MA degree from the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
129 130 Missouri Historical Review
contained only "a little cabin fixed up in the after part" for shelter, with the remainder left "exposed to the weather."3 Upon reaching Cairo, Illinois, the family bought several horses for the trip north to Cape Girardeau, where they boarded a keelboat that carried them to St. Louis. During his first years in St. Louis, John came to be known as an intelligent businessman who displayed a deep dedication to his new home. As James Neal Primm states in Lion of the Valley, John "presented himself as a wise investor who believed in the future of St. Louis."4 By 1811, John's landholdings were quite extensive, and he was building a permanent home when his wife, Anne, died, leaving him to raise six children by himself. James remained in St. Louis until 1814, when his father sent him away to school. Over the next four years, the younger Lucas attended three schools and maintained only sporadic contact with his father. James first attended Jefferson College in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, where he quickly showed signs of intellectual promise. For example, in an April 12, 1815, letter to In St. Louis, John B. his father, the fifteen-year-old displayed an impressive C. Lucas developed a knowledge of world affairs. He wrote of events in England, Prussia, and reputation as an astute France and expounded on his studies of Latin and Greek. James also conveyed businessman who considerable frustration with his father's lack of attention. He exclaimed, was also politically "Were it not for the rest of the family I would often times not know whether incorruptible. [SHSMO 012907-2] you are dead or alive ... you must certainly know this is very painfull [sic] to a son ... were I not to write to you I could not expect to be written to by you but it is not so, for I have written no less than 8 letters to you since seven months." Correspondence between father and son remained infrequent, despite James's irritation, as events in St. Louis dominated John's time and attention.5 Although often preoccupied with business affairs, John was a man of strong religious convictions and believed James's spiritual growth to be as important as his intellectual growth. To that end, in 1816 he sent James to St. Thomas College in Springfield, Kentucky, where the boy continued to grow as a scholar and began to better understand and embrace the tenets of his family's Catholic faith. In July 1817, T. Wilson, a school administrator, wrote that James was making great strides toward becoming "a good Christian." He explained that James "frequently comes to mass on common days tho [sic] under no compulsion so to do" and that the young man understood the "motives of piety . . . better than any of his companions." He added that James was also developing "a great talent for public speaking."6 Regardless of James's intellectual and religious maturation while in Kentucky, and for reasons that remain unclear, John transferred his youngest son to Litchfield, Connecticut, where he spent less than a year. During this time, the boy's life underwent significant change. In September 1817 he learned that his brother Charles had been killed in a duel with Thomas Hart Benton. This was the second of his brothers to precede him in death; Robert had died in the army in 1813.7 Shortly after learning of his brother's demise, James dropped out of school. He remained in the Northeast, where he studied law with Elisha James H. Lucas • 131
Williams, one of New York's most respected lawyers, and taught French. Nonetheless, the young man soon grew restless, and sometime during the first months of 1818, he returned to St. Louis, where he briefly toiled in anonymity before embarking upon a journey to Arkansas. Along with two companions, he made the trip to Montgomery Point, then stopped in Little Rock before settling at Arkansas Post. What motivated James's choice of destinations remains uncertain; however, he stayed in Arkansas for a number of years.8 To support himself, James taught school and worked for the Arkansas Gazette for a brief period. He also continued his study of the law. William Russell, a family friend, wrote to John in 1820 to inform him of his son's condition. He stated, "Your son James is teaching school. Is in very good health—Boards at a private (French) Gentleman's house—keeps as good company as any in the place" and "has taken some small credits from some of the merchants . . . Entirely on his own credit and account."9 Notwithstanding Russell's appraisal and James's employment, John occasionally loaned his son financial support during the young man's first years in Arkansas.10 By 1824, however, James had earned his law license and was supporting himself by riding the circuit in Phillips, Arkansas, Chicot, and Pulaski counties.11 Governor James Miller eventually appointed James to the position of probate judge. In 1832, James married Mary E. Desruisseaux, a native of Cahokia, Illinois, and shortly thereafter, he purchased a cotton plantation in South Bend, Arkansas, from his wife's family. He owned six slaves worth an estimated seven thousand dollars and was earning approximately one thousand dollars per year from his law practice. By the late 1830s, Lucas had accrued enough wealth from his law practice and plantation that he could consider "trying to get clear of law" to focus solely on farming.12 The 1830s were a decade of tragedy for the Lucas family. In 1831, James's brother Adrian died after falling through the ice on Loutre Lake in Howard County, Missouri, and his brother William committed suicide in 1837. As a result, John summoned James, with whom he had maintained periodic contact during the previous few years, to St. Louis in July 1837, as he was quite distraught and his health was failing. In a letter to James, he wrote, "I think I should experience much relief if you could come to see me; you might detain such a length of time as you could spare without materially interfering with home concerns."13 James then returned to the city for the first time in more than a decade and remained for several weeks. He returned in September 1837, at which time John turned over a portion of his estate consisting of fifty-one acres that included "a brick house" located "about one-half mile from the city of St. Louis." John's health continued to deteriorate, prompting James to begin selling his property in Arkansas as it became apparent that his return to St. Louis would become permanent. By May 1839, John's health had worsened to the point that James was given power of attorney to act on his father's behalf in all business matters.14 On August 17, 1842, John Baptiste Charles Lucas died. He left half of his "estate property and effects" to James, with the rest divided among his daughter, Anne; her husband, Wilson Hunt; and their children. James's portion included approximately 500 acres of land situated throughout St. Louis and 132 Missouri Historical Review
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77?/s detail from an 1853 an additional 640 acres, known as Normandy after the region in France where map depicts St. Louis at John had been born, located a few miles outside of the city.15 From this point the time of its first major forward, James immersed himself in the multitudinous business and cultural geographic expansion. affairs of his childhood home. The arrows indicate the location of Lucas Place To begin with, James left an indelible mark on the city as a land developer, and Lucas Market. just as his father had done. From the time of his arrival in 1805, John had [SHSMO 751-F534] spent considerable time and effort acquiring and subdividing land, which created thousands of dollars in profit. He built his first subdivision about 1815 James H. Lucas 133 when he and Auguste Chouteau created the Chouteau-Lucas addition to take advantage of St. Louis's swelling population following the end of the War of 1812. This subdivision was bounded on the north by St. Charles, the south by Cerre, the east by Fourth Street, and the west by Seventh Street. Within three years, John had sold more than twenty lots on this land for nearly ten thousand dollars, and Primm estimates that Lucas's profit from land sales exceeded 1,200 percent by the mid-1820s.16 Following this precedent, James Lucas and his sister, Anne, opened their first addition on February 7, 1843. It consisted of eighteen blocks and was bounded on the west by Eleventh Street, the east by Ninth Street, the north by St. Charles, and the south by Market. Another addition consisting of fifteen blocks, running from Twelfth Street to Seventeenth Street and bounded by Olive on the north and Market on the south, opened on January 18, 1849. Like his father, James amassed a considerable fortune through developing and selling lots. Furthermore, Glen Holt, author of "The Shaping of St. Louis, 1763-1860," maintains that these additions were significant because they "gave St. Louisans residential and business location options far exceeding population needs."17 In addition to developing subdivisions, Lucas also established one of the city's largest public markets. On August 8, 1845, a city ordinance was approved allowing "for the establishment of the Lucas Market" on Twelfth Street between Olive and Chestnut. Construction began early in 1846 and quickly caught the public's attention. An article in a March issue of the St. Louis Republican noted that the new market was "a handsome edifice, built of most durable materials in every part. . . . Everything about it. . . betokens the most liberal spirit, and desire to secure permanent prosperity to that section of the city."18 Lucas Market officially opened on Monday, August 10, 1846, and the Republican praised the finished product as "one of the finest" markets in the city Lucas Market was the with its "ample space" for meat and vegetable markets and its central location leading trading center in that could serve "a large population . . . more conveniently . . . than any other St. Louis for over forty market." Thereafter, countless "butchers, fishmongers and truck gardeners" years. flocked to the market to sell their "meats, fish, vegetables and other country [SHSMO 025890] produce" while others, such as Ulysses S. Grant, sold wood and hay there.19 In September 1864 an ordinance was passed allowing for the purchase of the market by the city for the sum of $60,431.20 Despite the change in ownership, Lucas's market continued to fulfill its original purpose until it closed in 1882 to accommodate modifications to Twelfth Street. While Lucas's subdivisions and market undoubtedly garnered some measure of public notoriety for him, it was Lucas Place, created in 1851, that proved to be his defining accomplishment as a land developer. Holt argues that Lucas Place resulted from a "residential and 134 • Missouri Historical Review
business dispersal away from the old city center" during the 1840s. For many of the city's elite, including Lucas, this proved to be a concern. Fear of declining degrees of separation between the residential and the business spheres of the city formed the basis of this concern. Lucas believed the most effective deterrent to this encroachment would be the creation of a private neighborhood that would help provide some measure of privacy and tranquility. As Rick Rosen, author of "St. Louis, Missouri, Lucas Place was the 1850-1865: The Rise of Lucas Place and the Transformation of the City from residence of choice for Public Spaces to Private Places," contends, Lucas's vision was to mean that St. Louis s wealthiest citizens. It was located the wealthy citizen could seize control—through private initiative and on what is now Locust agreement—of all the factors that so threatened domestic tranquility and Street. which had so overwhelmed collective municipal efforts. At Lucas Place, [Lossing-Barret, Missouri Historical Society, St. the perceived pathology of the riverfront—with its transients, its low Louis] life, its immigrants, and its disease, as well as the dangers inherent in the technology of river transportation—could all be left behind for a new or der, an order which was to be built from scratch under the guiding hand of James Lucas.21
Lucas laid out his enclave between Thirteenth and Jefferson streets. Unlike other similar developments such as Summit Square or Carr Square that were owned by the city, James owned all of the property in Lucas Place, and every deed specified in explicit detail how the land was to be used. For example, no dwellings were permitted to "be nearer than twenty-five feet to the front line" of the property. Residents could not erect "any Family Grocery, Apothecary Shop, Coffee House, Eating House, Restaurant, Dram Shop, Theatre, Circus or any other business of amusement, or of the bargain or sale of any description of goods, wares, or merchandise." Any violation of these rules would result in the "immediate and absolute forfeiture and reversion of the said premises, and the purchase money thereof, and all buildings and improvements thereon" to Lucas. Interestingly, any of these restrictions could be removed after thirty years if a majority of the property owners agreed to do so.22 Once the construction of houses began, their architectural styles proved to be quite diverse, and the lot widths ranged anywhere from 35 feet to 110 feet. Mary Bartley, author of St. Louis Lost, contends that this "mixture of styles and spaces that lacked coherence" nonetheless "influenced the standards used later in private places and other subdivisions" such as Vandeventer Place.23 James H. Lucas • 135
Besides specifying acceptable placement of buildings and usage of properties within his enclave, Lucas also addressed the potential problems posed by adjacent properties. He established a physical barrier between Lucas Place and the encroaching city. To accomplish this, he sold a parcel of land bordered on the north by Locust, on the south by Olive, on the east by Thirteenth Street, and on the west by Fourteenth Street to the city for $95,000. In addition, he gave the city the adjacent block to the north. Lucas donated this parcel to help provide a barrier to Lucas Place and because he was "desirous of contributing to the ornament and health of the city of St. Louis." Therefore, he required that the land "shall forever be maintained as a public promenade for the inhabitants of the city."24 These two parcels of land later came to be known as Missouri Park. Within a few years of Lucas Place's creation, the list of its residents read like a who's who of St. Louis. The group included Robert Campbell, a prominent fur trader, banker, and real estate developer; Trusten Polk, a lawyer, and later Missouri governor and United States senator; Thomas Allen, who rose to prominence with the Pacific Railroad; and General William Harney, who had fought in the Mexican War. Despite the beautiful homes and renowned inhabitants of Lucas Place, the city government convinced Lucas's heirs in the late 1880s to allow the agreement that had heretofore dictated the use of Missouri Park to be broken.25 In effect, this destroyed the one barrier that had long protected the sanctity of Lucas's creation and cleared the way for its use for commercial ventures. Today, the Robert Campbell house stands as the sole remaining edifice from what was once St. Louis's preeminent private place. The name James Lucas also became synonymous with the city's private banking industry. When he started his banking career in the 1840s, the atmosphere surrounding St. Louis banks was quite volatile. This instability dated to 1829 when the city became home to a branch of the Bank of the United States. Primm posits that when this bank was created, it provided St. Louis with "a sound currency and funds for business operations and expansion."26 In 1832, however, President Andrew Jackson blocked the rechartering of the bank, and in 1835 the St. Louis branch closed its doors. The Cincinnati Commercial Agency quickly moved in as a replacement, but before long this out-of-state bank's practices made it the target of many people's indignation. At the core of most everyone's dissatisfaction was the fact that Illinois retailers and wholesalers purchased farming supplies and manufactured products in St. Louis with notes from the state bank of Illinois, which the Cincinnati Commercial Agency readily accepted. This influx of Illinois notes into an out-of-state bank that tunneled most of its profits back to Cincinnati, coupled with the fact that Missouri lacked a specie-paying state bank, caused consternation among many Missourians, who increasingly felt their banking system was at the mercy of the business interests of other states. As Lilburn Boggs, a candidate for governor in 1836, pointed out, "Missouri is the only state in the Union that has not one or more Banks. We must then . . . establish one of our own: otherwise we shall have all the evils of Banking without any of its advantages." In response to this turmoil, the Bank of the State of Missouri was chartered in 1837. Its opening coincided with a national 136 Missouri Historical Review
financial panic, however, and thereby served only to exacerbate St. Louis's already shaky financial situation.27 This unstable economic atmosphere spelled opportunity for James Lucas. In 1839 the St. Louis Gas Light Company was incorporated, with Lucas serving as president. Although it was originally intended to supply the city with lights, only a meager $40,000 was set aside for that purpose. Instead, the gas light company assumed an active role in the field of private banking. Its primary function as a bank was to receive deposits and to make loans; however, it was unable to issue currency. More importantly, the gas light company, along with several insurance companies, served to keep the Illinois bank notes in circulation, much to the dismay of many St. Louisans. Although sentiments about the company's banking operations varied, it nonetheless managed to expand, however briefly, the city's banking options. Regardless, these new banks were unable to solve the city's banking woes, and the St. Louis Gas Light Company gave up the banking business in 1842 and focused on providing lights for the city.28 Lucas's banking career did not end with the gas light company. He next served as a director of the Boatman's Savings Institution, which was chartered in 1847. While this was a significant and influential position, it was the creation of the private bank Lucas, Simonds, and Company in 1851 through which he ultimately became a prominent figure in the St. Louis banking world. Designed to "sell exchange . . . collect and transmit money and transact all business pertaining to Banking," Lucas's bank quickly rose to prominence throughout the St. Louis region and beyond.29 Much of his bank's initial success came through the flurry of banking activity that surrounded the California gold rush, which began in 1848 and prompted Lucas to open a branch bank in San Francisco in 1853. William T. Sherman (who later gained notoriety in the Civil War) and Henry S. Turner oversaw this operation, known as Lucas, Turner, and Company. Within weeks of opening, the branch enjoyed considerable success. Turner wrote to Lucas in July 1853 that "business matters have taken a wonderful start in San Francisco," with deposits "upwards of $126,000" and a total "balance on the books" of "$200,000."30 Boatman s Savings Financial panic in January 1855 soon Institution, now threatened this prosperity, and economic catastrophe became a distinct Boatman s Bancshares, possibility for Lucas's bank. Until this point, the St. Louis banking firm is the oldest bank west of of Page and Bacon had been his biggest competitor, both at home and in the Mississippi River. San Francisco. As St. Louis's largest private bank, Page and Bacon was [SHSMO 027854] heavily engaged in financing railroads and real estate. In 1854 banks in New York brought pressure to bear on their debtors, largely out of concern for skyrocketing railroad debt. This left Page and Bacon in a vulnerable position James H. Lucas 137 and, more importantly, contributed to an outbreak of runs on St. Louis banks, including Lucas, Simonds, and Company, on January 13, 1855.31 As reported in the St. Louis Republican the following day, the run "commenced upon Lucas and Simonds and . . . continued unintermittedly [sic] . . . until 4 o'clock." Three days after the run, the Republican published a more detailed account of its impact:
On Saturday last, so great was the rush to their counters, that they paid out to depositors the large amount of $260,000. On Monday, however, so completely was confidence restored, that the amount of money depos ited with them exceeded the amount withdrawn by more than $56,000. Notwithstanding the immense personal wealth of the senior partner, the firm of Lucas and Simonds have been most prudent and discreet in the management of their widely extended business; and when the crisis of Saturday came upon them, they showed themselves amply prepared for the emergency, though it was sudden.32
To this account, the St. Louis Daily Missouri Democrat added, "A dense crowd was at the counter . . . all day and as fast as tellers could perform their duties—coin, was exchanged for checks," yet "none fettered" and "none trembled" as Lucas's employees "felt conscious" of their bank's "strength."33 In the end, according to the St. Louis Republican, this run, which could have destroyed Lucas's bank, "only increased public confidence in their strength and solvency." This confidence was reflected in the fact that ten city businessmen pledged their own property to stop the run once it had started. Moreover, the run brought an end to Page and Bacon, thereby leaving Lucas and Simonds as the largest private banking firm in the city Lucas's partner, John Simonds, later claimed that the bank added "66 new customers, mostly the best houses in the city," as a result of the run. He added, "Without vanit) I think Lucas and Simonds are now the Bankers of the West, as Lucas and Turner may soon be of California."34 As confidence was restored in Lucas and Simonds, business affairs soon returned to normal, and before long they were receiving huge shipments of gold on a relatively regular basis. For example, on June 11,1855, they received $85,000 in gold from California; on July 13 they received John Simonds was a an additional $169,000; and on July 24 they received $232,000.35 riverboat captain before Business took another downturn in early 1857 when the nation succumbed working in the banking to widespread financial panic. As a result, beginning on September 28, industry. St. Louis banks experienced another run on specie that proved to be more [SHSMO 98-00048] devastating than the first. Lucas and Simonds was hit especially hard; by the end of the day, the firm had doled out in excess of one million dollars. Although it did not emerge unscathed from this run, Lucas's bank nonetheless again proved itself to be among the strongest financial institutions in the city, as reflected in an article in the Republican: 138 • Missouri Historical Review
The seekers after gold were early on the street in front of the bank ing house of James H. Lucas & Co, where they were soon joined by a number of idlers and curiosity-mongers. Those who had deposits in this house were not overmodest in making demand for specie, and from 9 to nearly 11 o'clock the tellers were busily employed in paying checks. Nobody was sent away without having his wishes gratified . . . and some of them, when they had received the gold, appeared greatly at a loss to know what to do with it.36
As with the first run, a number of prominent businessmen came forth and professed their confidence in the bank. There was, however, no accompanying guarantee of property, and Lucas and Simonds was forced to liquidate on October 5. To many St. Louisans, the bank's closing came as a shock. The Republican noted, "There was not a man, in all probability who did not believe that his money was perfectly safe with them, but the great majority of depositors, either to answer the importunities of friends or to be sure that the gold was within their clutches, resolved to check it out and it was done."37 According to Timothy Hubbard and Lewis Davids, authors of Banking in Mid-America: A History of Missouri s Banks, in the wake of his bank's demise, Lucas did not wish to "embarrass his friends" who had publicly pledged their confidence in his institution, and therefore, he "assumed personally all the obligations of his bank." While he did pressure those who owed him money to pay, he never took legal action against them. To his creditors, Lucas offered 10 percent interest payments per annum on his own debts until they were paid off. In the end, this kind deed cost him approximately $500,000.38 Despite this unfortunate turn of events, Lucas continued his banking career. In 1869 he established Lucas Bank, which operated until 1879, when it merged with Mechanics Bank, which later became part of First National Bank. As a financier, Lucas experienced much success as well as disappointing failure, but he nonetheless managed to create one of St. Louis's most prosperous and stable banking houses during a period when the city's banking world was plagued with uncertainty and acrimony. Many St. Louisans respected his capacity as a competent banker, as evidenced by their public pledges of support that buttressed his bank during the leanest of financial times and by the shock displayed by average citizens when his bank finally failed. Along with his careers as a land developer and banker, Lucas was also heavily involved with the railroads. The dream of building a railroad through St. Louis dated to the 1830s. Most of the early discussions and planning for a railroad were impotent because the state's precarious financial position guaranteed that construction funding would not be forthcoming. By the late 1840s, however, victory in the Mexican War, which led to the addition of vast expanses of western land into the United States, and the discovery of gold in California helped transform plans for a western railroad from a pipe dream into a viable reality.39 With railroad fever running high, Thomas Hart Benton made a proposal in the Senate for a railroad that would run from St. Louis to San Francisco. Shortly thereafter, on February 20, 1849, a public meeting was held, and attendees adopted a resolution that called for the Missouri legislature to charter a railroad that would traverse the state from St. Louis to its western James H.Lucas • 139 boundary. In response, the legislature approved "An act to incorporate the Pacific Railroad" on March 12, and Lucas was named as a charter member of the railroad's board of directors. Specifically, the act of incorporation stated that the railroad was to run "from the city of St. Louis to the city of Jefferson, and thence to some point in the western line of Van Buren county . . . with a view that the same may be hereafter continued westwardly to the Pacific Ocean." Advocates of this new railroad then decided to hold a convention composed "of Delegates from all the towns, cities, Counties, and States, which will join in such a movement, for the purpose of taking into consideration the best and speediest plan of railroad and telegraphic Connexion with California and Oregon and the Pacific coast, said Convention to be held in the city of St. Louis on the third Monday of October next."40 The convention began on October 15, 1849, at 12:30 p.m., and James Lucas, along with dozens of other delegates, took his seat in the rotunda of the courthouse. Although the primary goal of the convention was to determine the railroad's route, delegates made little progress toward that end. They resolved that it was "the duty of the Congress of the United States to make immediate provision for the construction of a great trunk Railroad to the Pacific Ocean in California" from an as yet undetermined "point in the Mississippi valley."41 The delegates also decided to hold a convention in Memphis, to which Lucas was named a delegate as well. The Memphis convention added fuel to the growing debate over the location of the railroad's eastern terminus. Despite the heated and growing disagreement, plans moved forward. On January 31, 1850, the Pacific Railroad Company's incorporators held a meeting, and Lucas was appointed to a committee charged with writing a memorial to Congress "praying for a donation of... sections of land along the route, for the construction of the proposed road." He was also appointed to a committee, along with James Yeatman and J. B. Brant, other charter members of the railroad's board of directors, that was to open subscription books for the new railroad at the Merchants' Exchange on February 4, where they would remain for six days. Before the meeting adjourned, Lucas became the first person to subscribe stock—333 shares at a cost of $33,000. Although Lucas eventually sought to reap profits from the railroad, Primm argues that this early monetary pledge, along with those of countless other private subscribers made over the coming days, was initially "motivated by civic duty and indirect benefits rather than direct profit, since it was assumed that no dividends would be paid for many years."42 In addition to private subscriptions, the railroad also received funds from the state and St. Louis County. In March 1850 the stockholders named James as the company's vice president, a position he held for two years, along with his spot on the board of directors. In February 1851 the State of Missouri provided an additional two million dollar loan to the Pacific Railroad, and on July 4,1851, formal groundbreaking ceremonies were held. According to the Republican, "It was truly a great gala-day, and, for a time, the business, matter-of-fact character of the city was converted to one of unbounded gayety and rejoicing." The celebration began just before nine o'clock in the morning with a parade. Lucas rode in a procession of carriages that carried the day's speakers and the company's officers. According to Edward Bates, once the parade reached Chouteau's Pond, one of the featured speakers, Mayor Luther M. Kennett, along with 140 • Missouri Historical Review
Thomas Allen and Lucas, turned over the first three shovels of dirt before a crowd between "15 or 20,000" strong.43 On August 20, 1852, the first locomotive arrived in the city, and on December 9, the Pacific Railroad Company made its first run—to Cheltenham. According to the Republican, "Yesterday, as had been announced, the first Passenger Cars were placed upon the Pacific Railroad, and it must be chronicled as the first event of the kind occurring on the west bank of the Mississippi. It was a new epoch in the history of our State, and one which will be recollected by, and treasured upon the memories of the young and old, for many years to come." Lucas, who had done so much to make this run possible, was one of several members of the railroad company who commemorated the event. Upon reaching Cheltenham, he gave a speech amid what the Republican described as tremendous "feelings of gladness and rejoicing that the work had been so auspiciously commenced and thus far successfully carried out."44 Unfortunately, this success did not last. The Pacific Railroad soon found itself bogged down by overwhelming costs that led to the further infusion of state and county funds. Aside from financial concerns, the railroad suffered a major setback in November 1855 during its first excursion to Jefferson City. Shortly after passing through Hermann, the train crossed the bridge at Gasconade, which collapsed, killing more than thirty people and destroying a large portion of the company's equipment.45 The railroad suffered more reverses during the Civil War as construction lagged and bridges, depots, and other key components of its infrastructure were damaged. Confederate General Sterling Price's raid in 1864 inflicted the greatest physical damage, costing the railroad "not less than a million of dollars," and "put a stop to all operations in construction."46 In spite of these problems, the railroad finally stretched to Kansas City by September 1865. Lucas played an instrumental role during this tumultuous period when he, along with James Harrison, another member of the railroad's board of directors, loaned the railroad nearly $300,000 when it stood on the verge of bankruptcy. Exacerbating this desperate financial situation was the fact that the state threatened to take control of the railroad as a result of monies owed on past loans. To prevent such a calamity, Lucas was appointed chairman, in 1868, of a "finance committee" created to find a means by which the railroad could purchase the state's lien. Lucas and the committee successfully carried out their assigned task, procuring the state's lien for five million dollars on March 31, 1868. Their success was short lived. Hudson Bridge, a company director, soon accused Lucas and several others of resorting to bribery to carry out the purchase. Despite the negative publicity surrounding such accusations, Lucas was elected president of the railroad the next year. Bridge then charged the finance committee with mismanaging the sale of bonds that were to be used to pay off the railroad's debt to the state.47 In the end, despite Bridge's continued accusations of misconduct, no charges were leveled against Lucas, and shortly thereafter, his association with the Pacific came to an end largely due to health concerns. Despite the turbulent nature of his final years with the railroad, James Lucas made several significant contributions to the line, financial and otherwise, that helped create the railroad as well as keep it running through trying times. Moreover, the Pacific Railroad Company was not the only James H. Lucas 141
•%J ,,,«,, f^''Wm%!~M^^^^S-
^ I*1 ''•*•' one with which Lucas was involved during these years. He contributed An artist s rendering of financially to the Hannibal and St. Joseph and served as a featured speaker at the Gasconade Bridge its groundbreaking ceremony in November 1851. He helped organize the Iron disaster depicts this Mountain Railroad that same year and served as one of its first directors. tragedy, where the Although many St. Louisans knew Lucas as an astute entrepreneur, it train s locomotive and twelve of the thirteen is important to note that he also had a reputation as one of the city's leading attached cars plunged philanthropists. For example, he made several contributions to the Catholic into the Gasconade River. Church in St. Louis during a crucial period in its development. When [SHSMO 026219] Archbishop Peter Kenrick first arrived in December 1841, the diocese was in desperate financial straits. As a result, Kenrick dedicated his efforts to eradicating the church's debt. To accomplish this, he immersed himself in the local real estate market, where he proved to be a shrewd businessman, continually buying and selling plots of land to build new church facilities and to strengthen the church's coffers.48 A devout Catholic, Lucas understood the church's precarious financial position and on more than one occasion, according to Archbishop Kenrick, helped provide "for the spiritual wants of the growing population of the city" through his donations. For instance, on October 1, 1846, Lucas donated to the church block 498, which was bounded on the south by Chestnut and on the west by Sixteenth Street. He specified that the land be "used for the purposes of a church and public school or for either or both such purposes." The following year, on July 15, he donated block 272 to the St. Vincent Free School of St. Louis "to have and to hold ... so long as a public free school shall be kept and maintained thereon."49 Furthermore, Lucas was an incorporator and financial supporter of the Catholic Protectorate and Industrial School of St. Louis, which was created in 1871 and still exists today. When originally incorporated, this organization existed as a "protectorate for young girls and children of the female sex exposed to danger either from a disposition to vice in themselves, incompetency of parents and guardians, or evil surroundings." In addition, it sought to "train them in religion and morality, and to afford them a good common school education and to put them in possession of the means of earning a livelihood." 142 Missouri Historical Review
Lucas also donated the first thousand dollars when the Alexian Brothers needed twenty-five thousand dollars to purchase a building and lot for a hospital in 1869.50 Lucas's philanthropic activities extended beyond the church. For example, the same year that Archbishop Kenrick arrived in St. Louis, an organization known as the St. Louis Fireman's Fund Association was created to offer "relief of the distressed, the burial of the dead, the protection of the widow and the education of the orphan." On July 2, 1844, Lucas donated two thousand dollars to this organization "for the relief of disabled Firemen of St. Louis." On October 8, 1850, he conveyed block 492 to the St. Louis Laclede Fire Company. This donation stemmed from his "desire to promote the usefulness of the Laclede Fire Company of St. Louis," and he specified that the land be used "as a location for an Engine House" or for any other "usual purpose of a fire company."51 Lucas's donation may have been motivated by the fact that the city had suffered a great fire in 1849 that had destroyed numerous steamboats and countless city blocks. Lucas played a pivotal role in instituting the Missouri Born in Dublin, Ireland, Historical Society. Along with numerous other St. Louisans, Archbishop Peter Kenrick he signed his name to an advertisement that ran in the July 11, 1866, St. Louis became the first Catholic Missouri Republican: "Fellow-Citizens—The undersigned old residents of St. archbishop in the Louis, who have spent the flower of our lives in advancing its interests, and Midwest. still bear a conspicuous part in promoting its future greatness . . . propose to [SHSMO 011643] celebrate the centenary anniversary of that event [the first land grant in St. Louis] by meeting ... at the Court House ... and forming a Historical Society worthy of our age." The meeting began at two o'clock on August 11, and Lucas was unanimously appointed chairman of the proceedings. According to the Missouri Republican, after gratefully accepting the appointment, Lucas told the assembled crowd that their purpose should be to form an organization that would save "from oblivion the early history of our city and State."52 Prior to adjourning, those in attendance unanimously elected Lucas the first president of the new Missouri Historical Society, a position he would hold until 1868. In addition to serving as its president, he and his wife donated a parcel of land bounded by Locust on the north, Olive on the south, Twelfth Street on the east, and Thirteenth Street on the west "in consideration of their desire to promote the interests of the society. Although Lucas intended this lot to be used for a permanent home for the society, it proved to be too small and was never used for that purpose.53 James Lucas suffered a stroke in November 1869. Soon thereafter, his declining health forced him from the public eye, but the public did not soon forget him. In May 1870 a group of St. Louis's most distinguished citizens, including Mayor Nathan Cole and Judge Wilson Primm, met at the Lucas household to dedicate a bust created in James's honor. Keynote speaker John H. O'Neill, a wealthy capitalist, said, in part, "Mr. Lucas has seen St. Louis grow from a small and comparatively insignificant French village, to the proportions of a large city and... has watched with interest, and furthered with his intellect and his purse her progress and advancement in wealth, enterprise and power." James H. Lucas • 143
He added that Lucas "was one of the earliest and most effective advocates of a . . . railroad, . . . has, for a number of years been connected . . . with many of the most important moneyed institutions of the city," and "has liberally contributed toward the erection of churches and charitable institutions all over" St. Louis. The Lucases gratefully accepted the bust, and a few days later, James left for Europe to try and recuperate from his stroke.54 Unfortunately, Lucas never recovered, and he died on November 9, 1873. He left behind a considerable fortune, including stock in numerous insurance companies, banks, and railroads valued at $364,000. He owned 2,020 acres of land within the county as well as 62 dwellings within the city, from which he earned an annual rent of $103,962.23. And finally, he owned 5,203 acres in Iron County and 320 acres in Reynolds County.55 By the time of his death, Lucas had garnered an impressive fortune and considerable public notoriety as a real estate developer, banker, railroad magnate, and philanthropist. Ultimately, his fortune was divided between his wife and children, but many of the enterprises with which he was associated, such as Lucas Market, Lucas Place, Lucas Bank, the Pacific Railroad, the Catholic Protectorate, and the Missouri Historical Society, continued to play a role in the lives of many St. Louisans. Together, James Lucas's public stature, wealth, and multitudinous business and cultural endeavors secured for him a position as one of St. Louis's most noteworthy nineteenth-century citizens.
NOTES Papers; "Commerce Sweeps Away Most Noted of Old Mansions in Downtown St. Louis," St. Louis Post- 1. "James H. Lucas," Inland Magazine, February Dispatch, 11 May 1919. 1875, 182; "Coming Restoration of Public Park Given St. Louis by James H. Lucas Recalls History 8. William Lucas, "Biographical Sketch"; "James of a Celebrated Family," St. Louis Globe-Democrat, H. Lucas," 181-184; Anne Lucas Hunt, recollections; 24 March 1907; John Devoy, A History of the City of "Commerce Sweeps Away." St. Louis and Vicinity: From the Earliest Times to the 9. Russell to John Lucas, 2 March 1820, box 10, Present (St. Louis: John Devoy, 1898), 345. Lucas Family Papers. 2. James Madison to John Baptiste Charles Lucas, 10. James Lucas to John Lucas, 1 April n.y., box 22 March 1805, box 2, John B. C. Lucas Family Papers, 21, ibid. Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis. 11. "James H. Lucas. Attorney and Counsellor at 3. Anne Lucas Hunt, recollections, n.d., box 21, Law," St. Louis Missouri Republican, 30 August 1824. ibid. 12. James Lucas to John Lucas, 1 April n.y. 4. James Neal Primm, Lion of the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri (Boulder, CO: Pruett, 1981), 86. 13. John Lucas to James Lucas, 2 July 1837, box 14, Lucas Family Papers. 5. James H. Lucas to John Lucas, 12 April 1815, 2 box 6, Lucas Family Papers. 14. Deed Book C , 10 November 1837, 229-230, St. Louis City Recorder of Deeds Office; J. Farrelly to 6. Wilson to John Lucas, 12 July 1817, box 8, James Lucas, 27 May 1839, and power of attorney, 15 ibid. May 1839, both in box 15, Lucas Family Papers. 7. William Lucas to John Lucas, 6 March 1818, 15. John Baptiste Charles Lucas, last will and box 9, ibid.; Anne Lucas Hunt, recollections; "James testament, 22 July 1839, box 15, Lucas Family Papers; H. Lucas," 181-184; William Lucas, "Biographical John Baptiste Charles Lucas Probate Records, case Sketch of James H. Lucas," 1906, box 21, Lucas Family 144 Missouri Historical Review
01802, microfilm reel C27533, filed 1843, City of St. Sandweiss (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, Louis Probate Court Records. 2003), 109. 16. Primm, Lion of the Valley, 107-108; Oscar 27. "To the Voters of Missouri," St. Louis Missouri W. Collet, Index to Instruments Affecting Real Estate Argus, 20 May 1836; Timothy W. Hubbard and Lewis Recorded in the Office of Recorder of Deeds in the E. Davids, Banking in Mid-America: A History of County of St. Louis, MO (St. Louis: Daly, 1874), 1: 600- Missouri's Banks (Washington, DC: Public Affairs 605; John B. C. Lucas Probate Records. Press, 1969), 52-54; Primm, Lion of the Valley, 141- 142. 17. Collet, Index to Instruments Affecting Real Estate, 1: 600-605; James H. Lucas Probate Records, 28. John Ray Cable, The Bank of the State of case 11032, microfilm reel C34942, filed 1873, City of Missouri (1923; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1969), St. Louis Probate Court Records; Glen E. Holt, "The 185. Shaping of St. Louis, 1763-1860" (PhD diss., University 29. The Saint Louis Directory for the Years 1854-5 of Chicago, 1975), 317-318. (St. Louis: Chambers and Knapp, 1854), 3. 18. "An Ordinance for the Establishment of Lucas 30. Turner to Lucas, 31 July 1853, box 17, Lucas Market," St. Louis City Ordinance 1552, 8 August Family Papers. 1845, Records Retention Office, St. Louis City Hall; "St. Louis," St. Louis Republican, 10 March 1846. 31. Cable, Bank of the State of Missouri, 233- 235. 19. "The Lucas Market," St. Louis Republican, 8 August 1846; "Lucas Place Fifty Years Ago and 32. "The Monetary Affairs of Yesterday," St. Louis Notables Who Lived There," St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Republican, 14 January 1855; "Lucas and Simonds," 18 January 1914; "First of Series of Historic Markers ibid., 16 January 1855. Placed Here," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 18 May 1933; McCune Gill, The St. Louis Story: Library of American 33. "Money Matters," St. Louis Daily Missouri Lives (Hopkinsville, KY: Historical Record Association, Democrat, 15 January 1855. 1952), 1:416. 34. "Lucas and Simonds"; "Banks Safe— Confidence Restored," St. Louis Daily Missouri 20. St. Louis City Ordinance 5431, 6 September Democrat, 15 January 1855; Simonds to Kenneth 1864, Records Retention Office; "Lucas Market: What Shibboleth, 18 January 1855, box 1, Kennett Family is to be Done With the City's Elephant," St. Louis Papers, Missouri Historical Society. Republican, 4 June 1877. 35. St. Louis Democrat, 11 June, 13, 24 July 21. Holt, "Shaping of St. Louis," 325; Richard 1855. Allen Rosen, "St. Louis, Missouri, 1850-1865: The Rise of Lucas Place and the Transformation of the City 36. "Suspension of the Banking House of James from Public Spaces to Private Places" (master's thesis, H. Lucas and Co.," St. Louis Republican, 6 October University of California, Los Angeles, 1988), 93. 1857; "Money Matters," ibid., 30 September 1857. 5 6 22. DeedBookY ,8;DeedBookE ,15,449; Deed 37. "Money Matters," 30 September 1857; 6 6 Book N , 58; Deed Book O ,48, 57, all in St. Louis City "Suspension of the Banking House." Recorder of Deeds Office. 3 8. Hubbard and Davids, Banking in Mid-America, 5 6 23. DeedBookY ,8;DeedBookE ,15,449; Deed 76-77; "Suspension of the Banking House." Book N6, 58; Deed Book O6,48, 57, all in St. Louis City Recorder of Deeds Office; Mary Bartley, St. Louis Lost 39. Primm, Lion of the Valley, 211-212. (St. Louis: Virginia Publishing, 1994), 24. 40. Thomas Allen, "Address of Thomas Allen, 24. Deed Book 185, 19 March 1857,180, St. Louis Esq., of St. Louis, to the Board of Directors of the City Recorder of Deeds Office. Pacific Railroad Company, at Their First Meeting, January 31, 1850. And also a Memorial to Congress, 25. "Lucas Place Fifty Years Ago"; "Lucas Place and the Act of Incorporation" (St. Louis: Republican to Be Opened for Stores—Sales and Transfers," St. Office, 1850); "Proceedings of the National Railroad Louis Republican, 10 April 1888. Convention which Assembled in the City of St. Louis 26. James Primm, "The Economy of Nineteenth- on the Fifteenth of October, 1849" (St. Louis: Chambers Century Saint Louis," in St. Louis in the Century of and Knapp, 1850). Henry Shaw: A View Beyond the Garden Wall, ed. Eric James H. Lucas • 145
41. "National Railroad Convention," St. Louis 47. Resolution of Mr. Edgar, 20 June 1868, and Republican, 18 October 1849; Maury Klein, "Dreams Resolution of Mr. Brown, 11 June 1868, both in box 2, of Fields: St. Louis and the Pacific Railroad," in The St. Pacific Railroad Collection, Museum of Transportation, Louis Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri- St. Louis; Bridge, Pacific Railroad Controversy. St. Louis Fellowship Report 2003, ed. Gregory Ames 48. History of the Archdiocese of Saint Louis: A (St. Louis: Chelmsford Printing, 2003), 17. Condensed History of the Catholic Church in Missouri 42. Allen, "Address of Thomas Allen"; Pacific and Saint Louis (St. Louis: Western Watchman, 1924), Stock Subscription List, 31 January 1850, box 1, 44. Railroads Collection, Missouri Historical Society; 49. Kenrick to Lucas, 3 February 1846, box 17, Primm, Lion of the Valley, 215-216. Lucas Family Papers; Deed Book C4, 432, and Deed 43. "Pacific Railroad Celebration," St. Louis Book Y4, 410-411, both in St. Louis City Recorder of Republican, 6 July 1851; Edward Bates, diary, 4 July Deeds Office. 1851, box 17, Bates Family Papers, Missouri Historical 50. Corporation Record, Book 12: 4-6, St. Society. Louis City Recorder of Deeds Office; History of the 44. "The Pacific Railroad," St. Louis Republican, Archdiocese of Saint Louis, 44. 10 December 1852. 51. "The Fireman's Fund Association: Origin and 45. "Terrible Catastrophe: The Excursion Cars to Condition," St. Louis Missouri Democrat, 15 January Jefferson City Precipitated into the Gasconade River," 1869; Deed Book K3, 334, and Deed Book P5, 495, both St. Louis Daily Missouri Democrat, 2 November 1855; in St. Louis City Recorder of Deeds Office. "The Great Catastrophe," ibid., 3 November 1855; "The 52. "The Old Landmarks: An Invitation to a List of Killed and Wounded," ibid., 5 November 1855; Centenary Anniversary," St. Louis Missouri Republican, "Terrible Catastrophe," St. Louis Christian Advocate, 8 11 July 1866; "Local News," ibid., 12 August 1866. November 1855; St. Louis Daily Missouri Republican, 5 November 1855; "The Gasconade Bridge Disaster," 53. Deed Book 453: 260, St. Louis City Recorder Jefferson City People's Tribune, 6 November 1878. of Deeds Office. 46. Hudson Bridge, Pacific Railroad Controversy. 54. "Death of James H. Lucas," St. Louis Globe- An Open Letter to the Stockholders: With a Series of Democrat, 10 November 1873; "An Interesting Articles Originally Published by The Daily Missouri Occasion," St. Louis Missouri Republican, 28 May Democrat (St. Louis: Missouri Democrat Printing 1870. House, 1869). 55. James H, Lucas Probate Records. Hickory Wind: The Role of Personality and the Press in Andrew Jackson's Bank War in Missouri, 1831-1837
STEPHEN CAMPBELL*
"'Old Jack, the famous In the United States Senate on March 28, 1834, an impassioned Henry New Orleans mouser, Clay of Kentucky hammered through a resolution to censure Andrew Jackson clearing Uncle Sam s for exceeding the powers granted to the president under the Constitution. Clay barn of bank and Clay argued that Jackson had assumed authority "in derogation" of the laws by rats " 1832. removing federal deposits from the Second Bank of the United States (BUS) [Library of Congress, 1 Prints and Photographs without the consent of Congress. An extraordinary test of wills was at play Division, LC-USZ62- over interpreting the Constitution's separation of powers. Clay's resolution 55185] passed, marking the only time an American president has been reprimanded in this manner.2 The stakes must have been high to warrant such an unusual measure. Clay and his allies were coalescing into a Whig opposition that sought to overturn
* Stephen Campbell, a master's candidate in American history at California State University, Sacramento, received a B A degree from the University of California, Davis. He is an adjunct lecturer at Yuba Community College in Marysville, California.
146 Hickory Wind • 147 what they viewed as Jackson's tyrannical usurpation of power. Three years later, however, in 1837, one of Jackson's staunchest allies, Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, led an effort to expunge Clay's censure from the record of the Senate.3 Although largely symbolic, Benton's motion signified that Jackson had successfully defeated the "Monster Bank," emerging triumphant from a tumultuous political struggle. The story of the Bank War at the national level has received intense scrutiny by historians since World War II, but little has been mentioned about how the attitudes of elite politicians toward the BUS interacted with those of common laypeople. Considering that local studies often provide in-depth glimpses into larger national trends, the case of Missouri is a valuable window on this interaction.4 The Bank War in Missouri witnessed the ability of influential and popular political leaders, aided and abetted by journalists, to influence a majority of Missourians to oppose the BUS and to support Andrew Jackson. Thus, personal popularity and demagogic skill, more than economic self-interest or geography, determined who supported and who opposed the national Bank. At the start of the 1830s, Missouri was on the verge of a profound political transformation. The nascent Jacksonian party was a diverse amalgam of intersecting groups with tangled allegiances and confused identities. This amorphous coalition owed unity more to Jackson's persona than to any cohesive economic or political platform. Yet Jackson's war on the national Bank set in motion a fragmentation of party loyalty at the national level and a fermentation of democratic spirit in Missouri. By 1837 most of the state's politicians and citizens were decidedly against the BUS and in favor of creating a state bank. Demographic movements, polarizing political and economic events, and the dissemination of Jacksonian rhetoric through partisan newspapers led to the consolidation of anti-Bank forces in Missouri politics. To a majority of Missourians, the pernicious powers of the national Bank represented a grievous threat to individual liberty and autonomy.5
The Geography of Bank Sentiment At the outset of the Bank War, Missouri politicians of all varieties linked themselves to Andrew Jackson so that they might harness Old Hickory's overwhelming popularity.6 The National Republicans, who had endured crushing losses during the 1828 elections, chose not to run candidates from their own party for several years, and the Whig Party did not officially run candidates in Missouri until 1839.7 Several prominent lawmakers, including Congressman William Henry Ashley, Representative John Bull, and Senator Alexander Buckner, therefore campaigned as Jacksonian candidates but professed support for a national economic program of internal improvements, moderately high tariffs, and the continuation of a national Bank. Unable to vote for National Republicans due to Democratic hegemony, influential merchants and other commercially oriented constituents functioned as a "pressure group" of opposition voters in electing these men to office.8 Although politicians like Ashley aligned themselves with the Democratic Party while Jackson's own economic views were still ambiguous, the more radical, anti-Bank wing of the ticket, epitomized by Governor John Miller (1825-1832), Governor Daniel Dunklin (1832-1836), and Senator Thomas Hart Benton (1821-1851), 148 Missouri Historical Review
derided these Bank-friendly politicians as "false Jackson men" or "counterfeit Jacksonians."9 These pro-Bank Jacksonians profited immensely from a split within Democratic ranks. Missouri's anti-Bank Democrats were deeply divided between rival factions who often nominated several candidates to run for one office, thereby splitting the vote and allowing men like Ashley and Bull to win elections. In June 1831, Daniel Dunklin worried that opposition men could expose the weaknesses within the fledgling Jackson party. He observed that the unified opposition "portends more of evil to our party than good" and that the men loyal to Jackson's policies were "too much disjointed to be very efficient."10 Dunklin's concerns foreshadowed disappointment. Ashley defeated the anti-Bank candidate, R. W. Wells, in a special congressional election in 1831 with the help of pro-Bank men in St. Louis.11 Thomas Hart Benton observed afterward that the opposition boasted of their victory and would continue to wreak havoc with the Democratic Party "by running Jackson men against Jackson measures."12 Opposition men learned from the successful Ashley campaign and continued to vote for Jacksonian candidates who espoused their views. Readers of the opposition-leaning Columbia Missouri Intelligencer, for example, endorsed John Bull for Congress in 1833. In this competition, five Jacksonian candidates ran for one congressional seat, in effect splitting the electorate and allowing Bull to be elected. Bull, a Jacksonian from Howard A Kentucky native County who supported the national Bank, later joined Ashley as Missouri's who arrived in second representative in Washington, DC.13 Another pro-Bank Jacksonian, Missouri Territory Alexander Buckner, had similarly received opposition support in his election in 1818, Alexander to the U.S. Senate in 1830. The same trend applied to the congressional Buckner served as a election of 1835 in which Ashley, backed by many of the opposition men, delegate to Missouri s 14 1820 Constitutional defeated three other Jacksonians en route to victory. After Ashley's third Convention. consecutive triumph, A. R. Corbin, editor of the St. Louis Missouri Argus, [U.S. Senate Historical wrote to Dunklin that "we are to be divided among ourselves" and predicted a Office] state of confusion resulting in the "total route of our party."15 Angered at their losses, some anti-Bank Democrats rebuffed their pro-Bank counterparts for betraying what, in their minds, were the true principles of Jackson. | Dunklin and Miller continually struggled to fashion a cohesive political party in Missouri tailored to Jackson's hard-money, anti-Bank views, and political infighting ensued. In August 1835, Senator Benton referred to fellow Missouri Democrat George F. Strother as a "traitor" and "scoundrel," questioning Strother's commitment to party principles. Insulted and livid, Strother responded by challenging Benton to a duel, which Benton refused.16 This heated episode revealed the deep fissures that plagued the Democratic Party of Missouri during the first half of the 1830s. Politicians friendly to the national Bank in Missouri gained from initial Democratic divisiveness, but this trend alone does not fully explain their early success. William Ashley, for one, was an appealing and popular figure in Hickory Wind • 149
Missouri, a Jacksonian statesman who cultivated a loyal following based on his exploits as a western explorer and militia officer. Later in his career, Ashley became an influential merchant in St. Louis, and as a congressman, he lobbied extensively for western interests through internal improvement projects.17 In addition, Ashley benefited from peculiar demographic characteristics endemic to Missouri at the start of the 1830s, an environment that would gradually shift and diminish his political influence. Of the counties that voted for Ashley in the congressional elections of 1831, 1832, and 1835, as well as the gubernatorial race of 1836, two generalizations emerge: first, the counties that voted for Ashley tended to be strongly slaveholding, and more importantly, there was no significant demarcation between urban and rural support for him. The older, wealthier counties along the northern edge of the Missouri River, most counties along the Mississippi River, and a few other counties scattered throughout the state constituted Ashley's power base.18 These included Boone, Callaway, Clay, New Madrid, Lincoln, Pike, St. Charles, St. Louis, and Washington counties. All of these counties voted for Ashley at least two or more times in his four elections between 1831 and 1836. And most of these counties contained a relatively high proportion of slaves in relation to the general population.19 According to the 1830 federal census, Missouri's statewide slave population was 25,096, or approximately 17.9 percent of the total population of 140,475. Ten of the thirteen counties with above-average slave populations voted for Ashley while eleven of the nineteen counties that had below-average slave populations voted against him.20 At a time when voters' allegiances were convoluted and party identity was fractured, this relationship seems particularly relevant (table 1). Many of Missouri's early settlers, especially elite planters, depended on the BUS for stable credit. This connection was crucial to Missouri since a state bank was not procured until 1837. Large slaveholders, moreover, often relied upon commercial activities provided by the national Bank and were economically tied to northern merchants.21 In 1830 slaves accounted for nearly 18 percent of Missouri's population, and their masters, no doubt, exerted considerable political influence in electing Ashley and other "false Jackson men" into office. But population growth on the Missouri frontier, heavily weighted toward newly developing communities that were devoid of both banking institutions and large plantations, erased much of this edge. Large slaveholding counties found their influence diminished as political leverage shifted toward the burgeoning frontier areas that were less inclined toward the Bank. These dramatic demographic movements, in addition to the increased polarization of the two parties over time, help explain why the anti-Bank wing of the Democratic Party in Missouri consolidated power by the late 1830s. By 1840 the slave population was reduced to 15 percent, and on the eve of the Civil War, slaves accounted for slightly less than 10 percent of Missouri's population, explaining, in some part, why the state did not secede from the Union despite its southern antecedents.22 Importantly, areas that had traditionally sided against the Bank witnessed substantially higher growth rates than the older, more densely populated sections that supported Ashley and future Whig candidates. Counties that frequently voted against Ashley included Chariton, Cole, Crawford, Franklin, 150 Missouri Historical Review
Table 1: Slave Population and Voting by County, 1830s
County Total Slave Percent Above Voted for Population Population of Total Missouri Ashley Population Average 2 + times
Boone 8,859 1,923 21.7% Yes Yes Callaway 6,159 1,456 23.6% Yes Yes Cape Girardeau 7,445 1,026 13.8% No No Chariton 1,780 301 16.9% No No Clay 5,338 882 16.5% No Yes Cole 3,023 300 9.9% No No Cooper 6,904 1,021 14.8% No No Crawford 1,712 64 3.7% No No Franklin 3,484 386 11.1% No No Gasconade 1,545 137 8.9% No No Howard 10,854 2,646 24.4% Yes No Jackson 2,823 193 6.8% No No Jefferson 2,592 236 9.1% No No Lafayette 2,912 429 14.7% No Yes Lincoln 4,059 750 18.5% Yes Yes Madison 2,371 410 17.3% No No Marion 4,837 1,327 27.4% Yes No Montgomery 3,902 605 15.5% No Yes New Madrid 2,350 471 20.0% Yes Yes Perry 3,349 536 16.0% No Yes Pike 6,129 1,198 19.5% Yes Yes Ralls 4,375 839 19.2% Yes Yes Randolph 2,942 493 16.8% No Yes Ray 2,657 166 6.2% No Yes Saline 2,873 706 24.6% Yes Yes Scott 2,136 362 16.9% No Yes St. Charles 4,320 951 22.0% Yes Yes St. Francois 2,366 423 17.9% Yes Yes St. Louis 14,125 2,796 19.8% Yes Yes Ste. Genevieve 2,186 523 23.9% Yes No Washington 6,784 1,168 17.2% No Yes Wayne 3,264 372 11.3% No No
Totals 140,455 25,096 17.9°/ N/A N/A
Note: Population and slave numbers from U.S. Census, 1830. Compiled from census data on Geospatial and Statistical Center, Historical Census Browser, University of Virginia Library, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/ collections/stats/histcensus. Hickory Wind • 151
Gasconade, Jackson, Jefferson, and Wayne. Cole and Gasconade counties, centers of fierce, anti-Bank opposition, boomed with remarkable population increases of over 200 percent during the 1830s, while Boone and St. Charles counties, both Ashley strongholds, grew by less than 90 percent.23 The increase in the number of eligible voters by virtue of this demographic shift surely overturned the slim margin that had placed "counterfeit Jacksonians" in office in the first place. Even the Ashley stronghold of St. Louis County, often heralded for its tremendous population growth and large influx of immigrant workers in the antebellum period, grew at a rate less than the state average between 1830 and 1840.24 Accordingly, the political weight of Missouri seemed to be shifting away from St. Louis and into the central Boonslick region of the state. By the end of the 1830s, the Central Clique, an influential faction of proslavery radicals, assumed tight control of the Democratic Party. St. Louis merchants, exerting a profound impact on Missouri's politics through the election of pro-Bank congressmen at the beginning of the Bank War, saw During the War of 1812, their influence eclipsed by population growth in frontier Missouri. Between Andrew Jackson served 1830 and 1840, Missouri nearly doubled the number of its voting districts, as a general and earned creating thirty new counties, most of which would find identification with the nickname "Old Jackson's anti-Bank policies. These developing, overwhelmingly agrarian Hickory "for his strict counties south of the Missouri River exploded in numbers and became anti- discipline of the troops. Bank regions.25 [SHSMO 011396] From a cursory examination of the geographical distribution of bank sentiment, one might conclude that, in most circumstances, frontier, agrarian counties in Missouri were anti-BUS. Indeed, hard-money, anti-Bank Democrats nearly monopolized state politics in Jefferson City by 1836. Missouri historians John Ray Cable and Perry McCandless have noted that rural interest in banking controversies was often ambivalent or inconsequential and that when rural Missourians did care about the Bank, their feelings were generally negative.26 On a deeper level, however, support for the Bank at county levels, as expressed by "yea" votes for William Ashley, was more complex. For the purposes of this study, the words "rural" and "agricultural" are used interchangeably. Thus, the higher the percentage of workers engaged in agricultural forms of labor, the more rural the county. In New Madrid County, 93.1 percent of workers in 1840 participated in agricultural-related occupations, compared to only 39.2 percent of St. Louis County's workers.27 Since both New Madrid and St. Louis counties repeatedly voted for Ashley, voting records suggest that a rural-urban delineation did not exist in Missouri with regard to the Bank. Many authors of the so-called "market revolution" school have highlighted a general paradigm of class conflict between bourgeois, middle- class merchants and a loose coalition of farmers, laborers, and mechanics who clung to traditional ways of life. Proponents of this concept have explained the Jacksonian era's political, religious, and social movements in relation to the rapid development of a protocapitalist society. After the War 152 • Missouri Historical Review
of 1812, advances in transportation (canals, roads, turnpikes, and railroads) and communication systems, coupled with a population explosion, gave rise to fundamental changes in modes of production. Americans increasingly switched from a subsistence livelihood to an economy in which "farmers and manufacturers produced food and goods for the cash rewards of an often distant marketplace."28 In essence, increasing disparities in wealth brought on by rapid market transformations constituted a fundamental threat to republican liberty. The BUS, wielding its tremendous financial prowess and intimate connection with the federal government, came to symbolize the negative aspects of social change for market revolution and pro-Jackson scholars.29 The most commonly held view in this historiography is that Andrew Jackson embodied the democratic, agrarian spirit that resisted the market revolution. His war on the national Bank symbolized the democratic triumph over wealth, privilege, and monopoly.30 It follows from this analysis that most farmers in Missouri should have opposed the BUS while merchants should have supported it. If market revolution authors like Charles Sellers had expanded their broad strokes of Jacksonian America to include Missouri on a local level, they might have hypothesized that rural voters in Missouri, reacting to the uncertainty of economic change, directed their fear and anger toward the national Bank. This conclusion is plausible since the 1830s were a time of rapid population growth, most notably in rural counties. On the surface, Sellers's dichotomy seems to hold some weight.31 Correlation, of course, does not always equate with causation. One of the biggest weaknesses in the market revolution paradigm is that public opinion about the Bank War did not fall along this clear-cut rural-urban division because the geographical distribution of bank sentiment in Missouri was much more complex. For one, almost all of the state was agricultural; in 1840, 83.9 percent of employed persons held jobs related to agriculture.32 In fact, the only pocket in Missouri that was beginning to urbanize by this time was St. Louis, which always contained a significant vocal minority of Jacksonians who voted against the Bank. The congressional election of 1833 should illustrate this point further. St. Louis voters generally favored the Bank, and the Gateway to the West later became a bastion of Whig support. Votes from anti-Jackson opposition men in St. Louis often influenced close elections, pushing the tide in favor of "false Jackson men."33 Yet St. Louis residents did not vote for pro-Bank Jacksonians across the board since a substantial number of anti-BUS voters lived there as well. In 1833 an anti-Bank Democrat, George French Strother, defeated the pro-Bank candidate, John Bull, in St. Louis County by an almost two-to-one margin! At the same time, Bull received enough rural support in Missouri, thanks to several Jacksonians splitting the vote, that he was elected to Congress by a narrow majority of forty-two votes.34 Although Ashley was also certainly aided by his commercially oriented allies in St. Louis, he received significant agrarian backing from the Boonslick region. The fact that pro-Bank sentiment in Missouri existed well beyond the limits of St. Louis, and indeed thrived in some rural counties, means that a more complex evaluation is needed. Agrarian support for Ashley and Bull hints that personality was just as important as economic interest in determining Hickory Wind • 153 voting behavior. Much of the criticism generated toward Sellers's work has focused on the liabilities of such an all-inclusive, universal claim about Jacksonian America.35 All too often, common farmers in Missouri's rural areas welcomed the BUS's offering of stability, credit, and a strong currency.36 Jean Alexander Wilburn, in analyzing the Bank-related petitions and memorials sent to Congress, found that Jackson's electoral success in the West should not be confused with animus toward the Bank. She argued that Jackson's personality was much more essential to rallying votes.37 The absence of a true demarcation between rural and urban thought suggests that individuals in Missouri conceived of the Bank in terms outside of what their economic interest entailed. Missouri's farmers were not inimically hostile to the federal government's promotion of a nationalized economy as envisaged by Henry Clay's American System. Most Missourians favored federally funded internal improvements to their state. The "radical" Benton voted for all four of the major internal improvement bills discussed in the 19th U.S. Congress (1825-1827), as well as the Maysville Road bill of 1830.38 Missourians also favored moderate tariff protection for products like lead, hemp, salt, and fur. Above all, average farmers in Missouri paid close attention to the sale of public lands.39 The Second Bank of the United States facilitated and worked in tandem with internal improvements, tariffs, and western land sales. Likely, the ultimate destruction of the Bank was not about economic coherence, but about forging a successful political campaign. Rather than being discussed as a symbol of greater market transformations, the assault on the BUS should be treated as a separate political issue where the role of towering personalities and the powerful metaphors they employed were influential factors. Admittedly, much of this analysis rests on the assumption that a vote for William Ashley or John Bull equates to a vote for the national Bank, which is difficult to prove. Just as today, a variety of factors unrelated to economic A Senate committee in concerns was involved in the decision to cast a vote—ethnicity, religion, 1957 named Henry Clay cultural heritage, sectionalism, and especially, personality. At the same time, as one of the five greatest a candidate's position on the Bank was often the sole point that separated senators in American "counterfeit Jacksonians" from hard-money Jacksonians. In 1831, Benton history. [SHSMO 008072] called the BUS a divisive "turning point," and Dunklin figuratively viewed the Bank question as a "litmus test," or an indicator of party loyalty.40 In a letter to Senator Buckner, Dunklin claimed that the differences between himself and William Ashley centered only on the bank question.41 This source confirms the centrality of banking issues in party development. A vote for Ashley may have been the only chance for pro-Bank voters to choose a viable candidate for election in an era of Democratic dominance. In summary, the election of pro-Bank Jacksonians was predicated upon Democratic divisiveness and favorable demographic conditions. Throughout the 1830s, population growth on the frontier erased some of the traditional slaveholding support for Ashley and transferred political power away from St. Louis and into the central Boonslick region. There does not seem to be 154 • Missouri Historical Review
any substantial correlation, however, between one's livelihood and one's attitude toward the Bank. Not all farmers opposed the Bank, and not all merchants supported it, and in this way, the market revolution concept falls short in Missouri.42 Missourians' hostility toward the BUS did not reflect a coherent economic resistance to market transformations, but more of a reaction to political demagoguery. The towering presence of Andrew Jackson and Thomas Hart Benton, magnified through the ideological printings of Democratic newspapers, exerted an extraordinary influence on voters' loyalties in antebellum Missouri.
Elites
At five p.m. on Friday, August 26, 1831, on a Mississippi River island near St. Louis, two men squared off in one of the most infamous duels in the history of the frontier West. The two adversaries, Major Thomas Biddle and Spencer Pettis, pointed pistols at one another at a distance of five feet due to the former's nearsightedness. Nearly one thousand individuals witnessed the confrontation, "totally destitute of animosity or rancor," that terminated in the "lamentable" death of both men. Pettis died within hours of his wounds while Biddle lasted until the following Monday. The Biddle-Pettis duel contributed to Bloody Island's already notorious reputation for violent confrontations.43 What had caused Pettis, Missouri's lone member in the House of Representatives at the time, to challenge Biddle to a fatal standoff? This duel was the culmination of an ongoing exchange over the legality of the Bank of the United States. Pettis had been overwhelmingly elected to Congress as a vociferous critic of the Bank; Biddle, director of the St. Thomas Biddle, a war Louis branch, was the brother of BUS president Nicholas Biddle. Under the hero from the War of fictitious signature "Missouri," Thomas Biddle had attacked Pettis's character 1812, was buried with in local newspapers, to which Pettis responded in print under his own name full military honors at in caustic and severe terms. A vindictive Biddle then broke into Pettis's St. Jefferson Barracks. Louis hotel room on a blisteringly hot night and brutally beat the congressman [SHSMO 003079] with a cane. Feeling both peer pressure from friends and his honor tarnished, Pettis reluctantly challenged Biddle to a duel.44 What started as an ideological disagreement in local, partisan newspapers escalated into a violent collision of arms. Newspapers obviously played an essential role in stimulating the types of public protest that characterized the Bank War. Using pseudonyms, newspaper editors could openly condemn their political opponents without fear of retribution and create the illusion of public support for their measures. These editors functioned as party spokesmen who distributed propaganda and demagogic rhetoric to readers in the hopes of fostering a coherent political party45 Although party formation in Missouri in the 1830s was gradual, newspapers were influential contributors to an increased polarization between Democrats and Whigs. More specifically, partisan newspapers in Missouri channeled the views put forth by party leaders at the national level and frequently implemented scathing class- based arguments. Jacksonian spokesmen, for example, Hickory Wind • 155
termed opposition men as aristocratic "neo-federalists" while anti-Jackson men mocked Jacksonian "democracy" as ignorant, partisan, and susceptible to the fickle passions of the masses. Each side conceived of their opponents as "enemies" and suspiciously viewed the other as conspiratorially trying to overthrow the cherished liberties of republican government.46 One Democratic technique was denigrating the Bank as a tool for widening class divisions, "a pecuniary machine for making the rich richer, and the poor poorer."47 The Boonville Herald whipped up the message of class warfare and asserted that a well-entrenched "aristocracy" within the United States was responsible for the "tyranny and the gigantic power of the U. States Bank." Other newspapers viewed the bank struggle as a full-scale "war between aristocracy and democracy."48 Although the bank struggle was nonviolent in most cases, the term "war" is a fitting characterization. Individuals immersed in the conflict conceived of their opponents in terms of bitter class struggle. Jacksonians made effective political capital out of glorifying the average citizen. If opposition men valued their intelligence, it was Jacksonian "farmers" who replied in King Solomon's words that "too much learning maketh a man a fool." In portraying themselves as the allies of poor farmers, Jacksonians argued that the BUS's use of paper money and stockholders cheated the average farmer out of his due earnings.49 At the same time, these vociferous, stringent statements were, in many ways, rhetorical techniques to rally passions. Missouri Jacksonians and Whigs were not binary opposites; they shared many similarities among tangled, conflicting alliances during the 1830s.50 In overdramatizing the differences between Democrats and opposition men, newspaper editors may have obscured reality. What was the role of newspapers in creating this schism, and more importantly, who were the newspaper editors who provided such a view of politics? Who were the rabble-rousing writers who called themselves "Ironsides," "Common Sense," "A Jackson Man," "A Southerner," and so forth? Most likely, these pseudonyms masked the names of the newspapers' chief editors or prominent politicians. An author named "La Salle," who wrote several anti-Bank statements in the St. Louis Beacon, was actually Thomas Hart Benton. Benton may have also been disguised as "Democratus" and "Able Debater" in other local newspapers. "Common Sense" turned out to be Nathaniel Patten, head of the pro-Bank Missouri Intelligencer, and "Publicius" was rumored to be none other than BUS president Nicholas Biddle.51 Exposing the identities of the pen names in Missouri's newspapers provides a wider lens into the study of Jacksonian politics. Editors and politicians may have given themselves pen names to provide the illusion that there was popular approval for their measures. To write a column signed by "A Farmer of Cole County" implies that rural interest in the bank question existed, but it is also possible that this interest was artificial.52 Likely, much of the public opinion regarding the Bank War in Missouri was derived from elite perspectives. Commoners invariably echoed many of the same propositions that influential politicians disseminated through speeches and other media. It should be no surprise that Cole and Boone counties, neighboring areas with similar demographics, voted in accordance with the viewpoints of their local newspapers. Cole County voted overwhelmingly for anti-Bank candidates, 156 Missouri Historical Review
thanks to both the influence of Daniel Dunklin's governorship in Jefferson City and the militantly hard-money Jefferson City Jeffersonian Republican. Adjacent Boone County, home of the pro-BUS Columbia Missouri Intelligencer, however, contained a populace that consistently vouched for pro-Bank candidates.53 Newspaper editors and prominent politicians assisted the eventual takeover by anti-Bank Democrats in Missouri and strongly influenced the attitudes and sentiments of average Missourians toward the national Bank.54 In a confidential letter to Daniel Dunklin, John Miller complained of the St. Louis Beacon's "duplicitous" tactics and called for a more "ably edited paper" to be established in St. Louis. Throughout his early career, Dunklin labored to put in place newspaper editors who would disperse his views favoring hard-money currency and a states' rights political philosophy. Miller recommended that Dunklin, "with a few other confidential friends," should "finish the necessary aid" in erecting an anti-Bank newspaper press in St. Louis. Dunklin subsequently helped create the As governor, Daniel Missouri Free Press under the oversight of his friend John Steele, who went Dunklin tried to increase on to publish Dunklin-friendly views and promote the Potosi politician as a the state s role in public candidate for governor in 1832.55 In 1833 the Missouri Free Press received education and is known contracts from both state and federal government, suggesting that Dunklin as the father of Missouri s 56 public school system. may have reciprocated Steele's support. The appointment of party loyalists [SHSMO 018633] into positions as chief newspaper editors, as revealed in confidential letters, illustrates how politicians manipulated public information in devious methods. Of all newspaper editors and politicians in the bank struggle, Thomas Hart Benton exerted the greatest influence on Missouri's voters. A boisterous critic of the Bank and a steadfast proponent of a metallic currency, Benton left an indelible impression on Missourians, who roundly supported their senator for thirty years. His appealing personality, transmitted to voters by friendly support in newspapers, guided Missouri toward an increasingly anti-Bank position. Benton's prolific speeches in the Senate caused Missourians to fall "into line against the bank," and his considerable impact upon public opinion can be traced to the earliest days of Missouri's statehood. Benton was in a prime position to speak to voters as chief editor of the St. Louis Enquirer from 1818 to 1826, before Duff Green replaced him. He was also instrumental in establishing the St. Louis Missouri Advocate, which, under the leadership of S. W. Foreman, "became a strong Benton paper."57 Finally, Benton assured that his speeches were published in newspapers and that his views would be broadcast to a large audience. He drove Missourians to accept his judgments about the Bank, creating much of his political strength due to his "aggressive, dynamic personality and impressive physical appearance." "A master at being his own press agent," Benton effectively fashioned his views toward the masses.58 Anti-Bank Missourians, in turn, learned to speak the same language as Benton, and they recapitulated the fundamental tenets of his philosophy. From one standpoint, it is clear that Benton's control of the Missouri press created a top-down Hickory Wind • 157 model of activism. Whereas Benton projected his anti-Bank rhetoric in Congress as early as 1828, popular participation in Missouri concerning the bank controversy did not begin until the fall of 1831 and increased markedly after Jackson's vetoinl832.59 Benton's impact on public opinion was visible over time as Missouri's political makeup, following developments at the national level, shifted toward a more polarized environment. Vociferous attacks from Democratic newspaper editors facilitated this transition as many of the "false Jackson men" were weeded from power. These editors directed their assaults on Ashley, in particular. The congressman could not retain his Jacksonian label while professing support for a national Bank. In the 1836 gubernatorial election, he could no longer disguise his views as Jacksonian and felt compelled to run as an independent against the hard-money Democratic candidate, Lilburn W. Boggs. In the first election in which he did not run on a Jacksonian ticket, Ashley lost.60 The Loco Foco Journal of Jefferson City denounced him "by A proponent of gold and representing him as hostile to the President." "Justiciary" found Ashley to silver currency, Thomas be "aristocratic and anti-Democratic" and had observed a sizeable number of Hart Benton was often voters who had switched their allegiance from Ashley because the Missouri called "Old Bullion." congressman was now "too plain to deceive them any more." Finally, a [SHSMO 000368] correspondent to the St. Louis Missouri Argus complained about Ashley's purported campaign donations from the national Bank.61 Ashley's alleged connection to the Bank may have been a turning point. Scornful criticisms in local newspapers, no doubt, contributed to his eventual defeat. The statewide victories of hard-money Democrats in 1836 seemed to vindicate Spencer Pettis's troubling death five years earlier. In 1831, Missouri's Jacksonians had elected an anti-Bank candidate only to see his death and the subsequent election of "counterfeit Jacksonians" like William Ashley divide their party for the next five years. The Missouri Argus expressed intense bitterness over this struggle, and in 1836 it urged voters to avenge "the fall of the wronged, the insulted and deceived Pettis, who died a martyr to his principles."62 In 1836, with Ashley defeated, four anti-BUS congressmen representing Missouri in Washington, and an anti-Bank governor in Jefferson City, Democratic ideologues could celebrate.
Commoners When Andrew Jackson attended a memorial service for a former colleague in January 1835, an unassuming man emerged from the crowd and aimed a pistol at the president from a distance of less than ten feet. The assailant fired his pistol, but the bullet did not discharge; he tried a second gun, also to no avail. Cabinet members, military officers, and bystanders then seized the man and took him away to custody. Upon interrogation, the would-be assassin, Richard Lawrence, originally from England, replied that the president was personally responsible for Lawrence's destitute state because of Jackson's destruction of the BUS. Lawrence hoped that the death of a tyrannical president would free up more money from the national Bank so that mechanics would have plenty 158 Missouri Historical Review
of work and recover their liberty.63 Jackson's decrees over the BUS clearly held the potential to affect average citizens in deep and personal ways. Events in Missouri seemed to parallel developments at the national level. In the aftermath of a local election in Jefferson City involving larger bank implications, angry voters turned into a mob, causing a riot that destroyed houses, wounded several people, and even caused one fatality.64 The magnitude of these events indicates that common individuals in both Missouri and on the national scene conceived of the Bank as intimately affecting their lives. Records of public meetings, committees in state legislatures, memorials to Congress, and even literary metaphors illustrate how the bank question had migrated into popular consciousness. By the mid-1830s, Missourians had taken the bank issue to be their own cause, expressing passionate disapproval or jubilant elation over Jackson's policies during moments of intense democratic fervor. What had begun as an elitist, personal grudge match between Jackson and Biddle escalated into a full-fledged "war" that rallied the passions of common Missourians.65 The Biddle-Pettis duel revealed that the bank question had emerged as a wedge- driving issue among political elites during Jackson's first term. Interest among average citizens was slower to take root. One man from Boone County commented that the bank issue was of minor consequence in his region and had not caused any party divisions as late as September 1831,66 Soon thereafter, however, "a very large and respectable body of citizens, without distinction of politics," assembled at the courthouse in St. Louis to deliberate on the legality of Nicholas Biddle's disputed branch drafts, bank notes that circulated as official currency but did not contain Biddle's signature.67 Thomas Hart Benton delivered a fiery speech, calling the The Bank of the United drafts "vicious" and "illegal" since they were redeemable only in Philadelphia States in Philadelphia and, therefore, constituted a local, fraudulent currency for western laborers.68 [Library of Congress, Benton tried to inculcate into his constituents a sectional jealousy against Prints and Photographs eastern bankers, whom he disdained for draining the West of valuable specie Division, HABS, PA,51- and capital. If poems are any indicator of the social mores of the time, the PHILA,223-36] following campaign song illustrates the depth of opposition to Biddle's drafts:
To promise, yet not pay To cheat, to rob and lie; To trifle with the people's change, To pass them proudly by, To pour at Biddle's shrine, The offering of their cash, To waft it o'er the ocean brine And give us paper trash.69 Hickory Wind • 159
Such a verse reveals the western preference for hard money as well as the sectional animosity toward inflated paper currency printed in the East. More importantly, common citizens in Missouri actively participated in public meetings, engaged in campaign songs, and made voting decisions specifically based on banking factors. Public meetings were obviously a key component of the political participation that defined Jacksonian America. They were valuable expressions of the concerns of ordinary citizens. Interest in the bank controversy accelerated rapidly after Jackson's unprecedented and shocking veto in July 1832. A group of about five hundred Jackson men gathered in a St. Louis meeting hall to commend his action. Among them, Samuel Merry, A. Link, and W. M. Milburn perceived that Jackson's veto was a stand "against the monied powers of Europe and America, as a mark of firmness and patriotism." An anonymous observer named "C" characterized the meeting as "an uncommon one," signifying its importance.70 A somewhat smaller pro-Bank group simultaneously gathered at the courthouse in St. Louis to castigate Jackson. Attendees reported a turnout of "two to three hundred persons ... a fair representation of all the various classes and interests in the country." A collection of farmers, merchants, and professional men predicted "a general stagnation of business" and "universal bankruptcy," noting that it was the poor, not the rich, who would suffer the most from the Bank veto. The most common charge against Jackson was that he had exceeded his executive privileges, acting in a despotic manner by overturning "the known wishes of the people."71 The enthusiasm of nearly one thousand individuals rallying in public meetings demonstrated the magnitude of the Bank veto at the popular level in Missouri. Town meetings of this scale, in a county that had only 3,552 free white males over twenty, testify to the supreme importance of the banking question.72 Jackson's message, whether greeted with anger or pleasure, clearly reverberated with the people of Missouri. Although Jackson and Benton may have provided the initial spark for interest in banking matters, public participation in Missouri took on a life of its own by 1832-1833. Admirers of the national Bank were quick to predict dire consequences due to Jackson's veto, and many Missourians monitored the unfolding events of the Bank War with alarm.73 Yet it is safe to conclude that a growing majority of Missourians applauded Jackson's position over time. Moreover, in the public eye, economic disharmony seemed to stem more from Biddle's moves than from Jackson's. Fearing that the Bank's influence over the press and elections would continue to wreak havoc with his administration, Jackson began removing the source of the Bank's financial strength, the federal deposits.74 Biddle responded in late 1833 by contracting the BUS's loans, so that he could bring Jackson to his knees. This contraction, however, induced a mild financial panic, and although its effects were relatively benign, Biddle lost the confidence of most of the business community.75 The May 24, 1834, issue of the Jefferson City Jeffersonian Republican carried the headline "HARD TIMES!!—and worse a comingW" Anti-BUS Jacksonians looked anxiously toward a congressional committee appointed to investigate the Bank's activities under charges of misconduct.76 160 Missouri Historical Review
By 1833-1834, Missourians were taking a more active role in these debates as pro- and anti-Bank partisans became increasingly polarized. Jackson's removal of federal deposits and Biddle's retaliatory contraction generated much local interest in banking. When Jackson removed the federal deposits, debates over a replacement state bank raged back and forth between pro- and anti-Jackson newspapers as the issue seemed to be "waxing warmer and warmer." The economic gyrations of the Bank War, particularly "Biddle's Panic," gave average farmers in Missouri a vested interest in this conflict for the first time.77 Senator Amos Lane of Indiana observed a "pressure" of falling wheat prices in the West and urged voters to guard against commercial distress by preserving a strict economy. William Jewell, a candidate for Missouri state senator, pledged his support for restoring the Bank's deposits for the purpose of "quieting the alarms" of Missourians "and relieving the public distress which has been experienced in consequence of the high handed measures of the Executive."78 On the popular level, Jackson's removal of deposits and Nicholas Biddle, who Biddle's response ignited a democratic outburst in Missourians over the Bank edited the notes from War. Ordinary citizens may have realized that the financial dips and peaks the Lewis and Clark caused by the Bank War had begun to affect peoples' everyday lives on a Expedition, served as wider scale. A November 1834 Jackson meeting in Callaway County drafted president of the national Bank from 1822 to 1839. resolutions that condemned the Bank for charging interest, issuing branch [SHSMO 004104] orders, dealing in stocks, and refusing to let Congress examine its books. It also ridiculed the Bank for violating its charter "in the making of donations for roads and canals, and other objects."79 Quite remarkably, these protesters made idealistic objections to the entire system of interest rates, stocks, and the financing of public works. While banking may have played an essential role in westward development, historians should not dismiss this furious expression as a nostalgic and reactionary vision. Whether the animosity directed toward the BUS was deserved or not, most Missourians truly believed their lives were being victimized by a power-hungry national Bank.80 The national Bank failed to renew its charter in 1836, much to the approval of the Jacksonian majority in Missouri. Die-hard supporters of the BUS reminisced about the "habitual, gentle, and salutary supervision" of the institution's direction and continued to call for a new national Bank.81 The image of the bank as a salutary caretaker is one way in which pro-Bank Missourians conceived of the BUS. Opponents of the Bank were more likely to use the tools of literary allusion and metaphor to express their hatred of its power. Portrayals of the Bank as a monster, a tyrannical being, a personified agent in elections, and even as a slavedriving force penetrated deeply into the hearts and minds of Missourians. Pro-Bank individuals did not have a pervasively equivalent metaphor, explaining perhaps, in some small way, why their side lost. A successful campaign can benefit, of course, from imparting exaggerated fears into the minds of average citizens. And to be sure, Democratic newspapers attempted ceaselessly to personify the BUS as a pernicious agent of change, Hickory Wind • 161 a physical being that could inflict harm upon the fundamental principles of democracy. The St. Louis Missouri Argus reprinted accusations from other newspapers that the Bank manipulated elections. One writer alleged that "the Bank's cavalry" and "the traveling proxies of the Bank party" had made incursions into several Virginia counties and influenced the voting process.82 Apparently Nicholas Biddle had dispatched merciless horsemen to do his dirty work by riding into towns, intimidating citizens, and galloping away with stolen elections. Much more common to Missourians at the time was the depiction of the Bank as a monster. G. F. Strother rallied voters by describing it as an unstoppable force with extraordinary powers, a gigantic monster that "throws out its many arms and embraces the twenty-four states, pressing with resistless force."83 Benton, by far the most vociferous critic of the BUS in Missouri, used colorful images to steer voters away from the Bank. In February 1836, over a year after he had pronounced the Bank "withdrawn from the field" in a private letter, Benton publicly announced a renewed fight against its power. He emphatically prophesied that democracy could overcome "ALL SHAPES AND FORMS WHICH THE HYDRA AND PROTEAN MONSTER MAY ASSUME."84 Allusions to Greek mythology were one of the myriad devices that politicians used in the 1830s to foster anti-Bank sentiment. A noticeable discrepancy existed between Benton's two assessments of An 1836 L ithograph the Bank. Since he revealed one thing in a confidential letter and projected Portraying the National Bank as a Monster contradictory views in a public setting, his private account may have been [Library of Congress, more accurate. When Jackson commenced removal of the Bank's deposits Prints and Photographs in 1833, the Jeffersonian Republican printed an interesting, albeit comical, Division, LC-USZ62- 1575]
oct^fritAiL JACKS*** Bi^MYm€<'TMmMjmYMEAmwm mmm^rmm. 162 • Missouri Historical Review
personification of the Bank originally published in the Philadelphia Pennsylvanian. It characterized the Bank of the United States as "an old lady" that had been sick for a few weeks after swallowing hickory pills.85 This article was in line with Benton's evaluation of the Bank's strength in 1834. If the BUS had been slowly dying since 1833, and yet Benton emphatically warned of its dangers as late as 1836, then the Missouri senator may have been intentionally exaggerating its powers to rouse public support for his measures. Whether based on reality or not, Missourians, on some level, truly felt that the national Bank engaged in exploitative practices. The Jeffersonian Republican reprinted an article from the Manhattan Advertiser that portrayed banking in general as a bastardization of the state of nature according to Christian theology. The article outlined a "real legitimate, unincorporated" bank system called the Universal Agricultural Bank of Nature, first commenced by Adam and Eve, in which "every man may be a stockholder" and the "Lord himself is President and Director."86 Drawing parallels to Christianity likely resonated with many newspaper subscribers. Fervent resistance to banking often drew from negative experiences with usury and charging interest on loans, something that could plunge farmers into debt. Many agrarian Missourians wanted a "natural" bank that could finance agriculture and westward expansion without the "sin" of charging interest. Not all Missourians shared the conviction that banks, interest rates, and stockholders invariably exploited farmers. The following poem shows that farmers need not always fear banks:
How happy the farmer who owes not a pound, But lays up his fifty each year that comes round: He fears neither constable, sheriff nor dunn: To Bank or to Justice has never to run. His cellar well filled, and his pantry well stor'd. He lives far more blest than a prince or lord; Then take my advice, if a fortune you'd get, PAY OFF WHAT YOU OWE, AND KEEP OUT OF DEBT.87
The passage illustrates a lesson of fiscal responsibility and implies that at least part of the blame for economic dependence and land foreclosure lay with farmers who took out loans they could not repay. Interestingly, virtually all of Missouri's newspapers, even the outspokenly pro-Bank Missouri Intelligencer, glorified the profession and calling of farming in poems like these. This reveals not only that a wide range of thought accompanied the larger bank question, but also that there was no unequivocal conflict between banking and farming in the state during this time. By far the most dramatic depictions of the BUS were ones that compared it to slavery. During the Panic of 1837, editors of the Jeffersonian Republican, the most extreme of the Democratic presses, blamed the country's travails on all banks. One editor wrote, "For the benefit of these institutions, heaven, earth, and hell are invoked—the worst passions of our nature are appealed to, and the tocsin of alarm is sounded for the purpose of aiding the aristocracy to enslave the people." Another writer described the Bank's deeds as a type of "slavery imposed upon the American people by a soulless corporation."88 Hickory Wind • 163
The use of such a comparison, despite the obvious implementation of didactic demagoguery on the part of newspaper editors, still begs for scrutiny since the forced migration of hundreds of thousands of African Americans as part of a larger domestic slave trade was accelerating in these years. By focusing on the economic injustice of the BUS, Missouri's Jacksonians may have intended to direct attention away from the larger question of slavery. This would seem fitting because Missouri, since its inception as a slave state in 1821, had been at the center of the slave controversy.89 And Jacksonian policy certainly sought to suppress discussion of slavery in order to preserve the fragile intersectional alliance that composed the Democratic Party.90 It is ironic that such rancorous debates over individual liberties, economic self-autonomy, and personal freedom took place at a time when debate over slavery was forbidden in Congress under the infamous "Gag Rule" of 1836. Debates over the Bank overshadowed and may have even distracted voters from debates over slavery. Yet portrayals of the Bank as a slavedriving force, however ill conceived, added to the broad, popularized campaign to kill the BUS. Citizen participation through town meetings, committees, resolutions, and, indirectly, the voices of politicians, shows that average Missourians cared deeply about the Bank War and perceived the institution to be a dangerous threat to their economic livelihood. The chronology of the Bank War hints that it began as a personal confrontation among elites, slowly spreading to the masses through newspapers and propaganda. Soon, however, the bank struggle was defined by popular passions, and with westward expansion, the winds of Old Hickory had swept into Missouri by 1836. Just as the opinion of elites had come to influence the sentiments of average citizens, so, too, did commoners influence their leaders in reciprocal fashion by the end of the bank struggle.
NOTES Roger Sharp, The Jacksonians Versus the Banks: . Politics in the States after the Panic of 1837 (New 1. Fac Surnle ofthe Expunged Resolution of the York. Columbia University Press, 1970); and Larry U.S. Senate, as it appears in the Record of the Senate, of c , ., . D ,. ., A . c ., r ' FF ' Scnweikart, Banking in the American South jrom March 28th, 1834," 16 January 1837, folder 7, Thomas ^ Age of Jackson t0 Recomtruction (Baton Rouge: Hart Benton Papers, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louisiana State University Press, 1987). None of these studies, however, thoroughly examined Missouri's role 2. The most recent attempt was Senator Russ in the affair. Feingold's (D-WI) attempt to censure President George a margin of ^ than ^ t0 onCj Missouri Bushin2006fordomesticspy.ng.Themotionfa.led. For yoters chose Jackson oyer John Quincy Adams fof an interesting, albeit slightly anachronist.c, comparison ident ^ 182g ^ 1 g33 approximately 70 percent between Clay's censure and Feingold's attempt, see H. of Missouri>s eUgible voters were Jacksonians. See W. Brands, "Be Sure Before You Censure," New York peny McCandlesS; A History of Missouri, Volume II: Times, 21 March 2006. ]82Q fo ]86Q (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 3. "Facsimile." 1972), 83, 91. In 1836, Martin Van Buren won 60 percent of Missouri's vote for president. See Rudolph 4. A few authors have examined the Bank War Eugene Forderhase; "jacksonianism in Missouri, From on a statewide basis. See Lee Benson, The Concept Predilection to Party, 1820-1836" (PhD diss., University s of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case 0f Missouri 1968 ) 537 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961); James 164 Missouri Historical Review
6. Missouri voted for a Democrat in every "Jacksonianism in Missouri," and Clokey, William H. presidential election between 1832 and 1860. Ashley, 181-279. 7. John Vollmer Mering, The Whig Party in 19. Historians have observed this trend as far Missouri (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, back as 1931. Leota M. Newhard, "The Beginning 1967), 8. of the Whig Party in Missouri, 1824-1840," Missouri Historical Review 25 (January 1931): 254-280; Charles 8. Many of these opposition men would later Sellers, "Who Were the Southern Whigs?" American become Whigs. In the late 1820s and early 1830s, they Historical Review 59 (January 1954): 335-345. were called "Adams men" or "the federal party." See Thomas Hart Benton to Finis Ewing, 12 November 20. Census data obtained from Geospatial and 1831, Benton Papers; Mering, Whig Party, 1. Statistical Data Center, Historical Census Browser, University of Virginia Library, http://fisher.lib.Virginia, 9. John Miller to Daniel Dunklin, 8 March 1832, edu/collections/stats/histcensus/. folder 3; Miller to Dunklin, 16 September 1832, folder 4, Daniel Dunklin Papers, Western Historical Manuscript 21. Sellers, "Who Were the Southern Whigs?" Collection, University of Missouri-Columbia. See 340. also Marvin Cain, Lincoln s Attorney General: Edward Bates of Missouri (Columbia: University of Missouri 22. Many of Missouri's early American settlers, Press, 1965); James Earl Moss, "William Henry Ashley: particularly those along the Mississippi River and in A Jackson Man with Feet of Clay," Missouri Historical the Boonslick, were of southern origin. Boonslick Review 61 (January 1966): 1-20; Robert E. Shalhope, Democrats tended to hail from southern ancestry, had "Jacksonian Politics in Missouri: A Comment on the slaveholding and mercantile interests, and above all, McCormick Thesis," Civil War History 15 (September possessed a common political ideology of Jeffersonian 1969): 210-225; and James Roger Sharp, "Gov. Daniel strict construction. These individuals subscribed to the Dunklin's Jacksonian Democracy in Missouri, 1832- "Old Republican" philosophy of limited government 1836," Missouri Historical Review 56 (April 1962): and states' rights and were vociferous hard-money 217-229. advocates. See Shalhope, "Jacksonian Politics," 177. St. Louis residents tended to be more moderate in tolerating 10. Dunklin to Charles Keemle, 28 June 1831, a national Bank, and in terms of demographics, St. Louis folder 2, Dunklin Papers. hosted large influxes of antislavery Germans, which contributed to the relative decline of Missouri's slave 11. St. Louis Beacon, 10 November 1831; Moss, population. William Freehling draws the connection "William Henry Ashley," 19. between high slave populations and the states that 12. Benton to Ewing, 12 November 1831. seceded in his book, The South vs. The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the 13. Columbia Missouri Intelligencer, quoted in St. Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Louis Missouri Republican, 10 May 1833. 23. Geospatial and Statistical Data Center; Clokey, 14. St. Louis Missouri Republican, 6 August 1833; William H Ashley, 181-279. 8 August 1835. 24. Geospatial and Statistical Data Center. 15. Corbin to Dunklin, 18 September 1835, folder 12, Dunklin Papers. 25. Dunklin to Martin, 11 August 1835. 16. John Merry to Dunklin, 6 August 1835; Dunklin 26. John Ray Cable, The Bank of the State of to F. H. Martin, 11 August 1835; Martin to Dunklin, 30 Missouri (New York: Columbia University Press, August 1835; all letters in folder 11 in Dunklin Papers. 1923), 88; Perry McCandless, "Thomas H. Benton: His Source of Political Strength in Missouri from 1815 to 17. Ashley was lauded for his efforts in Congress 1838" (PhD diss., University of Missouri, 1953), 155. to make the Missouri and Mississippi rivers more navigable and to extend the Cumberland Road into 27. The percentage of agriculturally oriented Missouri. Richard Clokey, William H. Ashley: workers was calculated by dividing the total number Enterprise and Politics in the Trans-Mississippi West of "persons in agriculture" by the total number of (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980), 207. "employed persons" in the 1840 census. St. Louis County had 3,996 workers employed in agriculture, out 18. For excellent insights into the geographical of a total of 10,189 workers. The remaining workers support of William Ashley, see Forderhase, of St. Louis were employed in mining, commerce, manufacturing and trade, navigation, engineering, the Hickory Wind • 165 printing industry, and other learned professions. As 35. See Stokes and Conway, Market Revolution expected, St. Louis was the most urban of Missouri's in America, and Richard Ellis et al., "A Symposium on counties. Geospatial and Statistical Data Center. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846," Journal of the Early Republic 12 28. Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway, The (Winter 1992): 445-476. Market Revolution in America: Social, Political, and Religious Expressions, 1800-1880 (Charlottesville: 36. St. Louis Beacon, 21 September 1831; St. Louis University of Virginia Press, 1996), 1. Missouri Republican, 19 June, 28 August 1832; Jean Alexander Wilburn, Biddle s Bank: The Crucial Years 29. Some celebratory accounts of the Jacksonian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 55. era, both at the national level and in Missouri, have characterized farmers as opposed to banking 37. The Jacksonians, superior in numbers and establishments and other symbols of wealth, privilege, organization to the National Republicans, mustered and capitalist transformation. See McCandless, only 8 anti-Bank citizens' memorials and no state A History of Missouri; Charles Sellers, The Market bank memorials to Congress. The Bank's supporters, Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846(New York: however, forwarded 118 citizens' memorials and 70 Oxford University Press, 1991); and Harry Watson, state bank memorials to Congress. Despite the assertion Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America that Biddle manufactured this illusory support with a (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990). Other authors have pseudo-grassroots campaign or other claims of bribery, pointed out that farmers were the greatest beneficiaries this marked discrepancy should give some indication of internal improvements, tariffs, and stable banking. of the BUS's support throughout the nation. Wilburn, See Joyce Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Biddle s Bank, 55. Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730- 38. Larson, Internal Improvement, 169; Wilentz, 1815 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Rise of American Democracy, 328. Press, 1993); John Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular 39. McCandless, History of Missouri, 70, 85. Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: 40. Benton to Ewing, 21 November 1831. University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and John Majewski, A House Dividing: Economic Development 41. Dunklin to Buckner, 26 May 1832, folder 4, in Pennsylvania and Virginia Before the Civil War (New Dunklin Papers. York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 42. The term "market revolution" seems to be 30. Probably the two greatest proponents of this falling out of favor with the historical community. In the view are Sellers, Market Revolution, and Sean Wilentz, 1980s, Sean Wilentz advanced the term in an article, but The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln it was conspicuously absent in his recent publication, (New York: Norton, 2005). The Rise of American Democracy. 31. Washington County, which, according to the 43. St. Louis Beacon, 1 September 1831. 1840 census, contained over one-third of the state's employed miners, voted for Ashley in three of his four 44. For a detailed account of these events, see elections. St. Charles County, a neighbor of St. Louis Edward Dobyn letter, ca. 1866, Duels Collection, County, had an agricultural workforce slightly below Missouri Historical Society. the average of most counties in Missouri at 77 percent. 45. For an interesting look at the impact of St. Charles County voted overwhelmingly for Ashley. newspapers in politics during the early national See Geospatial and Statistical Data Center. period, see Jeffrey Pasley, "The Tyranny of Printers": Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic 32. Ibid. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001). 33. St. Louis Beacon, 11 November 1831. In the 46. G. W. Miller to Dunklin, 22 August 1831, 1831 special election between Ashley and R. W. Wells, folder 2; John Miller to Dunklin, 16 September 1832, an election decided by only 120 votes, Ashley's 783 folder 4, Dunklin Papers. votes to Wells's 381 in St. Louis County helped assure Ashley's victory. 47. St. Louis Beacon, 21 July 1831. Opposition men, of course, used the same rhetoric about Jackson's 34. St. Louis Missouri Republican, 6 August veto of the Bank. 1833. 166 Missouri Historical Review
48. Boonville Herald, quoted in the Jefferson City 62. St. Louis Missouri Argus, 22 July 1836. Jeffersonian Republican, 31 May 1834; Jefferson City 63. H. W Brands, Andrew Jackson: His Life and Jeffersonian Republican, 24 May 1834. Times (New York: Doubleday, 2005), 504. 49. Ibid., 17 September 1831; St. Louis Missouri 64. Jefferson City Jeffersonian Republican, 8 Argus, 12 June 1835, 24 June 1836. November 1834. 50. John McFaul, "Expediency vs. Morality: 65. In Andrew Jackson and the Bank War (New Jacksonian Politics and Slavery," Journal of American York: Norton, 1967), Robert Remini argued that the History 62 (June 1975): 28. Bank War began as a personal confrontation between 51. Clarence Henry McClure, Opposition in Jackson and Biddle. Similarly, Lynn Marshall, in Missouri to Thomas Hart Benton (Nashville: George "The Authorship of Jackson's Bank Veto Message," Peabody College for Teachers, 1927), 42; William Mississippi Valley Historical Review 50 (December Wright to Dunklin, 12 May 1832, folder 4, Dunklin 1963): 466-477, claims that the decision to veto the Papers; St. Louis Missouri Argus, 22 July 1836. Bank originated in Jackson's closest circles. 52. Jefferson City Jeffersonian Republican, 17 66. Columbia Missouri Intelligencer, 24 September 1831; Columbia Missouri Intelligencer, September 1831. 24 September 1831. This has also been mentioned 67. St. Louis Beacon, 20 October 1831. in Cable, Bank of the State of Missouri, and James Neal Primm, Economic Policy in the Development of 68. Benton, Thirty Years' View, 221. a Western State, Missouri, 1820-1860 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954). 69. Timothy Hubbard and Lewis Davids, Banking in Mid-America: A History of Missouri's Banks 53. Dunklin to Martin, 11 August 1835; Clokey, (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1969), 45. William H. Ashley, 270. In both Boone and Cole counties, a relatively equal percentage of the workforce 70. St. Louis Missouri Republican, 31 July 1832. was engaged in agricultural, commercial, and 71. Ibid. manufacturing activities. Geospatial and Statistical Data Center. 72. House Journal of the State of Missouri of the First Session of the Sixth General Assembly (Fayette, 54. Scathing remarks in the Missouri Argus toward MO: Western Monitor, 1831), n.p. William Ashley may have influenced the gubernatorial election in 1836. St. Louis Missouri Argus, 24 June, 22 73. Cincinnati Gazette, quoted in the St. Louis July 1836; Clokey, William H Ashley, 270. Missouri Republican, 4 September 1832. 55. John Miller to Dunklin, 8 March 1832; John 74. This move angered many Democrats and Steele to Dunklin, 16 March 1832, both in folder 3, was opposed by some members of Jackson's cabinet. Dunklin Papers. Secretary of Treasury William Duane refused to comply with the president's order, so Jackson replaced him with 56. Forderhase, "Jacksonianism in Missouri," 395. a pliant Roger B. Taney. 57. McCandless, History of Missouri, 94; St. 75. Jacob P. Meerman, "Climax of the Bank War: Louis Missouri Republican, 24 October 1825, quoted in Biddle's Contraction, 1833-1834," Journal of Political McCandless, "Thomas H. Benton," 107. Economy 71 (August 1963): 378-388. 58. McCandless, History of Missouri, 68, 79. 76. Jefferson City Jeffersonian Republican, 24, 5 9. Columbia Missouri Intelligencer, 9 May 1835; 31 May 1834. Committees in the Missouri General Thomas Hart Benton, Thirty Years' View (New York: D. Assembly mirrored these events at the national level. Appleton, 1854). See also McCandless, "Thomas H. This legislative body began preparing to establish a state Benton," 149. bank as early as February 1833, although deliberative deadlock and the threat of Daniel Dunklin's veto 60. Clokey, William H Ashley, 270, 271. delayed the feat. In 1837, Lilburn W. Boggs, Dunklin's gubernatorial successor, reluctantly approved the 61. Jefferson City Loco Foco Journal, quoted in St. chartering of a state bank. Louis Missouri Republican, 9, 22 July 1836; St. Louis Missouri Argus, 22 January 1836, quoted in Clokey, 77. Columbia Missouri Intelligencer, 4 December William H Ashley, 268. 1833; Sellers, Market Revolution, 337. Hickory Wind • 167
78. Columbia Missouri Intelligencer, 26 April, 28 85. Philadelphia Pennsylvanian, quoted in the June 1834. Jefferson City Jeffersonian Republican, 22 June 1833. 79. Jefferson City Jeffersonian Republican, 29 86. Manhattan Advertiser, quoted in Jefferson November 1834. City Jeffersonian Republican, 29 July 1837. 80. Historians have long argued about whether 87. Columbia Missouri Intelligencer, 15 February or not the animosity directed toward the Bank was 1834. deserved. Consensus historians like Richard Hofstadter 88. Jefferson City Jeffersonian Republican, 15 in The American Political Tradition and the Men Who July 1837, 6 December 1834. Made It (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948) and Bray Hammond in Banks and Politics in America from 89. Missouri's entry into the Union as a slave the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton state came in the context of an intense debate over University Press, 1957) maintain that Jackson's moves, slavery's role in the West. Congressmen solved this not Biddle's, initiated economic uncertainty. For an debate with the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the first excellent economic interpretation of the Panic of 1837, of many negotiations that kept the slavery question at see Peter Temin, The Jacksonian Economy (New York: bay until the Civil War. For an exceptional account of Norton, 1969), which posits that the panic would have these debates, see Don Fehrenbacher, The South and occurred regardless of Jackson's moves. Three Sectional Crises (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980). 81. Jefferson City Jeffersonian Republican, 30 January 1837. 90. For example, Jackson ordered his postmaster general in 1835 to abstain from delivering incendiary 82. St. Louis Missouri Argus, 24 June 1836. abolitionist mailings in the South. By a vote of 117 83. Jefferson City Jeffersonian Republican, 16 to 68, Jacksonians in the House of Representatives June 1833. trampled on First Amendment rights by prohibiting the discussion of slavery in the infamous "Gag Rule" 84. Benton to Daniel Dunklin, 1 September 1834, of 1836. Both of Missouri's representatives, William folder 9, Dunklin Papers; Thomas Hart Benton, speech, Ashley and A. G. Harrison, men of differing political 27 February 1836, Benton Papers. persuasions, supported the measure. See U.S. House Journal, 24th Cong., 1st sess., 26 May 1836, 884, http:// memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lwhjlink.html.
The CiviCWarin Missouri: (Essaysfrom the MissouriJfistoricaC (Review, Missouri fftMmcaf^vm&t 1906-2006
Edited and with an introduction by EdtwftsM di tnm&akm $y mHSkm % mzrtM William E. Parrish, distinguished Civil War scholar
This 260-page anthology contains twelve articles, previously pub lished in the Missouri Historical Review, that deal with all aspects of the Civil War in Missouri. This book would make a great gift for the Civil War enthusiast!
Available in paper or cloth. Paperbound book is only $12.50 for Society members ($25.00 for nonmembers), and clothbound ver sion is $30.00 for members ($40.00 for nonmembers). C&tittiy tiffyfasswn $fisl#fy$c&o£ir$fo'p Series tfk start iHiUMuv &h->*ty *J Mi GARY R. KREMER* In 1931, Dr. William J. Thompkins, a late-middle- aged African American physician who practiced his profession in the Thompkins Building near the corner of East 18th Street and Paseo Boulevard in Kansas City, sought an audience with Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York, the presumptive Democratic challenger to President Herbert Hoover in the 1932 election. A supporter of Roosevelt since at least the fall of 1930, Thompkins apparently wanted to lay the groundwork for a federal patronage position in the event that FDR won the presidency.1 In his effort to meet with Roosevelt, Thompkins solicited the help of Frank P. Walsh, described by historian Franklin D. Mitchell as an "old Kansas City progressive residing in New York." Walsh, a Missouri-born labor lawyer heavily involved in state and national Democratic politics, wrote to Governor Roosevelt, indicating, "This [letter] will be handed to you by my old friend, Doctor William J. Thompkins." Walsh praised Thompkins as "the most consistent and loyal Democrat, at least whom I William J. Thompkins know, in the United States."2 [The Historical Society of Washington, DC] Who was William J. Thompkins, and what had he done to warrant such an endorsement from a longtime Democratic Party activist at a time when the movement of African Americans away from the Grand Old Party of President Abraham Lincoln had barely begun?3 William James Thompkins was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1879, the son of Marion and Eliza Thompkins. The family lived at 409 Madison Street, three blocks south of the Missouri Governor's Mansion. Marion Thompkins's name does not appear on the 1880 federal census taker's list of residents present in the family home that year. Eliza, a thirty-nine-year- old Missouri-born black woman, is described as a widow, "keeping house" *Gary R. Kremer is executive director of The State Historical Society of Missouri. He received BA and MA degrees from Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, and a PhD from American University in Washington, DC. 168 William J. Thompkins • 169 for her children: Augusta (12), John (10), Jennie (8), and William (1). The census taker reported Eliza's inability to read and write and Augusta, John, and Jennie's enrollment in school.4 Although the Thompkins family lived on a block with white and black neighbors, the children attended a racially segregated school, as prescribed by Missouri law and local custom. The "colored school" and the town's two black churches lay within three blocks of the Thompkins home.5 Little is known of William Thompkins's childhood. In a biographical sketch included in a 1935 history of the Missouri Democratic Party "and its Representative members," Thompkins's early life commitment to the Democratic Party received emphasis along with the claim that his father had supported Democrats as far back as the Civil War. The Thompkins entry further announced his conviction "that the party of Jefferson and Jackson offered the best ethics for the welfare of the Negro race," failing to comment on the fact that both of those presidents had been slave owners. The entry also reported that Thompkins had first worked "as a bell boy in the old Madison Hotel," across the street from the Governor's Mansion. There, it noted, he "enjoyed the acquaintance and friendship of such men as [Congressman] Champ Clark, Governors [Alexander] Dockery, [William Joel] Stone and [Lon V.] Stephens," all Democrats.6 On September 5, 1892, Thompkins left the local black school for the Lincoln Institute Elementary Department. Located at the time on the outskirts Born the son of a former of Missouri's capital city, Lincoln Institute served as the state's publicly slave, Thompkins (far supported normal school for African Americans. Thompkins remained at right) achieved notoriety in the medical and Lincoln for nearly a decade, until 1901. The school's catalog for 1900-1901 7 political fields. lists him as a "Class A" student in the normal department. [The Historical Society of Thompkins graduated from Lincoln Institute in 1901 and subsequently Washington, DC] enrolled as a medical student at the University of Colorado in Boulder.8 He completed his medical studies at all-black Howard University in Washington, DC.9 Historian Thomas J. Ward Jr. describes Howard Medical School as "the first school opened for the purpose of educating African American doctors." Howard began admitting medical students in November 1868. By the time Thompkins enrolled there, the school had tightened both its admissions and graduation requirements. Ward writes, "By 1900, both Meharry [in Nashville] and Howard had adopted the admission procedures of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), which required that each student either possess a high school diploma or pass an examination in English, arithmetic, algebra, physics, and Latin before admission."10 How Thompkins could afford to attend the University of Colorado or Howard University remains unclear. In a late-life interview, his 170 • Missouri Historical Review daughter, Marion Thompkins Ross, recalled that her father often spoke of working on riverboats during the summers while he was a medical student. It is likely that he held one or more jobs during the school year as well. Ward quotes the so-called Flexner Report on medical education in the United States, completed toward the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, as saying "that most of Howard's medical students held outside employment while enrolled at the school." Indeed, Ward writes, "In the late nineteenth century Howard Medical School held classes only between 3:30 and 10 P.M., allowing its students to work at federal jobs in Washington."11 Thompkins graduated from Howard in 1905 and served an internship at Howard's Freedmen's Hospital in Washington, DC, during the following year. In 1906, Thompkins returned to Missouri and secured a license to practice medicine in his home state.12 He moved to Kansas City to engage in medical practice. Why the young doctor chose Kansas City instead of his hometown remains unclear, although, likely, he did not think there were enough African Americans in the capital city to sustain a medical practice. Perhaps, too, he had learned from the experience of Dr. J. Edward Perry, an African American physician who had established a practice in Kansas City three years earlier. A native of Texas and a graduate of Meharry Medical College, Perry tried to open a business in Jefferson City in 1895, during the period when Thompkins was a Lincoln Institute student. According to his memoir, Perry was advised by the Lincoln president, Inman E. Page, that he "had not the money or experience to cope with the local situation." Presumably, this meant that Page thought that whites in Jefferson City would be hostile to the presence of a black doctor and that African Americans were neither numerous nor wealthy enough to sustain a practice by an African American physician. Perry summarized Page's counsel as follows: "He advised me to get out of town as quickly as possible."13 Information on Thompkins's first decade of residency and practice in Kansas City is scarce. As early as 1913, he sought to return to Washington, DC, as the "surgeon in chief of Freedm[e]n's Hospital," the same segregated facility where he had completed an internship the previous decade. Seeking to use the connection with Frank P. Walsh that he apparently had established even at that early date, he urged Walsh to contact U.S. Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane and recently elected President Woodrow Wilson on his behalf. In a letter to Secretary Lane, Walsh explained that Thompkins's desire "to have charge of the hospital of his race at Washington, at the bottom, comes from his desire to serve his people and humanity." Thompkins did not get the job.14 One year later, in 1914, Thompkins secured an appointment as the superintendent of Kansas City's General Hospital No. 2, a racially segregated public health facility located in the "Old City Hospital" at 22nd and Cherry streets. The building had been vacated by whites in 1908, and between then and 1911, white doctors and nurses, exclusively, treated black patients in the facility. In 1911 four African American doctors and several black nurses joined the staff.15 Dr. Thompkins's appointment as superintendent marked the first time an African American physician held that position. He served in that capacity from 1914 to 1916 and from 1918 to 1922. During his tenure, the hospital gained recognition by the American College of Surgeons, the American Medical William J. Thompkins • 171 Association, and the National Hospital Association. Dr. J. Edward Perry, Thompkins's contemporary, recalled in his memoir, "Dr. Thompkins proved an excellent executive and the work and management of the institution continued on a high plane of efficiency under his direction."16 In 1917, Thompkins made another attempt to return to Washington, DC, as "Surgeon- in-Chief' at the Freedmen's Hospital. This time he called upon Democrats who controlled the Missouri House of Representatives to endorse his application for the position to President Kansas City s General Wilson. On January 18, 1917, the chief clerk of the Missouri House, R. E. L. Hospital No. 2 (above) merged with its white Morris, and House Speaker Drake Watson wrote the Democratic president, counterpart, General who had been elected to his second term in office, in support of Thompkins's Hospital No. 1, in 1957 effort. Despite this political endorsement, Thompkins again failed to get the due to budget constraints. job.17 The hospital is now Thompkins's daughter, Marion, recalled that her father always thought of Truman Medical Center. political activism as a way of achieving health goals for members of his race [SHSMO 027896] and, one might add, as a way of promoting his own career. Like a growing minority of other African Americans of his era, Thompkins thought that Republicans at both the state and national levels took the African American vote for granted and did not offer enough patronage positions to blacks or enough support for African American causes. According to historian Sherry Lamb Schirmer, Thompkins gave respectability and prestige to a small group of Kansas City black Democrats known as the "Negro Central League," which formed in 1900. Likewise, historian Larry Grothaus credits Thompkins with organizing "the Negro Democracy in Kansas City" into an "active and important group" by 1920.18 In 1919, Thompkins became involved in a national effort to assert African Americans' rights and privileges throughout the country. Like many blacks of the World War I era, including the famous intellectual and social activist, Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, Thompkins recognized the incongruity of young black men fighting and dying to make the world safe for democracy abroad while being denied access to freedom and equality in the land of their birth. In the wake of the November 1918 armistice ending the war, Thompkins and scores of Kansas City blacks joined the National Negro Constitution League of America in petitioning Congress to end Jim Crow legislation in the country. Drawing strength from an "awakened sense of justice and freedom," members of the league, including Thompkins, urged Congress to "make inoperative, null and void, all such State Laws as conflict with, and make ineffective, the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution of the United States."19 172 • Missouri Historical Review Not satisfied to leave the destiny of African Americans in the hands of disinterested or even hostile whites, Thompkins penned a column in the Kansas City Sun a few weeks later under the title "Race Loyalty." He urged African Americans to take greater control of their collective destiny by supporting legislative efforts to establish race-specific social service agencies and institutions that promised to care for, among others, "the Negro blind, deaf, dumb, feebleminded and tubercular." He also urged blacks to support increased funding for all-black Lincoln Institute, the appointment of a "Negro deputy superintendent of public schools," and the creation of a "Negro industrial commission" that would "make the Negro people of Missouri self- supporting and a greater economic asset to the state."20 Thompkins took particular interest in the high rate of tuberculosis among Missouri blacks during the postwar years, a disease that he referred to as "the great white plague" in his 1919 newspaper call to action. The rate of death from tuberculosis for blacks was nearly four times that of whites during the years after the war. In 1926 the Kansas City Health Department commissioned Thompkins to study the disease among the city's black population. One consequence of that study was the creation of a tuberculosis hospital in the community of Leeds, located at the eastern edge of Kansas City.21 His lifelong support of and involvement with the Democratic Party put Thompkins into direct and repeated contact with Kansas City's leading Democrat, political boss Tom Pendergast. In the wake of his 1926 study on tuberculosis, Thompkins was appointed to the city's hygiene department, an appointment that Schirmer argues "represented an alliance between Pendergast forces and the old guard of black Democrats." Not long after his appointment, Thompkins undertook a study of the general health conditions of Kansas Citians, focusing especially on the sad state of sanitation and its consequences in the city's African American neighborhoods. He detailed his findings in a fifteen-page report to Dr. John Lavan, health commissioner of child hygiene and communicable diseases for the city.22 In his report, By 1924, General Thompkins noted, "The health conditions of this city ... as far as sanitation Hospital No. 2 was the first hospital in the is concerned, are worse now than they have ever been." One reason for this, United States to have an he asserted, was "the large influx of Colored population from the South, and all-black staff. the consequent practice of tenement-house owners of constructing cheap out [The Historical Society of houses in conjunction with their poorly constructed homes." Cheap, quick Washington, DC] construction occurred in response to the movement of African Americans from South to North and from rural to urban settings as part of what historians call the "Great Migration" during the era of World War I and the generation that followed it. Kansas City's African American population grew by more William J. Thompkins • 173 than seven thousand persons during the 1910s and an additional nearly eight thousand during the 1920s.23 Thompkins cited other sources of poor sanitation in the black community, including the problem of rats and flies in "certain public meeting places" such as "pool-halls," "pastime or pleasure clubs," and "restaurant and lunch counters." Likewise, he noted, "Another great menace to the health of Negroes comes as a result of poor regulation and supervision of the barber-shops in Colored communities." Indeed, Thompkins's report was, more than anything, a call for new, more forceful government regulations aimed at improving the city's sanitation, especially in African American neighborhoods. Some African Americans in Kansas City objected to Thompkins's report, alleging that the portrayal of blacks as sickly would make whites less likely to hire them.24 Meanwhile, Thompkins and Felix Payne Sr., widely known as one of Tom Pendergast's "black associates," moved to establish a new method of recruiting African Americans in Kansas City into the Democratic Party. In 1928, with the support of Pendergast and likely with his financial backing, they established a black newspaper, the Kansas City American. This paper, which tended to support the Democratic Party, offered an antidote to the Republican-leaning African American newspaper in the city, The Call, published by Chester A. Franklin. Thompkins emerged as the publisher and editor of the new paper.25 During the 1928 presidential election, Thompkins used the pages of the Kansas City American to criticize the Republican Party and its presidential candidate, Herbert Hoover. By contrast, he promoted the fortunes of Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith of New York, as well as other Democratic candidates at all levels. In addition, he served as the country's "Central Division" director of the Smith-for-President Colored League. Historian Samuel O'Dell has written that under Thompkins's guidance, Missouri was "perhaps the best organized state . . . where Smith supporters formed twenty-nine local Smith-for-President clubs."26 Smith's loss to Hoover and the latter's four-year reign as president, marked by the onset of the Great Depression, further engaged Thompkins as a Republican critic. In 1932 he took to the campaign trail, making speeches on behalf of Democratic candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt and others of his party. He emerged as the president of a political action group known as the National Colored Democratic Association and used his position and the organization to persuade African Americans to vote the Democratic ticket. White political organizers recognized and sought his power and influence. On June 20, 1932, for example, an assistant to Missouri Democratic gubernatorial candidate Francis M. Wilson wrote to Thompkins, asking for his help in delivering the black vote in the Missouri Bootheel. The aide had learned that "there is a colored Democratic organization, with headquarters in Sikeston, that has about three hundred members in this and New Madrid County, and who vote as a unit." He sought Thompkins's advice on making sure that those voters supported Wilson. Likewise, he asked Thompkins to rally the black vote in Kansas City on Wilson's behalf.27 Meanwhile, Thompkins recalled in a letter to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in 1935, he responded to "the request of our National Committeeman, the Honorable W. T. Kemper," who instructed him 174 Missouri Historical Review "to get the Negro press and the Negro leaders into action" in support of "the Roosevelt cause."28 In addition to traveling and speaking for Roosevelt and other Democratic candidates during the 1932 campaign, Thompkins used the Kansas City American to attack President Hoover and other Republicans. In a hard-hitting editorial titled "What Can Be Worse Than Hoover" published on July 14, Thompkins condemned what he described as the president's "anti-Negro proclivities" and his tendency to support actions "positively inimical to what Negroes consider their best interests]."29 Roosevelt, of course, defeated Hoover in the 1932 election, a contest in which African Americans in the United States evidenced a growing willingness to abandon the Republican Party in an effort to promote their economic interests. Indeed, in Missouri, according to Grothaus, "A majority of Blacks . . . voted for the Democratic party in 1932."30 Thompkins wasted no time in calling his contributions to this victory to the attention of Roosevelt and his advisers. On November 19, 1932, Thompkins wrote to Louis M. Howe, a close associate of the president-elect, and proclaimed himself William T. Kemper, a to be someone who had spent "twenty-five years' work and prominent Kansas City devotion for the cause of the party and its ideals." Thompkins assured Howe banker, was also involved of his "constancy and persistence," adding that "never once have I been off the with grain milling and range, nor have I been found sulking in my tent" [emphasis in original]. This railroad transportation last comment was likely a reference to such Republican-turned-Democrats companies. [Missouri Valley Special as Arthur Wergs Mitchell of Chicago, with whom Thompkins later openly Collections, Kansas City clashed at a meeting of "dominant black Democrats" called by Mitchell in 31 Public Library, Kansas January 1933. City, Missouri] Of course, Thompkins hoped that his hard work on behalf of Roosevelt and the Democrats would result in his being appointed to an important patronage position. He spent a great deal of time over the next year trying to gain such an appointment. Especially interested in being named the governor of the Virgin Islands, he explained in a letter to a member of the House Committee on Insular Affairs, "For the President of the United States to name a Colored man Governor of the Virgin Islands would be the highest honor that has ever been recorded a race man in America, and would be the most outstanding stroke that could be made in the way of honoring the Negro race."32 Thompkins mustered considerable support from powerful Democrats for his effort to gain the Virgin Islands position. Among his supporters was Kansas City Congressman Joseph B. Shannon. Congressman John J. Cochran, Shannon's cross-state colleague, also supported Thompkins's effort. In a letter to James A. Farley, FDR's postmaster general and chairman of the National Democratic Committee, Cochran asserted his belief that "if there is one place in the United States where the Negro is a Democrat it is in Kansas City, Missouri." Cochran credited Thompkins for this reality, adding, "Through the efforts of our good friend, Mr. Thomas Pendergast and others, the Colored man votes the Democratic ticket and is taken care of by the political organization."33 Thompkins even solicited the support of Eleanor William J. Thompkins • 175 Roosevelt in his effort to obtain the Virgin Islands position. In a more than eight-hundred-word letter to Mrs. Roosevelt, he outlined his contributions to the Democratic Party and his qualifications for the post, and recognizing the first lady's empathy for children, he included the explanation that if he received the gubernatorial post, one of his priorities would be to reduce infant mortality among residents of the Virgin Islands.34 In the end, Thompkins failed to get the Virgin Islands post, and an African American was not appointed to the governorship of that American protectorate until 1946. What Thompkins failed to realize was that he was running up against FDR's so-called "Southern strategy," the president's effort to avoid doing anything that would offend white Southern congressional leaders, whose support he needed to enact his New Deal program.35 The president did, however, nominate Thompkins to serve as recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia on March 19, 1934. This nomination came only five days after Farley, the party chairman, endorsed Thompkins's application to a top presidential assistant and assured him that "this appointment has the approval of William T. Kemper, National Committeeman for the State of Missouri, and [Missouri] Senator Bennett Champ Clark." Thompkins's appointment to the recorder's position was safe for the president, inasmuch as the recorder's job had been held by an African American for roughly fifty years, since Frederick Douglass first held it during the early 1880s. Thompkins was confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate and assumed the duties of his new office on April 20, 1934, at a salary of $5,600 per year. Four months later, Thompkins wrote to Louis Howe, now secretary to Roosevelt, assuring Howe that he Bennett Champ Clark helped establish the understood the president and his ideals, that he admired Roosevelt, and that he 36 American Legion and "firmly believe[d]" that "I can sell him to the colored race." became its first national The new job meant that Thompkins, then in his mid-fifties, would commander. have to relocate his family from a home on Euclid Avenue in Kansas City [SHSMO 004995] to Washington, DC. Thompkins's Kentucky-born wife, Jessie, whom he had met in Kansas City while she worked as a teacher at Lincoln High School and married on June 17, 1913, was in her mid-forties in 1934. His daughter Helen was eighteen, and daughter Marion, the only family member to survive into the twenty-first century, was only six years old when the family left Kansas City. In a February 2006 interview, she recalled starting elementary school at W. W. Yates School in Kansas City and her family's regular attendance at Metropolitan AME Church. She also had fond memories of the neighborhood in which she grew up, the stories her father told her, and the frequent visits to the family home by her father's close friend and political and business associate, Felix Payne.37 Despite the move to Washington, DC, Thompkins remained in close touch with many people in Kansas City, especially Payne. Indeed, he hired Payne's son, Felix Jr., to work in the DC recorder's office, as well as other Kansas City African Americans, among them William Dancy. Dancy recalled in a 2001 interview that 176 Missouri Historical Review his father had been an ally of Thompkins and that he had done "a lot of stomping throughout the little towns in Missouri for both Roosevelt and Truman" and that Thompkins had promised his father "that when I got old enough I would have a job." After Dancy graduated from Lincoln High School in Kansas City, he went to work for Thompkins in the District of Columbia's office of the recorder.38 The Thompkins family returned frequently to Missouri so that Dr. Thompkins could check on his property and business interests in Kansas City and visit an aunt, Eva Carter, who lived in Jefferson City. Thompkins also attended Lincoln University board of curators' meetings in Jefferson City after his appointment to that institution's governing board in 1933.39 Thompkins also returned to Missouri during the 1934 political season to campaign for Democratic congressional candidates. In a letter to FDR aide Marvin Hunter Mclntyre, Thompkins reported that he had "been in Missouri working in the 10th, 11th and 12th [congressional] districts" and that he had worked especially hard for "the Honorable Thomas C. Hennings, Jr.," who defeated incumbent Leonidas C. Dyer "with more than [a] 15,000 majority in a solid Negro district." Thompkins added, "I am confident that Mr. Hennings is going to make a successful Congressman for the President and the Party." Thompkins also worked on behalf of a number of lower- profile Jackson County candidates, including Harry S. Truman.40 In a 1963 interview, longtime Truman friend and associate Harry H. Vaughan confirmed that Thompkins was "a very enthusiastic Truman supporter," adding that "[Thompkins] was Mr. Truman's particular connection—liaison with the Negro population."41 In addition to traveling to Missouri during the off-year election, Thompkins reported to Mclntyre that he had gone to Nebraska on behalf of the Democrats. He also wrote a booklet describing the benefits of the New Deal, "with special emphasis on the Negroes." Likewise, in a At the launching of the SS letter to Louis Howe, Thompkins Booker T Washington, itemized the cost to him of producing this booklet, indicating that he regarded Mary McLeod Bethune, the $350.48 he had spent as a "contribution to the success of the greatest Marian Anderson, and Administration in the history of the United States." Clearly, Thompkins was Thompkins (in the top trying to let those who mattered in the party know that his appointment to a hat) congratulate the federal patronage position had been a good choice.42 workmen who helped construct the ship. Some months later, during the winter of 1935, Thompkins planned a self- [Library of Congress, described "Goodwill Tour . . . Through the Heart of the South Preaching the Prints and Photographs Doctrine of the New Deal." Before he departed, he circulated his proposed Division, FSA/OWI remarks to a number of people in the Roosevelt administration and the first Collection, LC-USE6-D- lady. On January 22,1935, Eleanor Roosevelt responded to Thompkins, telling 007662] him, "I think your speech is excellent," although she urged him to emphasize William J. Thompkins • 177 that "the new measures ... will benefit all and there will be no distinction as to color."43 Weeks later, on the evening of February 13, Thompkins boarded "the aristocrat of winter trains, 'The Florida Special,'" and traveled to Jacksonville, Miami, St. Petersburg, St. Augustine, Daytona Beach, Palm Beach, and other Florida cities, endeavoring "to show not only what the New Deal has done for the nation, but for our group in particular."44 Thompkins's trip through Florida generated a great deal of publicity for himself, his cause, and the president. From Florida, Thompkins traveled through Alabama, making speeches in Mobile and Pascagoula. The Mobile (AL) Press quoted Thompkins as identifying Roosevelt as "'the greatest humanitarian since Christ.'"45 In Mississippi, Thompkins stopped at the Biloxi home of Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederacy, before going on to Gulfport, Pass Christian, and Bay St. Louis. From Mississippi, he went to New Orleans, where he participated in Mardi Gras. Thompkins next motored to Montgomery, Alabama, and then to Birmingham. He visited Tuskegee Institute, where he found two women whom he had trained as nurses at Kansas City's General Hospital No. 2. He also spent time with the aging African American scientist, George Washington Carver.46 Although he no longer lived in Kansas City, Thompkins maintained a financial and managerial interest in the Kansas City American, and he guided the newspaper's support of FDR and other Democrats. In a letter to the president in late 1935, he assured Roosevelt that he continued "to interpret to our many readers of the Kansas City American my conception of the ideals for which you have stood and now stand."47 The 1936 election season saw Thompkins traveling again throughout the Midwest and South in support of his party. Among the many speeches on behalf of the president that he delivered that year was one in late February at the Bishops Council of the African Methodist Episcopal Church of America, Africa, and the West Indies, held at the Ebenezer Church in Kansas City, Missouri. Thompkins took the occasion to applaud the president's "social justice program" and hailed his tendency "to recognize merit without regard to race[,] color[,] or conditions." He urged "our people" to support the president so that his administration could "keep open the door of hope" to all people.48 Whenever Thompkins spoke, letters of praise for his efforts poured in to Democratic Party leaders in an effort at adulation that one suspects the doctor had a hand in orchestrating. After speeches by Thompkins in Taft and Muskogee, Oklahoma, for example, he was praised by the superintendent of the Oklahoma State Hospital for Negro Insane as a "great leader" who could bring "one hundred thousand disciples" to the Democratic cause, if he could but "have a few more days to present the cause."49 Sam Battles, the white Democratic State Central Committee chairman for Oklahoma, concurred, explaining in a letter to President Roosevelt that he had heard Thompkins deliver "a very logical report of the accomplishments of this administration," adding patronizingly, "He is one of the first Negroes that it has been my privilege to hear that appealed to logic rather than the emotions of the people." Battles concluded, "I consider his work very much worth while among his people."50 178 Missouri Historical Review During the 1940 political campaign, Thompkins spent a considerable amount of time in Missouri, working on behalf of his old friend and political ally Harry S. Truman in the latter's race for the U.S. Senate against Missouri Governor Lloyd C. Stark. According to Truman scholar Robert H. Ferrell, Truman appointed Thompkins "general chairman of the Negro Division" for his campaign in Missouri. Thompkins traveled throughout the state on Truman's behalf and often gave the man from Independence advice. Indeed, liilMI Ferrell credits Thompkins with helping Truman to craft a speech in Sedalia during the campaign. The occasion was the dedication of a hospital for African Americans, and Truman, at the urging of Thompkins, pledged his belief "in the brotherhood of man, not merely the brotherhood of fiicil white men, but the brotherhood of all men before the law." As Ferrell writes, "It was an extraordinary thing to say in outstate Missouri, where southern ideas and ways dominated. . . . [Truman] was making a bid for black support in a tight race."51 In addition to his work on Truman's behalf, Thompkins campaigned again for President Roosevelt's reelection, Thompkins traveled just as he had done in 1936. During the final days of the the country and spoke campaign, he chronicled his travels and speech-making on behalf of the in support of the president through West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri in a Democratic Party during series of letters to General Edwin M. Watson, secretary to the president. In the 1936 election season. back-to-back letters to Watson on October 28 and 29, 1940, he lamented the [The Historical Society of fact that the popular African American heavyweight boxer Joe Louis had Washington, DC] endorsed Roosevelt's opponent, Wendell Willkie, but then reported to Watson that he had picked up the endorsement of Jessie Owens, the African American track star and hero of the 1936 Olympics. Thompkins explained to Watson that he believed that "Owens would be the better in oratorical combat and the worse [sic] that could happen would be a stalemate contest." In one of the letters, Thompkins signed himself as "Just a private in the ranks without portfolio."52 Roosevelt, of course, won an unprecedented third-term victory in the 1940 election. Thompkins sent him a "victory ham," purchased in central Missouri, on November 5. Sending "victory hams" to celebrate political victories had become a tradition for Thompkins by this time.53 But Thompkins was growing increasingly restive as a "private in the ranks" of the Democratic Party. On June 26, 1941, he wrote to Marvin H. Mclntyre in an effort to help an old friend, Frederick S. Weaver of Missouri, obtain a patronage position. Thompkins began his letter by telling Mclntyre, "For some time Negro Democrats have been trying to obtain jobs in the Federal Departments, and, as I have told you before, many of these Negro Democrats have become disillusioned because prominent positions have been filled by Negroes who have never worked for the Democratic Party." Clearly frustrated that he had not been consulted about the Department of Agriculture's intent to hire Sherman Briscoe of Chicago as "Negro writer" for the department, Thompkins lashed out at the appointment: "Mr. Briscoe William J. Thompkins • 179 is hardly a Democrat or I would have heard of him. He is hardly a competent newspaper man, or I would know something of his record in that regard, being an editor myself. I have contacted several prominent Negro writers and none have heard of him."54 Of course, Thompkins was not the only African American unhappy with the president and his party. This was the era in which labor leader A. Philip Randolph threatened the president with a march on Washington if the latter did not take steps to help African Americans obtain jobs in the growing defense industry. According to historian Thomas Lee Green, it was Thompkins who "alerted the administration to Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters president A. Philip Randolph's intention to stage a march on Washington."55 Despite his growing unhappiness with the Roosevelt administration, Thompkins continued serving as the recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia under the Democratic president. He also remained active as an organizer of African American voters for the Democratic Party and a promoter of Democratic causes throughout the country, although during the last year of his life, he grew increasingly disturbed with the president and the party for their failure to provide more patronage positions for African Americans. Because of his prominence as a national spokesman for black Democrats, Thompkins often received letters from disenchanted African Americans throughout the country, some of whom threatened to abandon the Democratic Party and turn to the Republicans. Increasingly alienated from the Roosevelt administration, Thompkins grew critical of many African Americans who had gained favor with the president. In June 1943, he blasted Roosevelt's "Black Cabinet" as "political snobs," most of whom, he argued, "partake of political largess as if it were their due, and never lift a fingert o further the interests of the Democratic party."56 Two months later, as talk about a Roosevelt fourth term grew louder, Thompkins wrote to James L. Houghteling, director of the National Organization Section of the U.S. Treasury Department, warning that the Democrats were in trouble with African Americans. Thompkins enclosed a list of names of seventy-six African Americans from nineteen states who, he asserted, "have been ignored or overlooked." He urged that the men and women whose names appeared on the list be rewarded for their work on behalf of the Democratic Party and the president, explaining in the folksy way that he sometimes employed, "The mule who plows the corn should eat some of the corn."57 Dr. William J. Thompkins did not live to see Roosevelt's election to a fourth term. He died three months before the 1944 election, on August 4. Among his mourners was the president of the United States, who sent Jessie Thompkins a telegram the next day, expressing his "heartfelt sympathy" in the wake of her husband's passing. Had Thompkins lived just nine more months, he would have witnessed his old friend Harry S. Truman's advancement to the presidency. Marion Thompkins Ross, Thompkins's younger daughter, recalled that her mother often commented that if Thompkins had lived to see a Truman presidency, he could have gotten any position he wanted from the man from Missouri. Alas, he did not. He left behind, however, a remarkable legacy of loyalty to the Democratic Party, to his profession, and to his people, as a "race man" of great talent and energy.58 180 Missouri Historical Review NOTES 9. Jackson, Missouri Democracy, 3: 846. 1. Frank P. Walsh to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 22 10. Thomas J. Ward, Black Physicians in the Jim September 1931, William J. Thompkins file, Collection Crow South (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, PPF 8751, Franklin D. Roosevelt Papers, Franklin D. 2003), 4-5, 18-19. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York (hereinafter 11. Marion Thompkins Ross, telephone interview cited as FDR Papers). by author, 10 March 2004; Ward, Black Physicians, 15. 2. Ibid.; Franklin D. Mitchell, Embattled 12. Register of Physicians, vol. 2, State Board of Democracy: Missouri Democratic Politics, 1919- Health Collection, Missouri State Archives, Jefferson 1932 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1968), City. 191n8. 13. J. Edward Perry, Forty Cords of Wood: 3. Helpful studies documenting the movement Memoirs of a Medical Doctor (Jefferson City, MO: of African Americans from the Republican to the Lincoln University, 1947), 140-141. Another reason Democratic party during the decades of the 1920s that Thompkins may have gone to Kansas City is that and 1930s include: Larry H. Grothaus, "The Negro in his father, Marion, was living there by about 1890. He Missouri Politics, 1890-1941" (PhD diss., University of appears in Kansas City directories over the next two Missouri-Columbia, 1970); Nancy J. Weiss, Farewell to decades. Although Eliza Thompkins appears as a widow the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR in the 1880 federal census, her husband, William's (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); and father, did not die until November 26, 1910. Marion's Dennis S. Nordin, The New Deal s Black Congressman: death certificate was signed by William. Unfortunately, A Life of Arthur Wergs Mitchell (Columbia: University Marion Thompkins Ross was unable to shed any light of Missouri Press, 1997). on the apparent estrangement between her father's 4. Tenth Census of the United States, 1880, parents. Marion Thompkins, death certificate, File No. Population Schedule, "Cole County" (National Archives 34432, Death Records, Missouri State Archives. Microfilm Publication T9, roll 682), 40A. 14. Walsh to Lane, 3 September 1913; Thompkins 5. Beasleys Jefferson City Directory, for 1877-8 to Walsh, 6 October 1913, both in Frank P. Walsh (Jefferson City, MO: Regan & Carter, 1877), 110, 112; Papers, Archives and Manuscript Division, The New Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of Missouri: Jefferson York Public Library. The author is grateful to John City (New York: the company, n.d.), 6-8. McKerley for bringing these letters to his attention. 6. William Rufus Jackson, Missouri Democracy: 15. Charles E. Coulter, "Take Up the Black Man's A History of the Party audits Representative Members, Burden ": Kansas City s African American Communities, Past and Present (Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1935), 3: 846. 1865-1939 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 210. 7. "Lincoln Institute, Register for the Year Commencing Sept. 5, 1892 and ending June 1893, 16. Ibid.; Perry, Forty Cords of Wood, 374. Inman E. Page, President," 124-125, Ethnic Studies 17. R. E. L. Morris and Drake Watson to Woodrow Center, Inman E. Page Library, Lincoln University, Wilson, 18 January 1917, folder 1, William J. Thompkins Jefferson City, Missouri. Curiously, this register Collection, Historical Society of Washington, DC. identifies Thompkins's mother as being "Marion Thompkins," who, in reality, was the young man's 18. Marion Thompkins Ross interview; Sherry father. Thirtieth Annual Catalogue of Lincoln Institute, Lamb Schirmer, A City Divided: The Racial Landscape 1900-1901 (Jefferson City, MO: Tribune, 1901), 37; of Kansas City, 1900-1960 (Columbia: University W. Sherman Savage, The History of Lincoln University of Missouri Press, 2002), 65; Grothaus, "Negro in (Jefferson City, MO: Lincoln University, 1939). The Missouri Politics," 97. Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900, Population Schedule, "Cole County" (National Archives Microfilm 19. Kansas City Sun, 22 February 1919. Publication T623, roll 850), 99A, indicates that 20. Ibid., 1 March 1919. Thompkins was a "student" that year, living in the home of his grandmother, Matilda Nelson. 21. Schirmer, City Divided, 163-164. 8. Thirty-first Annual Catalogue of Lincoln 22. Ibid., 163; Thompkins to Lavan, n.d., Lincoln Institute, 1902-1903 (Jefferson City, MO: Republican, Collection, Missouri Valley Special Collections, 1902), 32. Kansas City (MO) Public Library. Although this report William J. Thompkins • 181 is undated, articles about it appeared in the Kansas City 35. Dennis Nordin writes that African Americans Times and the Kansas City Star on June 10, 1926. who sought patronage positions in the wake of the 1932 Democratic victory were stymied by party 23. Thompkins to Lavan; Fourteenth Census of leaders who refused to make any promises because the United States Taken in the Year 1920: Population they feared "a Southern backlash." Nordin concludes, (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1922), "Making matters worse, nobody close to Roosevelt 2: 53; Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930 had even been courageous enough to thank the faithful (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1931), minority workers properly." Nordin, New Deal s Black vol. 3,pt. 1:61. Congressman, 42. 24. Thompkins to Lavan; Kansas City Call, 10 36. Farley to Marvin H. Mclntyre, 14 March June, 9 September 1927. 1934; Jefferson S. Coage to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 24 25. Coulter, "Take Up the Black Mans Burden, " April 1934; Thompkins to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 27 114; Schirmer, City Divided, 163. September 1934; Thompkins to Howe, 25 August 1934, all in Official File Collection (hereinafter cited as OF), 26. Samuel O'Dell, "Blacks, the Democratic Series 51-c, FDR Papers. Party, and the Presidential Election of 1928: A Mild Rejoinder," Phylon 48 (Spring 1987): 6-7. See also, 37. Marion Thompkins Ross, interview by author, Grothaus, "Negro in Missouri Politics," 121. In 1941 14 February 2006. former Missouri legislator, congressman, and U.S. 38. Ibid.; William F. Dancy, interview by John senator Harry B. Hawes confirmed Thompkins's role on Viessman and author, 17 October 2001. behalf of Democrats in the 1928 election when he wrote a letter to the doctor, commenting, "The only thing that 39. Thompkins continued to serve on the Lincoln interests me are recollections of the old days when you University board until March 14, 1939. Lloyd C. Stark had charge of the Negro Division in the Smith campaign to Thompkins, 14 March 1939, folder 1742, Lloyd and I formed a high opinion of your ability." Hawes Crow Stark Papers, WHMC-Columbia. to Thompkins, 31 March 1941, folder 1, Thompkins Collection. 40. Thompkins to Mclntyre, 16 November 1934, OF Collection, Series 51-c. 27. Unsigned letter (probably from Wilson's 41. Harry H. Vaughan Oral History, 14, 16 January campaign manager, C. A. Leedy Jr.) to Thompkins, 1963, www.trumanlibrary. org/oralhist/vaughan 1 .htm. 20 June 1932, folder 573, Francis M. Wilson Papers, See also Robert L. Sweeney Oral History, 12 December Western Historical Manuscript Collection, University 1977, www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/sweeneyr.htm. of Missouri-Columbia (hereinafter cited as WHMC- Columbia). 42. Thompkins to Mclntyre, 16 November 1934; Thompkins to Mclntyre, 25 September 1934, and 28. Thompkins to Eleanor Roosevelt, 6 April 1935, Thompkins to Howe, 28 October 1934, both in OF Eleanor Roosevelt Collection, Series 70, FDR Papers. Collection, Series 51-c. 29. Kansas City American, 14 July 1932. 43. Roosevelt to Thompkins, 22 January 1935, 30. Grothaus, "Negro in Missouri Politics," 135. Eleanor Roosevelt Collection, Series 100. 31. Thompkins to Howe, 19 November 1932, 44. William J. Thompkins, "Goodwill Tour of Dr. Series PPF 3634, FDR Papers; Nordin, New Deal's William J. Thompkins Through the Heart of the South Black Congressman, 43. In 1934, Mitchell became the Preaching the Doctrine of the New Deal," unpublished first African American to be elected to the United States manuscript, 1935, OF Collection, Series 51-c. Congress as a Democrat. 45. Ibid. Thompkins included in his report on his 32. Thompkins to Ralph F. Lozier, 8 May trip what he referred to as "Extracts from the Southern 1933, folder 1766, Ralph F. Lozier Papers, WHMC- Press" about his travels. According to Thompkins, this Columbia. comment was reported in the Mobile (AL) Press on March 1, 1935. 33. Shannon to Farley, 8 May 1933; Cochran to Farley, 12 May 1933, both in Eleanor Roosevelt 46. Ibid. Collection, Series 100, FDR Papers. 47. Thompkins to Roosevelt, 5 November 1935, 34. Thompkins to Eleanor Roosevelt, 15 May OF Collection, Series 51-c. 1933, ibid. 182 • Missouri Historical Review 48. Thompkins to Democratic National Committee, 53. Thompkins to Roosevelt, 5 November 1940, telegram, 22 February 1936, OF Collection, Series 51- OF Collection, Series 51-c. c. 54. Thompkins to Mclntyre, 26 June 1941, OF 49. H. C. McCormick to Jack Nichols, 25 February Collection, Series 51-c. 1936, OF Collection, Series 51-c. 55. Thomas Lee Green, "Black Cabinet Members 50. Sam Battles to Roosevelt, 29 February 1936, in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Administration" (PhD OF Collection, Series 51-c. diss., University of Colorado, 1971), 207. 51. Robert H. Ferrell, Truman and Pendergast 56. Chicago (IL) Defender, 12 June 1943. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 86, 95-96. 57. Thompkins to Houghteling, 11 August 1943, C. Jasper Bell Papers, WHMC-Columbia. 52. Thompkins to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Attention: General Watson, 23, 28, 29 October 1940, 58. Franklin Roosevelt to Thompkins, 5 August OF Collection, Series 51-c. 1944, Series 51-c, FDR Papers; Marion Thompkins Ross interviews, 10 March 2004, 14 February 2006. Need a Gift for the History Buff? The State Historical Society of Missouri can help! The Society's gift shop has T-shirts, playing cards, tote bags, notecards, books, mugs, and more. It is open Monday through Friday from 8:00 a.m' to 4:30 p.m. Items can also be purchased by calling (573) 882-7083 or visitingwww.shsofmissouri.org/cgi/store/. From the Stacks: Western Historical Manuscript Collection-Columbia The National Women and Media Collection JENNIFER LUKOMSKI* This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the National Women and Media Collection (NWMC) at the Western Historical Manuscript Collection- Columbia. The NWMC was established in 1987 by Marjorie Bowers Paxson, a longtime journalist and publisher, with the gift of her papers and a monetary donation. Through Paxson's generosity, Jean Gaddy Wilson of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and Nancy Lankford, associate director of WHMC-Columbia, were able to pursue the personal papers and records of some of the most influential women journalists and media organizations in the country. The collection currently comprises the papers and records of sixty-nine journalists and organizations, including Donna Allen, founder of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press; Sylvia Porter, personal finance writer; the National Federation of Press Women; and New Directions for News.1 The collection documents the roles women have played and are playing in media fields, both as media representatives and as objects of coverage, and how those roles have changed over time. Many of the women who have donated their papers have strong ties to Missouri. Three of those individuals are highlighted here. Laura Redden Searing Laura Redden Searing was born in Sommerset, Maryland, on February 9, 1839. Her family moved to St. Louis when she was a child, and at the age of eleven or twelve, she lost her hearing after a bout with spinal meningitis. From 1855 to 1858, she studied at the Institute for the Deaf and Dumb in Fulton, now the Missouri School for the Deaf. She then took a job as editor of the St. Louis Presbyterian and also wrote a number of poems and articles that appeared in the St. Louis Republican under the penname Howard Glyndon. The Republican sent Redden to Washington, DC, as a correspondent at the beginning of the Civil War. She quickly became a popular fixture of the capital's social scene, befriending such military and political figures as Ulysses S. Laura Redden Searing Grant and Senator George F. Edmunds of Vermont. Throughout her life, she [WHMC-Columbia] * Jennifer Lukomski is a senior manuscript specialist at the Western Historical Manuscript Collection-Columbia. 183 184 Missouri Historical Review would come to know many of the literary, social, and political elites of the late nineteenth century, as evidenced by the correspondence, notes, and poetry from the likes of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), John Wilkes Booth, Emily Howland, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry Ward Beecher found in her papers. The next few years were to be her most prolific as a writer. Between 1862 and 1864, she published two books: Notable Men, a collection of biographies of members of Congress, and a book of poems, Idylls of Battle, and composed the words to the song "Belle Missouri," an ode to the state's Union volunteers. Redden spent the postwar years traveling to Europe, Cuba, Hawaii, and the American West, studying, and writing for several New York newspapers and national magazines. She published her second book of poetry, Sounds from Secret Chambers, in 1873. Hoping to acquire better communication skills, she studied speech and lip reading with Alexander Graham Bell and others in the 1870s. Although never able to master lip reading, Redden did regain a limited ability to speak, and in her newspaper articles, she advocated the teaching of speech and lip reading along with sign language in all schools for the deaf. She married Edward Whelan Searing, a New York lawyer, in 1876, and they had one child, Elsa, in 1880. Shortly after Elsa's birth, the couple separated, and Laura moved to California. The correspondence from this period details the desperate financial straits Searing often found herself in and her frustration in trying to guide her free-spirited daughter safely into adulthood. She supported herself and Elsa through her travel writing and gifts from friends. Laura Redden Searing died on August 10, 1923. Highlights of the collection include the aforementioned correspondence Mary Paxton Keeley, ca. with literary figures, a photographic record of family and friends from the 1918 1860s through the 1940s, and Elsa's detailed letters home describing her [WHMC-Columbia] perilous journey to the Alaskan goldfields in 1899. Mary Paxton Keeley Mary Paxton Keeley, the first woman to graduate from the University of Missouri School of Journalism, was born on June 2, 1886, to John Gallatin Paxton and Mary Neil Gentry in Independence, Missouri. Shortly after her graduation from college in 1910, she started work at the Kansas City Post. Copies of her articles found in the collection reveal that she wrote mostly feature items and sob-sister stories rather than hard news, common fare for early women reporters. The highlight of Paxton's career at the Post came when she ascended sixty feet in the air on a swing attached to the tail of a box kite. She described the sensation as "a cross between a ride on a camel's back and a merry-go-round." Her mortified family called the stunt disgraceful, but Paxton was undeterred. She "felt that as a woman you had to do things to show that women could do them." From the Stacks 185 In 1918 she joined the YMCA effort in World War I and went to France to work in the Canteen Service. Her papers include a diary from this period and many photographs and postcards depicting France immediately after the war. Upon her return to the States in 1919, she married Edmund Burke Keeley, and they settled in Virginia. After her husband's death in 1928, Keeley and her young son, John Gallatin Paxton Keeley, moved to Columbia. She worked as a home economics extension agent while earning her master's degree in journalism. That same year, she published her first book, River Gold. In 1929 she began teaching journalism and creative writing at Christian College, now Columbia College, and founded the student newspaper, the Microphone. In addition to teaching, Keeley also wrote and published several plays, many of which were performed locally. She remained busy after her retirement in 1952, writing articles for the Kansas City Star, editing the Missouri Alumnus, taking up painting and photography, and involving herself in various civic affairs. She died on December 6, 1986, at the age of one hundred. Her lifelong commitment to the community was recognized when the Columbia Public Schools dedicated the Mary Paxton Keeley Elementary School in 2002. In addition to the materials mentioned earlier, Keeley's collection also contains her literary works, photography, and drawings, as well as audiocassettes and transcripts from three oral history interviews. One interview focuses on her friend, poet Orrick Johns, while the other two recount her childhood, family history, interest in writing, and her relationship with Bess and Harry Truman. Tad Bartimus Tad Bartimus came of age when women reporters were no longer relegated to the women's pages of newspapers. She was born in Belton, Missouri, on September 5, 1947, to James and Dixie Lee Bartimus. From an early age, she knew she wanted to be a reporter and was able to secure a part-time job at the Belton Star-Heraldwhile still in high school. Tad Bartimus at a As a journalism student at MU, Bartimus attended a talk by famed Vietnamese Hospital war photographer Larry Burrows. Afterward, she told him she was going after a 1974 Bombing [WHMC-Columbia] to drop out of school and go to Vietnam to report on the war. He admonished her to finish her degree and she did, but her desire to be a war correspondent only became greater. "I was tired of the baseball score deaths being reported," she said. "I wanted to tell what was happening to the people, the families, the children. I thought I could make a difference." She got a job with the Associated Press (AP) two days after graduation and worked in Topeka, Kansas, and Miami, 186 • Missouri Historical Review Florida, for several years, all the while lobbying for an assignment in Vietnam. In May 1973, she got her wish. The collection is rich in photographs and correspondence from her year in Vietnam as she kept copies of all her outgoing mail to friends and family, including some audiocassettes. In 1974, Bartimus was appointed chief of the Anchorage, Alaska, bureau, the first woman bureau chief in the history of the AP. Over the remainder of her career with the AP, she worked in London, Central America, and the American West as a roving correspondent. In 1990 she was named a special correspondent, one of only twenty-five in the history of the AP, and the first woman to hold that position. Her collection contains copies of and photographs from nearly every story she covered during the quarter century she worked for the AP, including two stories that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. The collection also documents the founding of the Journalism and Women Symposium (JAWS), which began in 1985 as a retreat for a handful of women journalists at Bartimus's home but has grown to include hundreds of journalists, educators, and researchers who meet every year to examine issues important to women in the field of journalism. She left the AP to teach journalism at the University of Alaska-Anchorage in 1993. That same year, while on a book tour, she was enticed to join the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock-and-roll band made up of well-known authors Stephen King, Dave Barry, Amy Tan, Barbara Kingsolver, and others. She currently writes a syndicated column, "Among Friends," and travels throughout the country for speaking engagements, including WHMC- Columbia's upcoming celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the NWMC in October. NOTES 1. A complete list of all WHMC-Columbia's Women and Media collections and their descriptions can be found at www.umsystem.edu/whmc/tl-womedia. html. Book Reviews William J. Spillman and the Birth of Agricultural his interest in studying farm economics and farm Economics. By Laurie Winn Carlson (Columbia: management. University of Missouri Press, 2005). 210 pp. Excited by the scientific revolution and the Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. role the U.S. Department of Agriculture was $39.95. playing in the generation and dispersion of its results, Spillman moved to Washington, DC, in This is a must-read for anyone interested 1902. His objective was to assist the USDA in in the economic history of the United States. dispersing scientific production knowledge to Much of current economic policy emanates the common farmer in an understandable and from the 1880s-1930s period and financially prudent manner. Spillman is embedded in the friction of the wanted to be involved with the team transformation of the family farm that moved the United States into a sector to a more industrialized form leading agricultural nation. of food production. This book Carlson is very detailed as she follows the evolution of a science- documents the role Spillman played oriented methodologist through his | during his sixteen-year stint with subliminal conversion into a policy- the USDA. She carefully describes driven social scientist. It is a story of conflicts of interest, explains an exciting time and the history of a different points of view, places true rural Renaissance man. subjects and crises in a larger context, William J. Spillman, born in and remains objectively loyal to her southwestern Missouri in 1863, subject. She is particularly good at enrolled at the University of Missouri explaining Spillman's role in laying in Columbia at age seventeen. He the foundation for the Agricultural earned his BS degree in 1886 and his MS degree Extension Service. This section of the book could in 1889. After several teaching jobs in Indiana, be used in political science and public policy Missouri, and Oregon and a short course at the formulation courses. Carlson carefully identifies University of Wisconsin, he arrived at what is now the vested interests and the opportunistic behaviors Washington State University in 1894. exhibited by certain parties and demonstrates the Spillman's first major scientific contribution naivete of some of the altruists. Spillman emerges was the "rediscovering" of Mendel's laws of as a noble hero in this section and accomplishes inherited characteristics through his research the almost-impossible—survival. with wheat varieties. This tedious and carefully During his USDA period, Spillman developed documented work laid the foundation for the the Office of Farm Management and the field of field of plant genetics in the United States. In farm management and introduced the concept of addition, Spillman became very sensitive to the "diminishing returns"—a controversial argument farmers' economic plight caused by variability that suggests there is an optimal amount of fertilizer of yield, production, and price. This exposure to or, for that matter, any input before diminishing the financial challenges faced by producers led to economic returns set in. The emerging industrial input sector did not appreciate this insight. 187 Missouri Historical Review Spillman departed the USDA and became Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and an editor for the Farm Journal in 1918. While the Making of the New South. By LeeAnn Whites at the Farm Journal, Spillman popularized (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). viii + 244 his "diminishing returns" concept, became the pp. Notes. Index. $75.00, cloth; $24.95, paper. first president of the American Agricultural Economics Association, and wrote Balancing the The last half of the nineteenth century saw the Farm Output. In this book, Spillman defended South reel from the shock of fundamental social, the importance of protecting the family farmer economic, and political change. LeeAnn Whites and introduced a pro-government intervention argues that gender can be a particularly useful concept called the "limited debenture plan." His means for interpreting those turbulent years. arguments affected policymakers developing Defining gender as a "relational category" that also the New Deal and subsequently were adopted applies to men, she establishes how gender ideals as the "allocation plan" in the 1933 Agricultural shaped the way men and women defined their own Adjustment Act. Between the publication of this sense of self and their relationship to each other (p. book in 1927 and his death in 1931, Spillman came 5). In the past, gender has been the rather silent to realize that protecting the family farm from the partner of race and class as an analytical tool; negative consequences of scale and efficiency Whites establishes it as a valid and complicating improvements was contradictory. Yet, seventy- instrument in the effort to explain this turbulent five years after the adoption of these programs, era. She builds on the work of historians such U.S. agricultural policy has changed little from the as Stephanie McCurry to provide a new way of foundations advocated by Spillman. looking at the Civil War, Reconstruction, and The reviewer's only major disappointment was industrialization of the New South (p. 5). In Carlson's cursory treatment of the other "father or eleven essays she proves that, indeed, gender does dean of agricultural economics," Henry C. Taylor, matter in explaining both domestic and political who succeeded Spillman at the USDA. The book relationships as well as influencing issues of race leaves the impression that these two men were and class. enemies, yet they had similar objectives, values, In the first four chapters, Whites demonstrates passions, and, ultimately, a similar understanding that the Civil War induced a crisis in gender, and she of the power of market economics. uses Missouri situations to illustrate how gender This reviewer strongly encourages not only influenced public policy and private relationships. reading but also studying this short but thorough The war undermined gender stereotypes and treatment of a most exhilarating time in U.S. traditional relationships: Southern white men agricultural economic and institutional history. proved unable to protect their wives and families; Carlson has done us a great favor by thoroughly those women had to become household heads and documenting this complex period of shifts from managers of the home, taking on public roles that populism to progressivism, from a rural to an urban had traditionally been male; and black men gained nation, from farming technology dominated by not only their freedom but also the possibility of folk knowledge to scientific agriculture, and from manhood, whereby they could be family heads. a diversified family farm model to a specialized Southern households were, in Whites's words, industrialized paradigm. She has done this by "turned . . . inside out" (p. 5). choosing the perfect subject—a humble Missouri In 1863, St. Louis women moved outside farm boy who became a globally recognized their traditional roles by joining the Ladies Loyal agricultural production and social scientist, League and supporting the federal policy to banish educator, and administrator. disloyal women to Confederate lines. Moreover, when refugees from southwest Missouri flooded Michael L. Cook into St. Louis, General Henry Halleck ordered University of Missouri- Columbia known Southern sympathizers to compensate the refugees. These circumstances once again placed women in the forefront of public advocacy, Book Reviews 189 subordinated Southern men, and allowed loyal refused to return to his 'place' in the postwar order men to regain their sense of manhood. Through of things" (p. 159). Felton's escalating racism compelling examples drawn from led her to utter her most egregious the provost marshal records, Whites and infamous statement: "'If it will builds a convincing case for the save one white woman, I say lynch a importance of gender in shaping the thousand black men'" (p. 181). discourse surrounding these disputes With these eleven gracefully about loyal and disloyal activities. written essays, LeeAnn Whites has Even prostitution became politicized made an important contribution to when the provost marshal classified our understanding of nineteenth- the girls as "home traitors" (p. 67). century America. Close reading In dealing with the aftermath of of the evidence, complex yet clear the war, Whites explores the cost of analysis, and trenchant argument defeat on Southern men and women result in convincing proof that gender and finds that women saw their will hereafter matter in historical primary task as "the reconstruction interpretation. of southern white men" (p. 86). Ladies Memorial Associations that began as efforts to honor Virginia J. Laas Confederate dead turned their emphasis to Missouri Southern State University reestablishing prewar gender relationships and rehabilitating the masculinity of Confederate men. Recasting a Craft: St. Louis Typefounders That desire to promote their men led, sadly, to Respond to Industrialization. By Robert A. their involvement in the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Mullen (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University By sewing the hoods and robes, encouraging Klan Press, 2005). xiii +197 pp. Illustrations. Notes. propaganda that emphasized the protection of Bibliography. Index. $45.00. womanhood and home, and acquiescing to Klan racism, Southern women played a key role in the In this book, Robert Mullen contributes to growth of the organization. our understanding of the role of the printing type The focus of the final chapters of this trade in the history of St. Louis and the United collection is Georgian Rebecca Latimer Felton, States. Printing type was produced by blocks of the first woman appointed to serve in the United metal or wood with fantastic variety in the period States Senate. Felton, who had worked closely in he considers; today we know these as fonts. St. her husband's political career, became well known Louis was at one time a significant part of the in her own right as a prominent member of the industry. Mullen suggests that the history of this Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) trade in St. Louis can also be used to understand and eventually as a vocal and virulent racist. Using general U.S. trends, responses to mechanization, the lens of gender, Whites reconstructs Felton's and the problems of craft and consolidation of evolving ideas on the war, home protection, the industry. The author shows that there was a suffrage, and racism. Resenting the failure of symbiotic relationship between the development Southern men to protect their families during the of this industry and the growth of public literacy. war, Felton looked first to the efforts of the WCTU For example, the typefounders were essential to to reform men and protect families. Gradually, she the hundreds of newspapers produced in that came to see that white women could use suffrage period. as a means to protect themselves. Ultimately, she A significant portion of the book reproduces found a way to shift responsibility for the South's dozens of typefaces created in this period, and woes onto the black man. As Whites explains: thus it will be a welcome addition for aficionados "Unable to blame the husband who could no of the intricacies of the printing industry and longer support her as he once had been able to hobbyist collectors of the typeface, who now have do, she displaced her anger on the freedman who a guide to the types produced in St. Louis. This 190 Missouri Historical Review reader marveled at the complexity of some of the of technology and change. He traces the effects types and what was accomplished at such an early of the technological change on the small numbers period. of workers in the industry (under two hundred in Mullen suggests that this story is also a window St. Louis even at its height). A fuller story would to understanding St. Louis and the industry's have emerged if he had also consulted some of response to industrialization, and the other two the labor press in the city, a press that owed its parts of his book make a start to excavating this existence to the typefounders' craft. The author story. Mullen's story is pieced does describe a harsher side to the together from a variety of scarce story of the industry's innovations sources, a project that obviously and creativity. The wages paid to the took a great deal of searching and majority of the workers after 1890 persistence, as the industry began were at poverty level, with increased its decline over a century ago, and numbers of women and children most of the business records were employed to allow the survival of thrown out as the Linotype machine the industry in the face of extreme made individual typeface obsolete. competition and consolidation. The author traces the founding, rise, Mullen might have linked the and consolidation of the industry story of technological innovations before the Linotype, noting how STE LOOTS more fully to the anti-union open entrepreneurs in St. Louis contributed shop drive he discusses in a brief to the intense competition that narrative. In St. Louis, that drive produced the beautiful type and led was a means of consolidating power to creative marketing and advertising. By 1880 that went well beyond concerns of mechanization three significant type companies were located in and was led by businessmen who felt they owed St. Louis, making it a major supplier to the industry their survival and St. Louis's status to the drive and the one thousand newspapers in Missouri. against organized labor. The industry prevailed in But intense competition led to the dominance of a that battle, leaving in its wake even lower wages, few key firms and then the creation of a monopoly, not only for typefounders, but for a variety of the American Type Foundry of New Jersey, one other metalworkers. The typefounding industry firm that produced most of the type across the was part of a larger effort to create St. Louis's nation. St. Louis firms sought to remain alive by status as a bastion of sweatshop labor, and it also appealing to antimonopoly sympathies and by allowed the city to flourish on the edges of uneven niche marketing as well as innovations, some of capitalist development. which were the harbinger of fully justifiable type lines that we take for granted today. Rosemary Feurer Mullen's narrative contribution would have Northern Illinois University benefited from more linkages to the historiography Book Notes A History of Pierce City through Post Cards, This book explores the history of Monroe Photographs, Papers, & People. By David H. County, birthplace of Mark Twain, from its Jones (Springfield, MO: David H. Jones, 2005). formation in 1831 to today. Learn about the towns, iv + 91pp. Illustrations. Appendixes. $25.00. organizations, and families that make up Monroe County. To order a copy, visit www.mtpublishing. By examining postcards and other images from Pierce City's past, author David H. Jones com/proddetail.asp?prod=monroecntymo. traces the history of the city, including its notable people, historic buildings, and memorable events. Harry S. Truman and the Cold War Revisionists. To order a copy, contact David Jones at (417) 861- By Robert H. Ferrell (Columbia: University of 9223 or [email protected]. Missouri Press, 2006). ix + 142 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Sources. Index. $24.95. Evolution of the Missouri Militia into the The presidency of Harry S. Truman has been National Guard of Missouri, 1804-1919. By John widely criticized for launching the Cold War. Glendower Westover (St. Louis: Messenger, 2005). Robert H. Ferrell reexamines the foreign policy x + 200 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. of the Truman administration to show that this Appendixes. Index. $25.00. remarkable president was actually sensible and Originally published as a doctoral dissertation, courageous in his decisions. this book describes the development of the state An Opportunity Lost: The Truman militia into the Missouri Guard. To order a copy, Administration and the Farm Policy Debate. By contact Orval L. Henderson, Missouri Society Virgil W. Dean (Columbia: University of Missouri for Military History, 8973 Lindenhurst Drive, St. Press, 2006). xv + 275 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Louis, MO 63126-2448, or olhmilitia@sbcglobal. Bibliography. Index. $39.95. net. During his presidency, Truman recognized Mark Twain in Paradise: His Voyages to the need for a new policy for the rapidly changing Bermuda. By Donald Hoffmann (Columbia: farming industry. Virgil W. Dean explores why University of Missouri Press, 2006). x + 185 pp. Truman's policy ultimately failed and the effect Illustrations. Appendix. Notes. Index. $29.95. this failure had on agriculture. Mark Twain frequently visited Bermuda to The Essence of Liberty: Free Black Women escape his hectic life. Donald Hoffmann examines during the Slave Era. By Wilma King (Columbia: Twain's time in paradise to reveal a side of the University of Missouri Press, 2006). xvi + 290 author rarely seen—Twain at rest. pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $39.95, cloth; $19.95, paper. Monroe County, Missouri: Then & Now, 1831- 2006. By the Monroe County Historical Society Wilma King discusses the history of free black (Evansville, IN: M. T. Publishing, 2006). 368 pp. women during the slave era. She explores the Illustrations. Index. $65.00. lives of these women, including their education, employment, self-esteem, social consciousness, and spirituality. 191 Graduate Theses Relating to Missouri History, 2006 Missouri State University, Springfield Master's Thesis Hunsinger, Teri E., "Spatiotemporal Patterns of Transitional Landscapes in the Southwest Missouri Ozarks." St. Louis University Doctoral Dissertation Russell, Eric N., "Outside the Southern Ideal: The Evolution of Mobile, New Orleans, and Saint Louis in the Context of the Antebellum South." University of Central Missouri, Warrensburg Master's Thesis Hart, Amy, "The Founding of Freedom: A Kansas City Civil Rights Organization Since 1962." University of Missouri-Columbia Master's Theses Beilein, Joseph, '"The Presence of These Families is the Cause of the Presence There of the Guerrillas': The Influence of Little Dixie Households on the Civil War in Missouri." Gold, Samuel, "Permanent Visitors: The Impact of Permanent Migration to Traditional Tourist Areas in the Lake Regions of Rural Missouri." Rowe, Leroy, "A Grave Injustice: Institutional Terror at the State Industrial Home for Negro Girls and the Paradox of Juvenile Delinquent Reform in Missouri, 1888-1960." Doctoral Dissertations Geiger, Mark, "Missouri's Hidden Civil War: Financial Conspiracy and the Decline of the Planter Elite, 1861-1865." Mallea, Amahia, "Rivers Running Through: An Urban Environmental History of the Kansas Cities and the Missouri River." 192 Graduate Theses 193 University of Missouri-Kansas City Master's Theses Behrends, Cheryl, "Thomas Hart Benton and the Narrative Paradigm." Kelman, Stephanie Ann, "Arthur Wayland Ellison: A Kansas City Actor." Washington University, St. Louis Master's Thesis Brunstrom, Mary Reid, "Modern in St. Louis: 1930's Modernist Architects and Their Clients." Become a State Historical Society of Missouri Member Memberships further the mission of the State Historical Society. They provide funds to purchase books, preserve newspapers, exhibit artwork, and publish works on the history of Missouri. Each member annually receives four issues of the Missouri Historical Review and the Missouri Times. Individual annual membership $20 (foreign, $30)J Family annual membership $30 Contributing annual membership $50 Supporting annual membership $100 Sustaining annual membership $200-$499 Visit www.shsofmissouri.org/cgi/ Patron annual membership $500 or more store/000l.html to join online or send Life membership $1,500 payment for memberships to: The State Historical Society of Missouri 1020 Lowry Street Columbia, MO 65201-7298 News in Brief Applications for 2007 Richard S. Brownlee On January 30, guest curator Walter Schroeder Fund grants are due June 30. Brownlee Fund grants gave an in-depth tour of the Society's map exhibit, are made annually to individuals and organizations The Stories They Tell: Understanding Missouri proposing to write publications about, or otherwise History through Maps. Schroeder explained how document, the history of Missouri and its citizens. each map reflects aspects of Missouri history Individuals, local historical societies, museums, and geography. His detailed descriptions of and governmental and nongovernmental agencies the maps have been compiled in a spiral-bound are eligible to apply for funding. Residency booklet published by the Society. The booklets within the state is not a requirement. Application are available for sale for $5.00. To order, contact forms are available at www.umsystem.edu/shs/ the Society at (573) 882-7083, or order online at brownleeaward.html or by contacting the Society www.shsofmissouri.org/cgi/store/index.html. at (573) 882-7083. Successful applicants will receive their funds at the annual meeting on November 3. The National History Day in Missouri State Contest will be held on April 14 on the University of Missouri-Columbia campus. To run the contest, Ongoing exhibits include Light & Life in volunteers are needed to help for all or part of the Missouri: Photos by Notley Hawkins in the North- day. For more information or to volunteer, contact South Corridor Gallery (on display through May Diane Ayotte or Lucinda Barnhart at (573) 882- 12) and The Stories They Tell: Understanding 0189 or [email protected]. Missouri History through Maps in the Art Gallery (on display through June 30). The forty-ninth annual Missouri Conference on History, sponsored by the University of Missouri- In the Art Gallery on February 6, Joan Stack, St. Louis Department of History, will be held at Society art curator, gave a talk titled "The Thread the Crowne Plaza in downtown St. Louis on April of Life: Rediscovering the Personal Side of George 19-20. The keynote speaker is James N. Giglio, Caleb Bingham" about a recent acquisition. Stack professor of history at Missouri State University, talked about how the painting reflects aspects of who will present "Stan Musial and the Significance Bingham's personal life, from his rarely discussed of Sports Biography." The deadline for early religious beliefs to his struggles to have a child registration is April 10. For further information or with his beloved second wife, and showed slides to register, visit www.umsystem.edu/shs/mch, or of nineteenth-century artworks with similar themes call the Society at (573) 882-7083. that might have influenced the artist. 194 THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF MISSOURI The State Historical Society of Missouri, heretofore organized under the laws of this state, shall be the trustee of this state - Laws of Missouri, 1899; Revised Statutes of the State of Missouri, 2000, chapter 183. OFFICERS, 2004-2007 Richard Franklin, Independence, President (vacant) First Vice President James R. Reinhard, Hannibal, Second Vice President Noble E. Cunningham Jr., Third Vice President Donna G. Huston, Marshall, Fourth Vice President Henry J. Waters III, Columbia, Fifth Vice President Albert M. Price, Columbia, Sixth Vice President and Treasurer Gary R. Kremer, Jefferson City, Executive Director, Secretary, and Librarian PERMANENT TRUSTEES (Former Presidents) Bruce H. Beckett, Columbia Lawrence O. Christensen, Rolla Robert C. Smith, Columbia H. Riley Bock, New Madrid Leo J. Rozier, Perryville Avis G. Tucker, Kansas City TRUSTEES W. H. (Bert) Bates, Kansas City (2007) Emory Melton, Cassville (2007) Roy Blunt, Springfield (2009) Thomas L. Miller Sr., Washington (2008) Charles R. Brown, St. Louis (2007) Robert J. Mueller, Ste. Genevieve (2007) John L. Bullion, Columbia (2009) James B. Nutter Sr., Kansas City (2009) Doug Crews, Columbia (2007) Bob Priddy, Jefferson City (2009) Laura White Erdel, Columbia (2008) Dale Reesman, Boonville (2009) Widget Harty Ewing, Columbia (2007) Brent Schondelmeyer, Independence (2007) Michael R. Gibbons, Kirkwood (2007) Brian K. Snyder, Independence (2009) Virginia J. Laas, Joplin (2007) Bonnie Stepenoff, Cape Girardeau (2008) Stephen N. Limbaugh Jr., Cape Girardeau (2008) Arvarh E. Strickland, Columbia (2009) W. Grant McMurray, Independence (2008) Blanche M. Touhill, St. Louis (2009) James R. Mayo, Bloomfield (2008) Robert W. Wilson, Milan (2008) EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE Eight trustees elected by the board of trustees, together with the president and the treasurer of the Soci ety, constitute the executive committee. The executive director serves as an ex officio member. Richard Franklin, Chairman, Independence Bruce H. Beckett, Columbia Virginia J. Laas, Joplin H. Riley Bock, New Madrid Stephen N. Limbaugh Jr., Cape Girardeau Charles R. Brown, St. Louis Albert M. Price, Columbia Lawrence O. Christensen, Rolla Robert C. Smith, Columbia Doug Crews, Columbia The State Historical Society of Missouri collects, preserves, makes accessible, and publishes material relating to the history of Missouri and the Middle West. Its extensive collections of books, newspapers, jour nals, maps, manuscripts, and photographs are open to the public. An art gallery features rotating exhibits with selected paintings by George Caleb Bingham and Thomas Hart Benton on permanent display. The Society is a not-for-profit, tax-exempt organization. Gifts of cash or property to the Society are deductible for federal income, estate, and gift tax purposes. For further information about gifts or bequests, contact Gary R. Kremer, Executive Director. Contact the Society at: 1020 Lowry Street, Columbia, MO 65201-7298; phone (573) 882-7083 or (800) 747-6366; e-mail: [email protected]; Web site: www.umsystem.edu/shs.