The Double Life of St. Louis Narratives of Origins and Maturity in Wade’S Urban Frontier

The Double Life of St. Louis Narratives of Origins and Maturity in Wade’s Urban Frontier

ADAM ARENSON

s Richard C. Wade summed up The Urban Frontier: The Rise of AWestern Cities, 1790-1830, his groundbreaking study of western urban development, he found occasion to quote William Carr Lane, St. Louis’s first mayor. In 1825, as Lane pressed the city council for the adoption of new municipal policies, he harkened back to an imagined past, a time when St. Louis “was the encamping ground of the solitary Indian trader.” Envisioning an origin story, Lane said that this first camp “became the depot and residence of many traders, under the organiza- tion of a village, and now you can see it rearing its crest in the attitude of an inspiring city.” Wade, reading across the history of Ohio Valley cities, could recognize Lane’s “history” as the rhetoric of a booster—and yet he delighted in what Lane’s story revealed as well as obscured about St. Louis’s history.1 Wade called Mayor Lane “the town’s most popular and powerful figure,” and “the West’s best student of urban affairs.”2 Such praise also

______Adam Arenson is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso. His book The Cultural Civil War: St. Louis and the Failures of Manifest Destiny is forthcoming. 1Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790-1830 (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), 270, quoting Lane, St. Louis, Minutes, April 28, 1825, William Carr Lane Papers, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis. 2Wade, The Urban Frontier, 277, 270.

INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY, 105 (September 2009) 2009, Trustees of Indiana University. ST. LOUIS 247

William Carr Lane, the first mayor of St. Louis. Lane’s early boosterism was, by the end of his life, darkened by the politics of slavery, abolition, and civil war. Courtesy of Encyclopedia Dickinsonia, http://chronicles.dickinson.edu/encyclo/

described Richard Wade himself, a genial leader for the community of urban historians. His books, essays, teaching, and mentorship provided a blueprint for the development of the study of the city in the United States.3 In The Urban Frontier, Wade established key precedents, trans- ferring the methods of his mentor, Arthur Schlesinger Sr., and those of colonial historian Carl Bridenbaugh from the study of the established

______3Among the appreciations of Wade’s work are Carl Abbott, “Review of Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790-1830,” for H-Urban, H-Net Reviews (April 1997) at http://www.h-net.org/reviews/; Timothy R. Mahoney, David Hamer, and Edward K. Muller, “Wade and Urban History,” Urban History Newsletter, 13 (March 1995) 1, 13; Zane L. Miller, “Introduction,” in The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790-1830 (Urbana, Ill., 1996), xi-xx. I was privileged to meet Professor Wade at his last public appearance, at the Seminar on the City at Columbia University in November 2005, as arranged by Kenneth Jackson, and to discuss my work with him then. 248 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

eastern seaboard cities to the recovery of the history of cities in the American West.4 Demurring from Lane’s story, Wade insisted that “[t]he towns were the spearheads of the frontier,” as he wrote in his book’s justly famous first line. “Planted far in advance of the line of settlement,” he continued, “they held the West for the approaching population.”5 Displaying a careful and lucid style, Wade’s work re-conceptualized the frontier as an urban and cosmopolitan space, and his innovative comparative methods shaped the conduct of urban history for generations. A half-century on, we can appreciate the foundational significance of The Urban Frontier, even while recognizing how methodological advances and a widening, transcultural perspective have altered the details of this frontier urban history. In the case of St. Louis, the intervening decades have revealed a double life of the city, a history of origins and maturity in competition with that portrayed in The Urban Frontier. Yes, in 1830 St. Louis was a fledgling city of the United States, carefully balancing economic and political ties from the fur-trade fringes to the centers of American power, its regional influence assured. But the city’s successes were still shaped by the patterns of its previous French and Spanish colonial rule, embodied in the accents and customs of the city’s elite. And—more so than for the other Ohio Valley cities considered in Wade’s study—the progress of St. Louis to 1830 was mere prelude, as the geography of slavery and freedom and the acquisition of lands further west brought transformative success and then lasting frustration to the city’s ambitions. Wade praised the city that William Carr Lane envi- sioned as of 1825; by the end of Lane’s long life, however, the criticism that he volleyed at his once-loved city revealed how St. Louis had been fundamentally changed by its place at the intersection of slavery politics and westward expansion, the center of the cultural Civil War.6

______4See Arthur Meier Schlesinger, The Rise of the City, 1878-1898 (New York, 1933); Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America, 1625-1742 (New York, 1938); and Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743-1776 (New York, 1955). For comments on these connections, see Abbott, “Review of Richard C. Wade”; Miller, “Introduction,” xii-xvi. 5Wade, The Urban Frontier, 1. 6Adam Arenson, “City of Manifest Destiny: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War, 1848-1877” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2008). ST. LOUIS 249

“The story of Western urbanism begins . . . not where one might expect,” Wade mused, as he introduced the origins of St. Louis. Founded when a French merchant company laid out streets “a thousand miles through the wilderness,” St. Louis was a somewhat uneasy fit with the other Ohio Valley cities that Wade investigated—cities with more uniform stories of founding and transformation along the United States’ western frontier.7 Through his research, Wade demonstrated the fallacy of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis. Solitary men creating clearings in the woods were not the vanguard of American civilization, as Turner had claimed.8 Wade’s analysis of urban development foreshadowed the work of “new western history” scholars, who would utilize a regional focus but reject Turner’s teleology completely.9 Yet while Wade inverted the order of Turner’s frontier progression, he ultimately preserved the same basic directional and national orientation, looking west at North America from the British colonies of the Atlantic seaboard. French planners did not found St. Louis as a “western” outpost per se; they saw it more as the northernmost city of the Caribbean, vital to their imperial concerns in North America after the loss of Quebec in the Seven Years’ War.10 The city site was on a high bluff, above the Mississippi River’s flood stage, and near the confluence with the Missouri River. Its location on the western bank, in the Louisiana Territory, was politically valuable but more incidental than intentional.

______7Wade, The Urban Frontier, 2-3, 1. Miller, “Introduction,” p. xvi, describes the comparative pairings among the five cities—“four situated on a major river and one (Lexington) not . . . three ‘slave’ cities (Lexington, Louisville, and St. Louis) with two ‘free’ cities (Pittsburgh and Cincinnati)”—though Pennsylvania’s 1780 emancipation law did not end slavery there until 1808. In my correspondence with Miller, this was his, rather than Wade’s, account of how these cities were chosen for research. Wade merely called them “six intolerably warm summer in Ohio valley cities,” Miller, e-mail correspondence with the author, August 2008; Wade, The Urban Frontier, x. 8Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Report of the American Historical Association (1893). 9For new western histories of the region, see Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York, 1987); Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West (Norman, Ok., 1991). Miller, “Introduction,” p. xx, argued that Wade’s approach was neither exceptionalist nor regionalist, but I consider the processes he described more specific to the time and place described. 10Arenson, “City of Manifest Destiny,” chap. 1. 250 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

Wade had noted that “it was in the context of imperial rivalry that such Western cities as St. Louis and Pittsburgh had their origins,” but then he moved quickly to consider the cities’ acquisition by the United States, making the international origins inconsequential.11 William Carr Lane was born in Philadelphia in 1789 and had only been in St. Louis eight years when he defeated Auguste Chouteau, one of the city’s founders, in the first mayoral race.12 When Wade dismissed the founding French traders in favor of English-speaking leaders like Lane, he privileged one narrative of the city’s origins over another. In contrast, historian Jay Gitlin has painted a convincing portrait of St. Louis at the center of a French-speaking “bourgeois frontier.”13 Even the earliest French nickname for the town—Pain Court, or “little bread”—denoted pride for a settlement dedicated to commercial pursuits rather than farming, fur-trade historian J. Frederick Fausz has argued.14 In his book, Gitlin traces how the Chouteaus continued to be St. Louis’s most powerful commercial and cultural brokers for generations after U.S. acquisition, essential both to extending trade networks across the continent and to shaping civic improvement. Their representatives negotiated and traded from Detroit to New Orleans, into the lakes of Minnesota, out to the Green River rendezvous in Colorado, and down the Santa Fe Trail into New Mexico—all the while remaining key players in the streets and on the wharves of St. Louis.15

______11Wade, The Urban Frontier, 1-13, quote p. 2. 12For a biographical sketch of Lane, see Krista Camenzind, “William Carr Lane,” in Dictionary of Missouri Biography, ed. Lawrence O. Christensen (Columbia, Mo., 1999), 471-72. 13Jay Gitlin, The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns in Mid-America and the Course of Westward Expansion, 1763 to 1863 (New Haven, Conn., 2009). On competing narratives in the city’s history, Arenson, “City of Manifest Destiny”; Jay Gitlin, “‘Avec Bien Du Regret’: The Americanization of Creole St. Louis,” Gateway Heritage, 9 no. 4 (1989), 2-11. Wade does men- tion the continuing dominance of St. Louis in the fur trade and into the Southwest—citing Frederick Jackson Turner’s later work, The Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 (1906). Wade, The Urban Frontier, 190 n68. 14J. Frederick Fausz, “The ‘Accredited Ascendancy’ of Auguste Chouteau: Creating the Image of the Fur Trader as City Founder,” speech at the “Frontier Cities” conference, St. Louis, March 2008. Fausz is preparing a new translation of the Fragment of Col. Auguste Chouteau’s Narrative of the Settlement of St. Louis, first published in 1858. 15Gitlin, The Bourgeois Frontier; see also William E. Foley and C. David Rice, The First Chouteaus, River Barons of Early St. Louis (Urbana, Ill., 1983); Shirley Christian, Before Lewis and Clark: The Story of the Chouteaus, the French Dynasty That Ruled America’s Frontier (New York, 2004). ST. LOUIS 251

The Chouteau Mansion, c. 1840. The Chouteau family embodied St. Louis’s decades of change from a French trading outpost to an American frontier city. Lithograph by J. C. Wild, from Lyman Pierson Powell, Historic Towns of the Western States (1901)

While Wade referenced the Chouteaus’ records and John F. McDermott’s pioneering history of the extensive French private libraries of early St. Louis, he did not consider the continuities between these private holdings and the later, official records of the city and its institu- tions—the property deeds and trade contracts written first in French, then in a mixture of languages, and only decades later completely in English, with reference to U.S. laws and statutes.16 In part, these connections would have been obscure to Wade. Jennifer Turner has argued that over the intervening centuries, the families of St. Louis traders had felt compelled and then persuaded to abandon their French identity and their often-intimate ties to American Indian nations in order to demon-

______16Wade, The Urban Frontier, 3-6; citations include John Francis McDermott, Private Libraries in Creole Saint Louis (Baltimore, Md., 1938); and John Francis McDermott, ed., The Early Histories of St. Louis (St. Louis, Mo., 1952). For continuity in the city’s print culture, see Eleanora A. Baer, “Books, Newspapers, and Libraries in Pioneer St. Louis, 1808-1842,” Missouri Historical Review, 56 (July 1962), 347-60; and John Neal Hoover, “Books and Print Culture on ‘The Confines of the Wilderness’: New Findings and Questions,” in “Frontier Cities”, ed. Adam Arenson, Barbara Berglund, and Jay Gitlin (forthcoming). 252 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

strate affinity with American notions like whiteness.17 Later, according to Gitlin, French heritage was reconfigured in romantic stories of Midwestern “local color,” at the moment when other white-ethnic immi- grants—Irish, German, Italian, or Eastern European—faced greater prej- udice.18 By gazing west with American eyes onto the mélange of French, Spanish, and American Indians in St. Louis, Wade found his starting point but not St. Louis’s origins. More fundamental than the interplay of European interests in any of these cities was the pre-existing American Indian geography. In discussing St. Louis’s origins, Wade casually referenced how the presence of indigenous people meant “St. Louis was regarded as a savage place,” one that “still had an Indian problem.”19 While perhaps understandable given the depictions of American Indian history in the mid-twentieth century, such a characterization is jarring to the modern reader. For each of Wade’s cities, “founding” was predicated on local indigenous leaders accepting the establishment of a permanent European settlement, and on continuing intercultural exchanges.20 By the time of St. Louis’s founding, the European importation of the horse had transformed the indigenous geography of the region, and the existing fur-trading network had ritualized European-Indian encounters. Yet, even as Wade researched, archaeologists and ethnolo- gists working across the river from St. Louis were completing excava- tions at the Cahokia Mounds, revealing how the site had been populated by tens of thousands, making it the largest settlement north of Tenochtitlán, today’s Mexico City.21 Thus, the region had been a political

______17Jennifer Louise Turner, “From Savagery to Slavery: Upper Louisiana and the American Nation” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 2008). 18Jay Gitlin, “From Private Stories to Public Memory: The Chouteau Descendants of St. Louis and the Production of History,” paper delivered at the Western History Association annual meeting, St. Louis, October 11, 2006. 19Wade, The Urban Frontier, 59. In the initial framing, Wade says settlement was delayed by “Indian hostility and British imperial policy,” leaving the region “merely the haunt of Indian and animal.” Ibid., 1, 2. 20Arenson, Berglund, and Gitlin, eds., Frontier Cities. 21Thomas E. Emerson and R. Barry Lewis, Cahokia and the Hinterlands: Middle Mississippian Cultures of the Midwest (Urbana, Ill., 1991); William R. Iseminger, “Culture and Environment in the American Bottom: The Rise and Fall of Cahokia Mounds,” in Common Fields: An Environmental History of St. Louis, ed. Andrew Hurley (St. Louis, Mo., 1997), 38-57; Timothy R. Pauketat, The Ascent of Chiefs: Cahokia and Mississippian Politics in Native North America (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1994). From the era of The Urban Frontier, see John Corcoran and Charles ST. LOUIS 253

and economic crossroads centuries before Europeans arrived. Even after Cahokia’s diminution, the opportunities of the river confluences kept the region that would nurture the city of St. Louis at the forefront of indigenous politics. As historians Kathleen DuVal and Heather Devine have described, American Indian nations long maintained leverage over Euro-American traders in the middle of the continent, with Osage leaders dominant in the Arkansas River Valley and intermarried métis controlling the upper Missouri River Valley and Canada.22 Wade’s problematic phrases are best replaced by historian Stephen Aron’s more neutral terms: those in St. Louis oversaw the de-diversification of the region, from fluid intercultural borderland into explicitly Indian-free U.S. border state.23 During the period Wade studied, political delegations from American Indian nations regularly consulted with Territorial Governor William Clark, dined in fur traders’ homes, and camped within the city limits.24 While Wade’s history offers the view west from the United States into his frontier cities, a history facing east and south, from the perspective of these American Indian visitors, would be a worthy project.25 If the origins of St. Louis and other cities appear foreshortened in The Urban Frontier, Wade’s ultimate claim, that “any historical view

______van Ravenswaay, “The Diary of John Corcoran,” Missouri Historical Society Bulletin, 13 (April 1957), 264-74; and John C. Ewers, “The Indian Trade of the Upper Missouri before Lewis and Clark: An Interpretation,” Missouri Historical Society Bulletin, 10 (July 1954), 429-46. 22Heather Devine, The People Who Own Themselves: Aboriginal Ethnogenesis in a Canadian Family, 1660-1900 (Calgary, 2003); Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia, Pa., 2006). These reflect a local version of the processes described in Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge, U.K., 1991). 23Stephen Aron, American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State (Bloomington, Ind., 2006). Influencing Aron are Abraham P. Nasitir and John F. Bannon, S. J.; for representative publications, see Nasatir, “The Shifting Borderlands,” The Pacific Historical Review, 34 (February 1965), 1-20; Bannon, “Missouri, a Borderland,” Missouri Historical Review, 63 (January 1969), 227-47. See also Robert M. Morrissey, “Bottomlands, Borderlands: Empires and Identities in the 18th Century Illinois Country” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2007). 24On these instances, William E. Foley, “The Lewis and Clark Expedition’s Silent Partners: The Chouteau Brothers of St. Louis,” Missouri Historical Review, 77 (January 1983), 131-46; and Katherine Lindsay Franciscus, “Social Customs of Old St. Louis,” Missouri Historical Society Bulletin, 10 (January 1954), 156-66. See also Aron, American Confluence; Carolyn Gilman, Lewis and Clark: Across the Divide (Washington, D.C., 2003); Gitlin, The Bourgeois Frontier. 25For a model, see Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 2001). 254 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

which omits this [urban] dimension of Western life tells but part of the story,” can surely be affirmed.26 Wade led the way in describing cities as key protagonists in American history, utilizing the richness of public pronouncements, newspapers, city directories, official municipal records, and the archived papers of notable politicians and businessmen.27 In generations since, those inspired by his work have found more sources—court records, tax rolls, the built environment, Census data, archaeological discoveries, even geographic information system (GIS) analysis—to enrich our understanding of urban life and landscape. These histories have often been less institutional and more expe- riential, highlighting the sights, sounds, and smells of the urban landscape and focusing on the illiterate, the poor, and those discrimi- nated against as much as on the educated, the established, and prosperous city leaders. “Commerce is the vital principle of the town,” Mayor Lane remarked in 1824. As Wade sought “a rough gauge of urban development,” he relied most often on the statistics of city business.28 In The Urban Frontier, St. Louis’s growth is measured in river tonnage handled, newspapers started, and city ordinances passed—but not in the lives of the laborers along the river or at the presses, or in investigating the fears behind newly enacted regulations. Even though Wade’s next book, Slavery in the Cities, considered the structure of antebellum urban slavery, in The Urban Frontier he only alludes to racial calculations underly- ing his businessmen’s profits.29 The wider networks of conflict and cooperation between black and white workingmen that encircled the unique form of slavery on the rivers and in St. Louis have interested scholars since, including Thomas Buchanan and Daniel Graff.30

______26Wade, The Urban Frontier, 342. 27“From almost the very beginning there was also an urban West,” Wade wrote, and said he had written its history “largely out of the newspapers, records, and manuscripts of contemporaries, and as often as possible in their own words.” Ibid., v. 28Lane, St. Louis Minutes, May 4, 1824, as quoted in Wade, The Urban Frontier, 286; ibid., 251. 29Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities; the South, 1820-1860 (New York, 1964), especially pp. 54-60. 30Thomas C. Buchanan, Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the Western Steamboat World (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004); and Daniel A. Graff, “Forging an American St. Louis: Labor, Race, and Citizenship from the Louisiana Purchase to Dred Scott” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2004). ST. LOUIS 255

Mercantile Library Hall, St. Louis, founded in 1846. As the city and its leaders became prosperous, they built large homes, schools, theaters, museums, libraries, and other indicators of culture. Harper’s Weekly, c. 1860

As these cities grew, Wade wrote, business and political leaders “turned increasingly to the cultivation of the good life.”31 Wade tracked the uneven progress, up to 1830, of St. Louis’s schools and colleges, har- bingers of the cultural and educational successes of the next decades. In the early city, territorial governor William Clark had opened a museum with artifacts from his expedition with Meriwether Lewis, and with further tokens offered by visiting American Indian leaders.32 A generation later, immigrant merchant Henry Shaw built an Italianate villa surround- ed by gardens in South St. Louis. When he donated what are today Tower Grove Park and the Missouri Botanical Garden to the city, Shaw provided sorely need green space—and the apogee of nineteenth-century refinement for the built-up metropolis.33

______31Wade, The Urban Frontier, 202. 32John C. Ewers, “William Clark’s Indian Museum in St. Louis” in A Cabinet of Curiosities: Five Episodes in the Evolution of American Museums, ed. Whitfield J. Bell Jr. et al. (Charlottesville, Va., 1967), 49-72; Gilman, Lewis and Clark; John Francis McDermott, “William Clark’s Museum Once More,” Missouri Historical Society Bulletin, 16 (January 1960), 130-33. 33For more on Shaw, his garden and park, and the urban world which they inhabited, William Barnaby Faherty, Henry Shaw, His Life and Legacies (Columbia, Mo., 1987); and Eric Sandweiss, 256 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

Wade did not dwell on the look of the city, neither describing how distinguished buildings bespoke cultural capital nor detailing the mechanics of road layout, sewer digging, and sidewalk construction integral to creating new sections of the city. In the years since, architectural historian Lawrence Lowic has catalogued the built environment of what might be called “official St. Louis,” and John Reps has gathered period illustrations that provided visual evidence for the city boosters’ dreams.34 Wade noted how “the rise of the suburbs was an index of the increasing pace of the West’s urbanization,” providing a first foray into the study of this inveterately American form of city expansion.35 In studying the neighborhoods of St. Louis, urban historian Eric Sandweiss built on this foundation to create a vibrant and compelling portrait of how the American landscape was transformed, mapping property allot- ments and cataloging building types to detail and alter Wade’s general- izations.36 Meanwhile, environmental historian Andrew Hurley has tracked how railroads simultaneously connected the downtown district to the streetcar suburbs and segregated the industrial waterfront from the rest of the city.37 Despite the impression gained from many official records, antebellum St. Louis was not merely the domain of men. As Mayor Lane went about his official duties, he also conducted a decades-long—and well- preserved—correspondence with his wife, Mary Ewing Lane, and their

______ed., St. Louis in the Century of Henry Shaw: A View Beyond the Garden Wall (Columbia, Mo., 2003). 34Lawrence Lowic, The Architectural Heritage of St. Louis, 1803-1891: From the Louisiana Purchase to the Wainwright Building (St. Louis, Mo., 1982); John William Reps, Saint Louis Illustrated: Nineteenth-Century Engravings and Lithographs of a Mississippi River Metropolis (Columbia, Mo., 1989); and Reps, Cities of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century Images of Urban Development (Columbia, Mo., 1994). See also Don Rickey Jr., “The Old St. Louis Riverfront, 1763-1960,” Missouri Historical Review, 58 (January 1964), 174-90; and “The Historical Significance of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Area,” Missouri Historical Society Bulletin, 2 (July 1946), 47-53. 35Wade, The Urban Frontier, 307. Among the scholarship on American suburbs showing Wade’s influence, see Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York, 1985); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, N.J., 2001); Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York, 2001). 36Eric Sandweiss, St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape (Philadelphia, Pa., 2001). 37Andrew Hurley, “On the Waterfront: Railroads and Real Estate in Antebellum St. Louis,” Gateway Heritage, 13 (1993), 4-17. ST. LOUIS 257

daughters, Anne Lane and Sarah Lane Glasgow. These letters described politics and economic prospects alongside details of the latest public lec- tures and arts displays.38 Family ties held together emerging city elites, as historian (and Wade student) Timothy R. Mahoney has shown, tracing the intermarriages of merchant families and the patterns of family migra- tion throughout the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys.39 Women’s historians Katharine T. Corbett and Martha Saxton are among those who took up the task of supplementing Wade’s research by highlighting the “women on the urban frontier,” their labors, their choices, and their early chari- table and religious associations.40 Based upon Wade’s blueprint, these works provide a richer and more nuanced look at St. Louis as it emerged as a metropolis. “About 1830 the second era of urban history in the West came to a close,” Wade wrote of his five cities, acknowledging the provisional nature of this end date but linking it to a series of city incorporations (St. Louis in 1823) and the enlarging of the cities’ physical boundaries.41 Historians Glen E. Holt and Maximilian Reichard explicitly mentioned Wade’s work as inspiration for their attempts to anatomize the 1820s as a “transition decade” in St. Louis history.42 Soon after 1830, Thomas Hart Benton and Henry Clay rose to be national leaders—as Wade noted, not just frontier politicians and Western senators but urban men.43 Wade’s urban frontier was completely integrated into the United States by 1830, but these cities continued to grow apace, controlling entire regions and spurring the next round of westward expansion. By stopping his study

______38William Carr Lane Papers, Missouri Historical Society; William G. B. Carson, “Anne Ewing Lane,” Missouri Historical Society Bulletin, 21 (January 1965), 87-99; “‘Secesh,’” Missouri Historical Society Bulletin, 23 (January 1967), 119-45. 39Timothy R. Mahoney, River Towns in the Great West: The Structure of Provincial Urbanization in the American Midwest, 1820-1870 (New York, 1990); Mahoney, Provincial Lives: Middle-Class Experience in the Antebellum Middle West (New York, 1999). 40Katharine T. Corbett, In Her Place: A Guide to St. Louis Women’s History (St. Louis, Mo., 1999), 20; Martha Saxton, Being Good: Women’s Moral Values in Early America (New York, 2003). 41Wade, The Urban Frontier, 202, also 271-72. 42Glen E. Holt, “St. Louis’s Transition Decade, 1819-1830,” Missouri Historical Review, 76 (July 1982), 365-81; Maximilian Reichard, “Black and White on the Urban Frontier: The St. Louis Community in Transition, 1800-1830,” Missouri Historical Society Bulletin, 33 (October 1976), 3-17. See also Glen E. Holt, “The Shaping of St. Louis, 1763-1860” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1975). 43Wade, The Urban Frontier, 339-42, 304-307. 258 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

in 1830, Wade missed the changing nature of St. Louis’s prospects—and the disillusionment that would engulf William Carr Lane and his family. After Wade’s frontier opened the lands of the Ohio Valley and the Louisiana Purchase, cities once again led the way in the massive land acquisitions of the 1840s: the annexation of Texas and Oregon, and the conquest and purchase of the Mexican Cession. Propelled by mineral rushes, San Francisco and Denver rose as seemingly “instant cities,” as urban historian Gunther Barth has written; utilizing the raw materials of the entire “Great West,” Chicago rose from obscurity to capture the potential hinterlands of St. Louis, as historian William Cronon has described.44 Following Wade’s outline and researching the growth of cities from founding to maturity, a cadre of scholars framed studies of Seattle, Portland, Salt Lake City, Boise, Helena, Las Vegas, and Phoenix into accounts of “how cities won the West,” a title Richard Wade himself suggested to his former student Carl Abbott.45 As the twentieth century dawned, St. Louis was the fourth-largest city in the nation, bested in the trans-Appalachian West only by Chicago. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, Chicago remained in the top four but St. Louis was the forty-ninth-largest city in the nation, its metropolitan area a modestly more impressive eighteenth. What had happened? Some seeds of trouble were present in 1830. “St. Louis, though the scene of much ambitious planning, fell behind other towns,” Wade wrote, specifically discussing the failure at that date to establish public schools but also identifying a leitmotif of St. Louis history. City leaders

______44Gunther Paul Barth, Instant Cities: Urbanization and the Rise of San Francisco and Denver (New York, 1975); William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991). 45Among the exemplary histories of cities in the trans-Mississippi West are the many works of Carl Abbott, including The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West (Tucson, Ariz., 1993); How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban Change in Western North America (Albuquerque, N.M., 2008). Abbott mentions Wade’s suggestion of the title on p. ix. See also, for example, Eugene P. Moehring, Urbanism and Empire in the Far West, 1840-1890 (Reno, Nev., 2004); Jocelyn Wills, Boosters, Hustlers, and Speculators: Entrepreneurial Culture and the Rise of Minneapolis and St. Paul, 1849-1883 (St. Paul, Minn., 2005); Barbara Berglund, Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West, 1846-1906 (Lawrence, Kan., 2007). For an earlier historiographic effort, including the Mississippi River Valley and the trans- Mississippi West, see J. Christopher Schnell and Patrick E. McLear, “Why the Cities Grew: A Historiographical Essay on Western Urban Growth, 1850-1880,” Missouri Historical Society Bulletin, 27 (April 1972), 162-77. ST. LOUIS 259

disagreed on how best to promote manufacturing, how to manage a racially diverse population, whether to embrace municipal home rule, and then whether regional government offered any advantage.46 The city-county split in 1876 closed the door to growth by annexation, and the ever-more aggressive urban planning and development schemes pur- sued by St. Louis leaders in the twentieth century left a trove of dramat- ic if mostly unsuccessful plans.47 Yet St. Louis’s fate was shaped more by the decades just after 1830, as its previous geographic and political advantages came to be detriments. At the center of the continent, near the confluence of two of the nation’s greatest rivers, St. Louis profited from its geography to become a leading city of the United States. Straddling the northern border of slavery as well as the gateway of westward expansion, the city maintained a profitable, multiethnic network in fur trading even as English-speaking, American-born leaders came to dominate its politics. Thus St. Louis pro- gressed across the urban frontier Wade described while still retaining much of its frontier diversity. Presiding over a region split by the slavery question, St. Louis was engulfed in contradictions that would be resolved only in the great struggle of the Civil War and Reconstruction. After Reconstruction’s collapse—less than forty years after Wade’s study concluded—the city’s leaders found themselves permanently in Chicago’s shadow. Historians of St. Louis have spent a great deal of scholarly energy on pinning down the time and mechanism of this loss. Economic historian Wyatt Belcher blamed overconfident St. Louis rivermen who scoffed

______46Wade touches on the manufacturing-versus-trade debate, The Urban Frontier, 200-202; see also J. Christopher Schnell and Katherine B. Clinton, “The New West: Themes in Nineteenth Century Urban Promotion, 1815-1880,” Missouri Historical Society Bulletin, 30 (January 1974), 75-88. Terrence Jones is a proponent of municipal diversity; E. Terrence Jones, Fragmented by Design: Why St. Louis Has So Many Governments (St. Louis, Mo., 2000). Most scholars see this separation as the key factor in hampering St. Louis in the twentieth century; see Arenson, “City of Manifest Destiny,” chap. 10; Thomas Swain Barclay, The Movement for Municipal Home Rule in St. Louis (Columbia, Mo., 1943); William Nathan Cassella Jr., “City-County Separation: The ‘Great Divorce’ of 1876,” Missouri Historical Society Bulletin, 55 (January 1959), 85-104; Cassella, “Governing the Saint Louis Metropolitan Area” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1953); Colin Gordon, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Philadelphia, Pa., 2008). 47See, for example, Gordon, Mapping Decline; Joseph Heathcott, “The City Remade: Race, Public Housing, and the Urban Landscape in St. Louis, 1900–1960” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 2002); Mark Tranel, ed., St. Louis Plans: The Ideal and the Real St. Louis (St. Louis, Mo., 2007). 260 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

at the railroad; Jeffrey Adler suggested that northeastern financiers did not wish to invest in a slave state, and hence favored Chicago.48 Yet my own research has added to the evidence put forward by J. Christopher Schnell, James Neal Primm, William Cronon, and Frank Towers to demonstrate the broad and ambitious investments made in St. Louis after 1830 and the moderate local approach to slavery—and how those plans were stymied by political disadvantages, a fatal railroad accident, and a financial panic. The failure of St. Louis to capitalize on all its seem- ing advantages suggests the failure of Manifest Destiny itself in the face of slavery politics before, during, and after the Civil War.49

William Carr Lane was born the year the U.S. Constitution came into effect, and he lived to see its precepts challenged in the Civil War. Thirty-four years old when he was elected St. Louis’s first mayor, Lane lived another forty years, also serving as a state representative and as New Mexico’s territorial governor, cementing business and political ties along the Santa Fe Trail. With the influx of Irish and German immi- grants, the judicial decisions against Dred and Harriet Scott, and the declaration of martial law by Union commanders during the Civil War, St. Louis and the nation were transformed in his eyes. Over the decades, Lane’s optimistic vision of St. Louis—a fledgling American city, profiting from the existing French town plan and trade networks and city founda- tions—faded as men who were his political and philosophic opposites came into leadership roles. “This Civil War is a painful theme which thrusts itself before us, at every turn,” Lane wrote in April 1862, complaining of the constraints imposed by what he called “our present abolitionist Yankee rule.”50

______48Wyatt Winton Belcher, The Economic Rivalry between St. Louis and Chicago, 1850-1880 (New York, 1947); Jeffrey S. Adler, Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West: The Rise and Fall of Antebellum St. Louis (Cambridge, U.K., 1991). 49Arenson, “City of Manifest Destiny,” esp. chap. 4; J. Christopher Schnell, “Chicago Versus St. Louis: A Reassessment of the Great Rivalry,” Missouri Historical Review, 71 (1977), 245-65; James Neal Primm, Economic Policy in the Development of a Western State, Missouri, 1820-1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1954); Primm, “The Economy of Nineteenth-Century St. Louis,” in St. Louis in the Century of Henry Shaw, 103-135; Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis; Frank Towers, The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War (Charlottesville, Va., 2004). 50William Carr Lane, St. Louis, to William Glasgow Jr., April 14, 1862, and Lane to Sarah Lane Glasgow, Wiesbaden, February 7, 1862, from transcriptions in the William Carr Lane Papers. Cited in Arenson, “City of Manifest Destiny,” chap. 7. ST. LOUIS 261

Protected by age and reputation, Lane was freer than most to grumble, yet the transformation he witnessed was real. As mayor, Lane embodied Wade’s arguments in The Urban Frontier about the development of St. Louis as a freewheeling urban vanguard. Decades later, Lane could only bitterly wonder at how that promise had been erased by the all-consum- ing conflict over slavery. More than most, Lane experienced the double life of St. Louis in the nineteenth century. Focusing on the years 1790 to 1830 and comparing five Ohio Valley cities, Richard Wade’s The Urban Frontier portrayed a certain version of St. Louis’s history. Aligning the cities’ origin stories and yard- sticks of urban maturity, Wade’s account ultimately privileged the aspects of St. Louis’s history most like the American-founded river towns, where the age of the steamboat marked their zenith. This com- fortable history of St. Louis, with the key transition from French and Spanish founders and American Indian traders to a solid U.S. commercial hub, has long had its backers among citizens and historians of the city.51 Yet the multi-ethnic, inter-regional history of St. Louis that began in the Cahokia Mounds and continued through the hard-fought battles of the Civil War and Reconstruction offers a different history of the city—one that, fifty years after Wade’s inspiring first forays, we now have begun to appreciate in its greater, troubling complexity.

______51For one extravagant example, consider the 1914 Pageant and Masque version of St. Louis history. See Donald Bright Ostler, “Nights of Fantasy: The St. Louis Pageant and Masque of 1914,” Missouri Historical Society Bulletin, 31 (April 1975), 175-205; Arenson, “City of Manifest Destiny,” epilogue; James Neal Primm, Lion of the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri, 1764-1980, 3rd ed. (St. Louis, 1998), 427-30; Eric Sandweiss, “From a Garden Looking Out: Public Culture in Henry Shaw’s St. Louis,” in St. Louis in the Century of Henry Shaw, 14.