Missouri caught the railroad building mania late. Economic forces also linked Missouri to northern industrial centers, but there were none more important than railroads.
By 1860, 30 percent of Missourians hailed from the northeastern states or foreign countries. Beginning in 1854, organized violence took its turn in Bleeding Kansas and along Missouri’s western border in a small preview of greater horrors yet to come.ĭespite its initially southern nature, Missouri changed rapidly in the decade before the war, largely the result of immigration from the northern and eastern states, Germany and Ireland. In only a generation’s time, its citizens wrestled with the issue politically during the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and through the proceedings of the Dred Scott case. But for all the forces at work to make Missouri a border state with one foot in the South and one in the West, the state played as central a role as any Deep South state in the long-simmering controversy over slavery that ultimately erupted in civil war. By 1860, these counties contained nearly 77 percent of Missouri’s 114, 509 slaves. The institution thrived most in the tiers of counties along either side of the Missouri River and along the Mississippi River, where the agricultural potential made slavery economically viable. The French had introduced slavery west of the Mississippi River in the eighteenth century and Southerners found it easy to transplant their own system of chattel slavery. Even before the Louisiana Purchase, frontier migrants from the Upper South, the most famous being Daniel Boone, crossed the Mississippi to settle in Spanish-controlled Upper Louisiana, where they found a well-watered forested country reminding them of their ancestral homelands in Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, and ideally sited for the establishment of Southern agriculture and customs. Identity with the South was a powerful and pervasive force in Missouri society and politics.
Adapted from Prologue to The Civil War’s First Blood: Missouri, 1854-1861 by James Denny and John Bradbury, published by Missouri Life Media.ĭespite their initial reluctance to sever ties with the Union, Missourians who were fundamentally Southern in culture and heritage constituted the majority of the state’s population.
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