The Kansas City Times June 13, 1961 By Robert Pearman A century ago this week, Claiborne Fox Jackson, Governor of Missouri, was driven from the capitol by the Union Army and on June 17 made an unsuccessful fight at Boonville in the first of the Civil War battles in Missouri. Jackson was governor in the hour of great decision, that time when the state was called upon to choose allegiances with either the North or the South. The governor’s cause was clear: he favored secession. Had the governor ever waivered, even slightly, the fate of Missouri might have been decidedly different. For in those fateful months of 1861 the great pendulum of public favor swung back and forth but the two armed camps, those for secession and those for the Union, no matter what, but most Missourians actually stood somewhere in between, willing to stay with the Union under certain conditions. Jackson was elected governor of Missouri as a supporter of Stephen Douglas, pro- Union Democrat for President. This should have made him a Union man but Claib Jackson was pro-South by both heritage and association. In the election of 1860, Douglas carried Missouri—the only state that he did carry— edging out John Bell, another pro-Union Democrat. Jackson was born in Kentucky of Virginia parents and came to Missouri as a boy and found employment in a country store in Howard County. Later he bought his own store across the river in Saline County and operated it until about 1836. By this time he was 30. Through shrewd business sense and well calculated marriages, he had enough fortitude to retire from business and devote himself to politics. Jackson married in succession the three daughters of Dr. John Sappington, an Arrow Rock physician who had grown rich as the manufacturer of quinine pills as a remedy for frontier malaria. As each of the first two wives died, Jackson would again ask the doctor for the hand of the next. The third time this happened, gossips reported that Dr. Sappington reflected: “I reckon Claib’l be back next time for Ma.” Twice a member of the Missouri legislature, Jackson had been thwarted in bids for Congress by the opposition of Thomas Hart Benton. On the night of a territorial election in Kansas, he led Missourians with several cannon across the border into Kansas to vote in an election in which 80% of the ballots were later determined to be spurious. Elected with Jackson in 1860 was Thomas C. Reynolds for lieutenant governor. A South Carolinian, highly educated, he worked tirelessly to swing Missouri to the South. Thomas L. Snead was Jackson’s aid and secretary. Snead, who probably knew him best, saw Jackson this way: “He loved the Union but not with the love with which he loved Missouri which had been his home for forty years, nor as he loved the South where he was born and where his kindred lived.” “He was a tall, erect and dignified man; a vigorous thinking and was a fluent and forcible speaker, always interesting and often eloquent; a well informed man thoroughly conversant with the politics of Missouri and the Union with positive opinions in all public questions and the courage to express and uphold them.” Governor Jackson stated his position in his inaugural address. He did not call for secession then but made it clear that Missouri should stand by the states that did secede. He met President Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers from Missouri with a telegram to the War Department: “Not one man will the state of Missouri furnish to carry on any unholy crusade.” At the governor’s behest, the state legislature convened to consider the question of secession. But someone had miscalculated the sentiment of the voters, not a single avowed secessionist was elected to the convention and when the delegates gathered in February and March of 1861 they decided that there was no adequate cause for the withdrawal of Missouri from the Union. As the war clouds darkened and state after state left the Union, more and more Missourians saw that war was inevitable. The governor called on the state guards and plotted to seize the strategic arsenal in St. Louis. General Nathaniel Lyon thwarted this conspiracy with a lightening raid on Camp Jackson, the militia’s muster grounds in St. Louis and seized both men and material. This overt act on the part of the Unionists brought many heretofore reluctant citizens including General Sterling Price into the governor’s camp. In Jefferson City, the legislature stampeded giving Jackson dictatorial powers. On June 11, 1861, Jackson, Price and Snead met in the Planter’s House in St. Louis with Representative Francis Blair, Lyon and Major Horace Conant in a final attempt to head off open conflict. They failed. Snead said it happened this way: “Finally, when the conference had lasted four or five hours, Lyon closed it as he had opened it. ‘Rather’, he said, (for he still was sitting and spoke deliberately, and had a peculiar emphasis), ‘rather than concede to the state of Missouri the right to demand that my government shall not enlist troops within her limits or bring into the state whenever it pleases, or have the troops at its own will move into or out of the state, or through the state; rather than concede to the state of Missouri for one small instant the right to dictate to my government in any manner, however unimportant, I would (rising as he said this and pointing to everyone in the room), see you and you and every man, woman and child in the state dead and buried’. Then, turning to the governor, he said ‘this means war. In an hour one of my officers will call for you and conduct you out of my lines’ and then without an inclination of his head, without even looking, he turned upon his heel and strode out of the room, rattling his spurs and clanking his saber. While we whom he had left and had known each other for years, bade farewell to each other courteously and quietly and separated—Blair and Conant to fight for the Union and we for the land of our birth.” So the governor, Price and Snead returned to Jefferson City, pausing only to gather wood for the locomotive, cut telegraph wires and destroy the bridge behind them. It was past midnight on June 12 when Governor Jackson’s special car arrived in Jefferson City. There, in his chambers, he performed his last official act in the state he had been elected to lead only a few months before. By dawn, his hastily drawn up proclamation calling for 50,000 “true, bold, stout hearted Missourians” to repel the “invaders” was running off the presses. Up the Missouri River by boat came the relentless Lyon. The governor and the secessionists abandoned Jefferson City and moved on to Boonville. On the afternoon of June 15, Lyon stood before the window in the governor’s silent office and contemplated how he would continue the pursuit. The Jackson administration, if not in exile, was deprived of its power to function. Along a country lane near Boonville, against the advice of his nephew Col. John S. Marmaduke, Claib Jackson decided to make his stand. But Lyon’s troops with their hard core of regulars performed with such devastating efficiency that the Missouri volunteers melted away. The defeat at Boonville, Snead said, made the Missouri River a Federal highway and made it impossible for the government to hold the rich, populous and friendly counties along its banks. Jackson retreated to the southwest corner of the state. At Carthage, the governor himself commanded the Missouri State Guard in battle, seated in his carriage on the ridge overlooking Coon Creek, nine miles north of Carthage on the humid morning of July 5, 1861. He watched Franz Sigel’s 1,000 troops prepare with infinite precision to attack his own army of 4,000 men. When the deployed cavalry threatened his flanks, Sigel withdrew in an orderly and masterful retreat. He lost only 13 men. For the governor, it was a great victory. But he, ill even then, must have felt misgivings as the hated “Dutch” from St. Louis prepared to attack so fearlessly that day in the valley of Coon Creek. That July, while Price trained the army on Cowskin Prairie, the governor went to Richmond to obtain arms from the government of Jeff Davis. Upon his return, he walked upon Missouri soil again at New Madrid where on August 5, he declared an independent and sovereign state. In Jackson’s absence, the state convention re-convened in Jefferson City and by a vote of 56 to 25 declared the executive office of that state to be open. Hamilton R. Gamble, a Union man, was elected provisional governor. From the point until his death in 1864, Gamble maintained in Jefferson city a government loyal to President Lincoln which was tacitly accepted by the majority of Missourians. But the Rebel government in exile was ever present, and the Jefferson City government was quasi-legal. In his trip to Richmond and in his effort to induce General Leonidas Polk in Memphis to launch an offensive into Missouri, Governor Jackson was absent from the state at the tome of the Confederate victory at Wilson’s Creek and Lexington. When he returned early in October, his army was retreating south again. For in many ways, the problems of Governor Jackson and his strength for Missouri reflected those of the Confederates of brilliant victories in the field only prolonging the inevitable defeat. No sooner had the Rebel yells died away than the Army was being pushed back again by an enemy superior in numbers, better armed, better trained, and always better fed. South from Lexington in October, Price’s victorious state guard again walked down the dusty road of retreat. Deserters left by the hundreds, crops were short, the soldiers ill. On a drizzling foggy morning near Greenfield in Dade County, they were met by Governor Jackson who had come from the South. Jackson convened the General Assembly or the secessionist members of that body in Neoshe on October 21 and one week later an ordinance of secession with but one dissenting vote and an act ratifying the Confederate constitution was passed. The legality of the act centering around whether or not a quorum was present has never been established. But they were considered legal in Richmond where on November 28, 1861 Missouri was admitted to the Confederate States of America. Senators and representatives were elected so that now the state was represented in both Washington and Richmond. That winter, Jackson remained with the army and after the Battle of Pea Ridge in March, when Price moved east into the Mississippi, the governor took the remnants of the state government into south Arkansas. Some time that spring, the governor met with many of Missouri’s wealthier citizens who had fled to Marshall in east Texas, near the Arkansas-Louisiana border. These were Jackson’s people and at Marshall in a three story frame house, he established a temporary seat of government for his state. Across the street, the governor rented another house and spent six weeks with his family there in the fall of 1862. When Claib Jackson traveled to Little Rock again to plan the winter military campaign. By November 1 his cancer which had weakened him for months, finally made him bedfast. On the night of December 6, 1862 Claiborne Fox Jackson, the 16th governor of Missouri, died in a lonely rooming house just north of the Arkansas River across from the capitol city. He was buried in Mt. Holly Cemetery in Little Rock and it was not until after the war that he was re-interred in the Sappington family cemetery at Arrow Rock. Transcribed by Christine Spencer June 2008