Missouri's diversity marks it as a microcosm of the nation. Located in the center of the country and drained by the great Mississippi River on its eastern border and bisected by the Missouri River, Missouri's land area is 68,886 square miles. In 2000, the state's population stood at 5,595, 211, with 11.2 percent being African American, just short of the 12.3 percent in the nation.
With rich farmlands north of the Missouri River devoted to general agriculture, a 200-day growing season in the Mississippi Delta of the southeast portion of the state for cotton, melons, soybeans, and rice, the Osage Plains in the southwest for dairying and cattle raising, and the Ozark Highlands occupying 31,000 square miles of the rest, Missouri offers a wide range of landforms. The Boston Mountains that make up the Ozarks are one of the oldest mountain ranges in the nation. The free-flowing Jack's Fork, Current, and Eleven Points Rivers provide opportunities for floating that places one in the natural beauty of the Ozarks. The Gasconade, White, and Osage Rivers add further to the charm of the region. Meramec, Round, and Big are some of the springs found in Missouri. Numerous caves add further to the attraction of the state.
The leading producer of lead in the world, Missouri also produces many minerals, including an abundance of coal, zinc, limestone, silica, barite, clay for brick-making, and Carthage marble, from which the State Capitol is constructed. Timber resources are abundant as well, and only the absence of oil in any quantity keeps Missouri from having all of the important natural resources.
Missouri's two major cities represent the urban dimension to its status as a microcosm of the nation. St. Louis, with more than 2.5 million people in its metropolitan area, retains the look and feel of an eastern city. Kansas City, with its more than 1.7 million metropolitan area residents, broad avenues, and expansive boundaries, is clearly a western city. Branson, in the southwest corner of the state, is an entertainment capital that surpasses Nashville, Tennessee, in its live performances and attraction of more than 6 million visitors a year. Diversity marks Missouri.
People
The people of the state also represent the citizens of the nation. Native Americans, particularly the Osage, dominated the area called Missouri before European explorers entered the region. Preceded by Mound Builders of the Mississippian period (A.D. 900–1500), who left their imprint on the earth still to be seen at Cahokia Mounds in Illinois, the Osage dominated the area when Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet, early French explorers, came to the area in the 1670s. The state takes its name from the Missouri Indians, who succumbed to attacks from their enemies, the Sauk Indians, and from smallpox epidemics. Remnants of the Missouri eventually blended with the Oto tribe of Kansas. Other French explorers, including René Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, Claude Du Tisne, and Etienne De Bourgmont, added to European knowledge and promoted settlement in the area. In 1720, Phillipe Renault introduced African American slaves into the area as the labor force for mining lead. In 1750, the French made the first permanent European settlement in the state at Ste. Genevieve. Just fourteen years later, Pierre Laclede Liguest and his adopted son, Auguste Chouteau, founded St. Louis, some one hundred miles north and also on the Mississippi River. Liguest and the other early French settlers sought to either profit from the fur trade with the Indians or to gain riches from mineral resources. Fur interested Chouteau and his descendants, and for the next sixty years, the Chouteau family explored, traded, and moved across Missouri. Even after Spain took over the area in 1762 through the Treaty of Fontainebleau, the French remained dominant. In 1800, Spain relinquished political control back to France through the Treaty of San Ildefonso. Three years later, Napoleon Bonaparte sold the entire Louisiana Territory, which included Missouri, to the United States. By then, other towns included St. Charles (1769), Cape Girardeau (1793), and New Madrid (1789).
Territorial Period
Disputed land claims accompanied the establishment of control by the United States. Spanish governors had been lavish in rewarding their friends with large grants. When Americans began entering the region in great numbers between 1803 and 1810, they began disputing these claims. To confuse the matter further, when the great earthquake hit the New Madrid area in 1811–1812, the territorial government offered those devastated by the quake the right to claim land in central Missouri called the Boonslick area (named for the famous frontiersman Daniel Boone and his sons, who had come to Missouri in 1799). A land commission settled some of the claims and the first territorial secretary, Frederick Bates, settled others between 1812 and 1820, but it took until 1880 for the last claim to be resolved.
President Thomas Jefferson, who had purchased Louisiana, decided to explore and lay claim to as much area as possible. In 1804, he sent an expedition led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on one of the greatest adventures in American history. The intrepid travelers went up the Missouri River to its origins and then along the Columbia River to the Pacific Coast. They returned in 1806 with broad knowledge of the Native Americans and the plants and animals that lived in this vast region. They also drew maps of the area. News of their findings spurred settlement and the establishment of extensive fur trading operations throughout the west. Fur trading became Missouri's first important industry.
Between 1804 and 1810, Missouri's population doubled from 10,000 to 20,000. It moved through the stages of territorial administration established by the Northwest Ordinance and became a third-class territory in 1816. By 1820, the population reached 67,000, and Missourians sought statehood.
Many settlers came from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. They brought slaves with them and quickly established a predominantly Southern culture in the Boonslick area, which became known as "Little Dixie." Still other settlers from those states and North Carolina began to enter the Ozarks, but they reflected their hill origins and brought few slaves with them.
The Missouri Compromise
The question of Missouri's entrance into the union of states evoked the first national debate over slavery. Through the efforts of Kentucky senator Henry Clay, a compromise that left the number of states even allowed Missouri to come into the Union as a slave state, for Maine to enter the Union as a free state, and for there to be no more slave states allowed north of the southern boundary of Missouri. Missouri became the twenty-fourth state to enter the Union in 1821.
The convention that drew up the constitution and the first general assembly met in St. Louis. The assembly designated St. Charles as temporary capital, and then on 31 December 1821 it decided to locate a new capitol on the banks of the Missouri River about 12 miles from the mouth of the Osage River. Named after Thomas Jefferson, the City of Jefferson became Missouri's seat of government.
The Age of Benton
Elected as one of the two United States senators in 1821, Thomas Hart Benton and his central Missouri supporters dominated Missouri politics for the next thirty years. A spokesman for the interests of hard money and cheap land, Benton became synonymous with Jacksonian Democracy, the party of President Andrew Jackson. During the 1840s, as the question of slavery and its expansion reached its zenith with the annexation of Texas, Benton took the side of free soil. His former supporters in central Missouri found new leaders in Claiborne Fox Jackson and David Rice Atchison, who associated Missouri's interests with the Southern states. Through a series of resolutions that passed the legislature in 1849, the supporters of slavery tried to force Benton's hand. His refusal to accept the resolutions caused him to lose his reelection campaign, and Missouri became so politically divided that for a period in the 1850s, only David Rice Atchison represented the state in the Senate, because a majority of the General Assembly could not decide on anyone.
In 1854, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which opened the territories to slavery and negated the Missouri Compromise. Contention over slavery and its extension led to fighting in Kansas, with Missourians along the border supporting slavery and the forces of abolition supporting a free Kansas. This fighting represented a prelude to the Civil War (1861–1865).
The Dred Scott Decision and the Civil War
While "Bleeding Kansas" gripped the nation's attention, the Supreme Court in 1857 decided that Dred Scott and his wife Harriet must stay in slavery. During the 1840s, Dred and Harriet, Missouri slaves, sued for their freedom on the grounds that they had been taken to free territories by their master. Reversing precedent and quite divided, the court ruled against the Scotts. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney went even further in the majority opinion, when he wrote that African Americans had no right to citizenship rights, thus making any suit invalid. A minority of justices wrote dissenting opinions, revealing the deep divisions within the country.
The election of 1860 further indicated that division. Four major candidates ran for president, and, Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of a purely regional party, won. Even before Lincoln's inauguration, South Carolina and other Southern states began to secede. Claiborne Jackson and Thomas Reynolds, the newly elected governor and lieutenant governor of Missouri, had run as moderates, but they attempted to lead Missouri into the Confederacy. Jackson called a convention to decide on secession, and the elected delegates surprised him by voting unanimously to stay in the Union. Federal forces led by Nathaniel Lyon and Frank Blair took forceful action and drove Jackson and Reynolds from the state. The pro-Confederates eventually established a government in exile and sent representatives to the Confederate government. Meanwhile, a provisional governor, Hamilton R. Gamble, ran the state government.
During the war, some 50,000 Missourians fought for the Confederacy and more than 100,000 fought for the Union. Some 8,000 of Missouri's 115,000 African Americans fought for their freedom. Only Virginia and Tennessee surpassed Missouri in the number of battles fought during the war. "Civil War" found its true meaning in Missouri as fathers fought sons and brothers fought each other. The intensity of guerrilla fighting on the western border involving such infamous figures as Frank and Jesse James and William Quantrill on the South's side, and the notorious General James Lane on the North's side went unsurpassed in brutality.
The influx of German immigrants into Missouri, and especially St. Louis, during the 1840s and 1850s helped greatly in keeping Missouri in the Union. The German immigrants hated slavery. A number of the new immigrants had left Germany because they fought on the losing side during the Revolution of 1848. Between 1850 and 1860, St. Louis's population more than doubled, going from 77,000 to 160,773, and 50,000 of these people had been born in Germany. Ireland also sent many of its sons and daughters to Missouri, and they represented the second most important immigrant group in the state's population.
The end of the war brought Radical Republican domination in Missouri, and five years of Reconstruction. Again, Missouri experienced, as it had in the Civil War, the nation's experiences in microcosm. Missouri officially freed its slaves before the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, but the 1865 Constitution provided for segregated schools. But through the leadership of white Republicans and black James Milton Turner, a statewide school system was established in Missouri. Also, court cases in the late 1860s ruled against segregation of the state's public transportation facilities. And once African Americans achieved the right to vote through the Fifteenth Amendment, they never lost it in Missouri. The mixed pattern of race relations in Missouri reflected the complexity of race relations in the nation as a whole.
Industrial Missouri
Railroads transformed Missouri and led to the growth of cities. In 1870, Missouri had completed 1,200 miles of track. By 1920, more than 8,529 miles of track carried goods and people to all but four of the 114 counties in the state. New towns blossomed, manufacturing greatly increased, and employment opportunities spurred immigration from throughout Europe. St. Louis grew from 160,000 in 1860 to more than 575,000 by 1900. Kansas City changed from a village in 1860 to a city of 163,000 by the end of the century. With the growth of its two major cities came organized labor. In 1877, St. Louis experienced the first general strike in the nation's history. Missouri's greatest writer, Samuel Clemens, known as Mark Twain, commented on this era in his coauthored, The Gilded Age, and made some failed investments in this industrial age. Machine politics also accompanied industrialization.
Ed Butler, a former blacksmith, created a political machine in St. Louis. Future Democratic Governor Joseph W. Folk made his reputation by attacking Butler's political corruption. He went from circuit attorney to governor in only three years and became nationally famous for reform. Progressives across the nation recognized Folk's efforts.
In Kansas City, Boss Tom Pendergast controlled city politics from the 1920s until his conviction for income tax invasion in 1939. Besides lining his pockets, Pendergast allowed a wide-open city where musicians could find lucrative employment and play all night. The Kansas City sound with such bands as Count Basie's influenced jazz nationally. Building upon this heritage, Kansas Citian Charles "Bird" Parker helped invent a jazz form called bebop in the 1940s. Of course, jazz built on the ragtime music of Sedalia and St. Louis composer Scott Joplin.
World War I–world War II
Missouri supported World War I (1914–1918) and sent General John J. Pershing to lead United States forces in Europe. Future President Harry S. Truman gained significant leadership experience as a Captain in the Great War, as it was called. During the 1920s, Missourians reflected the trends of the nation by electing Republicans as governors. With the spread of good roads, educational opportunities greatly increased during the decade. Woman's suffrage provided activists such as Emily Newell Blair with new opportunities for leadership. Missouri women such as Sara Teasdale and Fanny Hurst became nationally known writers, and not long afterward, Mary Margaret McBride began her remarkable radio career.
During the 1930s, Democratic governors attacked the depression. The January 1939 roadside demonstrations of former sharecroppers in southeast Missouri demonstrated how difficult conditions remained even after six years of the New Deal. In Missouri as in the nation, only World War II (1939–1945) relieved depression conditions. No business in Missouri benefited more from the war than the company founded by James S. McDonnell, who built airplanes in St. Louis. In addition, Truman gained a national reputation as the watchdog of defense contracts, which propelled him into the vice presidency and then in 1945, when Franklin Roosevelt died, into the presidency.
The Postwar World
The years after World War II brought school consolidation to Missouri, beginning in 1947, integration of the public schools during the 1950s, and major tests of the efficacy of busing to improve racial diversity in St. Louis and Kansas City during the 1980s and 1990s. Higher education expanded through the creation of the University of Missouri system in 1963 and the addition of four-year campuses in Joplin and St. Joseph during the late 1960s. A full-fledged junior college system and the takeover of Harris-Stowe College by the state completed the expansion of higher education. During the 1990s, in an effort to equalize funding for schools, Democratic leaders created a new formula for allocating state money to school districts.
In politics, Missouri remained a bellwether state, reflecting almost exactly the nation's preferences for candidates. During the 1960s, Democrats governed, with Governor Warren Hearnes becoming the first Missourian to serve two terms in that office because of a change in the state constitution. In the 1968 election, Hearnes won his second term, but in the same election John Danforth, a Republican, became attorney general. Danforth recruited other likely candidates and led in a Republican takeover of the governor's office in 1972 with the election of Christopher "Kit" Bond. In 1976, Bond lost to Democrat Joe Teasdale, as Missouri reflected national politics again. But in 1980, the state went for Ronald Reagan and Kit Bond won reelection. Meanwhile, John Danforth had replaced Democrat Stuart Symington in the Senate. Future United States Attorney General John Ashcroft served as governor after Bond, and Bond joined Danforth in the Senate. With Danforth's retirement, Ashcroft won his seat and two Republicans represented Missouri in the Senate. In 1992, just as Bill Clinton broke Republican dominance in the presidency, so did Democrat Mel Carnahan win election as governor of Missouri. He won again in 1996, and ran against Ashcroft for the Senate in 2000. A plane crash took his life and the lives of his son and an aide less than a month before the election, which led to an unprecedented development. Missouri voters elected the deceased Carnahan to the Senate. Roger Wilson, who had succeeded Carnahan in the governor's chair, appointed Carnahan's wife, Jean, to the office. Jean Carnahan became the first woman to represent Missouri in the Senate, although during the 1980s, Lieutenant Governor Harriet Woods came very close to defeating Kit Bond for the same office.
Finally, to complete the analogy of Missouri as a microcosm of the nation, it suffered urban sprawl during the 1980s and 1990s. While St. Louis's metropolitan population greatly expanded, the city's population declined from a high of 850,000 in 1950 to only 348,189 in 2000. Kansas City, with the boundaries of a western city, encompassed the sprawl within its borders, and surpassed St. Louis as the state's largest city. In 2000, its population stood at 441,545. The state's third largest city reflected growth in the Ozarks. Springfield counted 151,500 people in 2000. Indeed, except for population growth north of St. Louis, over the last twenty years, the Ozarks region has grown the fastest, replicating rapid growth of resort areas across the nation.
Bibliography
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