    
The following paper was presented by Dr. Gary Kremer on September 17, 2000, at Arrow Rock Missouri, as past of the "Gunstocks and Bustles" weekend sponsored by the Friends of Arrow Rock and funded by the Missouri Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Kremer teaches history at William Woods University, Fulton, Missouri, and is an author of numerous articles and books on Missouri history, including co-authoring of The History of Missouri 1875-1919 and Missouri's Black Heritage. by Dr. Gary Kremer My contribution to this interesting and important gathering is to try to remind us all of what life was like in Missouri during the generation after the Civil War. That's no easy task, because the quality of one's life was determined by a whole host of variables, ranging from exactly where one lived and how one made a living, to what political party and religious denomination one belonged to, to what one's race and gender was. Let me begin with an attempt to look at the big picture. What were the big themes that characterized life in Missouri during the generation that followed the Civil War? One very obvious one, of course, had to do with politics. Missourians were terribly skeptical of their governments, and especially their state government, during the generation after the Civil War. I suspect that a great many Missourians who came of age just before the Civil War went to their graves still angry at their government's inability to keep them out of the war. How could they have faith in an institution that had bungled things so badly? How could they have faith in a government that had allowed its citizens to fight each other so ruthlessly for four years. No state in or out of the Union, as we know, witnessed more guerilla fighting than the state of Missouri. Just as importantly, how could they have faith in a government that denied so many of its own citizens the basic rights of citizenship immediately after the war? The most important governmental document generated in the state of Missouri in the two decades following the war was the constitution of 1875. It was, unquestionably, the most conservative constitution that Missourians have ever written and it was spawned by what many residents of the state regarded as the excesses of the Radical Republicans during the Civil War. The 1875 constitutional convention, and the document that it produced, set the tone for political life in Missouri for the remainder of the century. The convention was dominated by conservative Democrats who had waited a decade to reverse the liberal centralizing provisions of the dreaded Drake Constitution of 1865. Sixty-eight delegates gathered for the convention; only eight of them were Republicans. Seventy-five percent of the delegates had been born in the South, with twenty-four percent coming from one Southern state (Kentucky). Two-thirds of the delegates were lawyers and thirty-five of the sixty-eight had either served under the Confederacy or had strong sympathies with its cause. Senator Waldo P. Johnson of Osceola (St. Clair County) presided over the gathering. His role in the proceedings symbolized the convention's bent: he had been expelled from the United States Senate in 1862 after he joined the Confederacy. Subsequently, he served in the Confederate army as a lieutenant colonel under General Sterling Price. Still later, he was chosen as a senator from Missouri in the Confederate Congress. For Johnson and every other member of the convention, the Civil War had been a defining event that cast a shadow over their lives for all their remaining days. The doctrine of nullification may have been rejected as a matter of practical politics after Appomattox, for example, but that did not stop the convention from debating for most of a day the issues of secession and nullification. In the end, the language agreed upon declined to declare against the right of revolution. As historian Isidor Loeb has pointed out, "Repeated efforts to amend so as to include declarations against secession and nullification . . . failed by large majorities." So, the war had been over a decade, and their side had lost, but many of these Southern sympathizers remained unrepentant. The constitution that Johnson and his cohorts produced was more than a document of governance; it was a statement of philosophy about what the relationship should be between state government and the people it purported to represent. Above all else, the constitution reflected a suspicion toward centralized rule and a proclivity toward localism. This was a direct reaction against the Radical Republican rule of the 1860s and 1870s. The Radicals had expanded the power of the state government and, in the minds of the Democrats, had ridden roughshod over the rights and prerogatives of the state's citizens. The Radicals had, first of all, actually disfranchised thousands of Missouri citizens with the so-called test oath, which disallowed those persons who could not swear that they had never supported the Confederacy from voting or holding political office. Not surprisingly, in response, then, the new constitution made it more difficult for any standing government to restrict its citizens' rights. On the question of the power of the government to suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, for example, the 1875 Constitution deleted the phrase "unless when, in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it," which had appeared in the state's two previous constitutions. The 1865 Constitution had restricted religious freedom in a way that the 1875 Constitution tried to correct, especially with regard to giving religious bodies more freedom to own property. The 1875 Constitution made it much more difficult to convict a citizen of treason and denied the state government the right to confiscate a traitor's property, which the state could do under the 1865 constitution. The new constitution sought to limit governmental power in other ways as well. Indeed, it was not merely specific governmental actions that creators of the new constitution wanted to restrict; it was governmental action generally that these Missourians found so disturbing. Underlying the 1875 constitutional debate was the pervasive sentiment that government, especially state government, could not be trusted to act in the best interests of the citizenry, to protect the citizenry, or to serve the common good. One way to limit the activities of government was to limit the amount of money that government could receive. The Democrats accused the Republicans of being spendthrifts and of running up the state debt to $36 million by the end of the Civil War. Despite postwar recovery efforts and a serious attempt to reduce the state debt, it still stood at roughly $18 million in 1875. By 1875, state property taxes had reached 62.5 cents on $100 valuation and, as historian C. H. McClure has pointed out, "county, city and school taxes were also high." Supporters of the 1875 Constitution wanted to restrict state government's activism by restricting its power to raise money. As McClure writes, the 1875 Constitution fixed "Rigid limits of taxation . . . for every public corporation from State to school district." Taxable wealth had actually declined in Missouri by 1875, to a level of $556,444,456, after reaching an all-time high in 1873. Convention delegates, and Missouri citizens, were still feeling the effects of the 1873 Panic, an economic downturn, by the way, that caused the suspension of the Saline County Bank and made the availability of money even tighter than it had been. The table wealth of Missourians would not match its 1873 high again until 1882. In addition to limiting the power of public entities to tax, the constitution also made a two-thirds vote necessary to legalize any bond. Bonds, particularly railroad bonds, had grown especially burdensome since the end of the Civil War. Indeed, historian David Thelen has pointed out that during the decade after the Civil War, promoters in Missouri persuaded local governmental officials in roughly half of the state's counties to issue bonds totaling approximately $18 million in public aid for more than forty proposed railroads. Often these bonds were approved by local officials who did not seek their constitutents' approval, or, worse yet, defied popular votes against the issuance of railroad bonds. Moreover, in many cases the railroads were never built, even though the money had been appropriated and spent. In the minds of most Missourians in the mid-1870s, and I'm sure those in Saline County as well, they were being taxed beyond their ability to pay by officials who defied their best interests. Although local officials were often blamed for high taxes, the bulk of the blame fell on the shoulders of state legislators who, it was widely felt, passed too much "local and special legislation" aimed at benefiting a limited number of constituents rather than the state as a whole. The 1875 Constitution sought to end this process by prohibiting this kind of legislation from being passed and by expanding the powers of the governor at the expense of the legislature. The new constitution specified thirty-some things that the legislature could not do. In addition, the new constitution extended the governor's term from two to four years, while requiring legislators to continue to stand for election every two years. The assumption was that a statewide elected governor would be more inclined to favor the interests of the state as a whole than would a locally elected legislator. Also, there was a feeling that legislators would be more likely to toe the line if they knew they had to run for office biennially. For an additional check on ill-advised legislation, the new constitution allowed the governor to veto one or more items that he objected to in an appropriations bill ("line-item veto"). A legislative override required a two-thirds vote in each house. The political leader entrusted with the responsibility of executing the will of the people as expressed in the new constitution was Charles Henry Hardin of Audrain County. Hardin was elected governor of Missouri in 1874 and took office in January of 1875. Born in Trimble County, Kentucky, in 1820, Hardin had moved with his family to Old Franklin, Missouri, in the same year. Deeply troubled by the Civil War and by the secessionist sentiment prevalent in much of the area he represented, Hardin attended the secessionist General Assembly session convened by Governor Claiborne Fox Jackson at Neosho in October of 1861, but he cast the only negative vote on the articles of secession. The Kentucky-born Hardin carried 81 of Missouri's 114 counties, with his greatest support coming from those Missourians who, like himself, could trace their ancestry to Kentucky roots. He garnered 2,696 votes in Saline County, compared to 1,112 for his opponent, the Pettis County farmer, William Gentry, who was the People's party candidate and who was also supported by the Republicans. Hardin's term as governor presaged much of what would happen in state government over the next twenty years. In his inaugural address, delivered on January 12, 1875, he told legislators that "the people have wearied of lengthy, annual legislative sessions" and he urged them to be "Prompt, efficient and economical" in their deliberations. Most of all, he urged a reduction in the cost of running government. Hardin took no real action. But then, he served at a time when Missourians didn't particularly want their government to take much action. Perhaps no better example of the governor's style of leadership occurred than when the state faced the devastation of the 1875 grasshopper plague. Thousands of Missouri farmers, including those in Saline County, saw their crops eaten away by insects. State Entomologist C. V. Riley, in a letter of May 18, 1875, urged the governor to at least promote the killing of the grasshoppers by authorizing a bounty for them: "Have you not power to offer a small premium on the part of the State for every bushel of young grasshoppers destroyed? Such a premium would be a powerful incentive to the more destitute of the people in those districts to destroy the pests and thus avert future injury; and, at the same time give them the means of earning a living until the danger is past." Hardin, however, was unwilling to spend any tax money for such a venture, and he responded by proclaiming June 3 "a day of fasting and prayer that Almight[y] God may be invoked to remove from our midst these impending calamities, and to grant instead the blessings of abundance and plenty." No doubt Hardin felt vindicated in his approach when, soon after, the grasshoppers left the state and headed north to Iowa. So, Hardin was exactly the kind of leader Missourians wanted and his party, the Democrats, dominated Missouri politics for the last quarter of the 19th century. The Democratic party in Missouri had a long tradition of opposition to centralized rule and expansive governmental power. That tradition was rooted in a fundamentally Jeffersonian commitment to the notion of that government being best that governs least. The Civil War and Reconstruction experiences in the state had given Democrats tangible and graphic evidence of the frightful results of governmental activism. In creating the 1875 Constitution and in controlling state government thereafter, they acted upon the evidence. This suspicion of government contributed, I think, to one of the most unfortunate consequences of the era: the rise of vigilantism throughout Missouri. It makes sense, I suppose: if you don't have much faith in your government, then you are inclined to take matters into your own hands. That, of course, is what happened in Stone County in the spring of 1875 when a group calling itself the Sons of Honor threatened to disrupt the county court's proceedings because of their outrage over high taxes. The disturbance there, by the way, was quelled with the threat of armed force led by Missouri Adjutant General George Caleb Bingham. A similar frustration led to conflict in St. Clair County in 1877 when a band of armed vigilantes entered the county courthouse in Osceola and stole all of the official tax records from frightened officials. The vigilantes warned the county judges that they faced lynching if they did not resign immediately. The officials heeded the warning and resigned their positions. Meanwhile, the vigilantes destroyed the tax records so that there would be no basis upon which taxes could be collected. The most famous of the vigilante actions in Missouri during the post-Civil War generation occurred in southwest Missouri with the so-called "Baldknobbers" who gave up on local officials in their search for justice and took matters into their own hands during the 1880s. It seems clear to me that it is at least worth looking at things that were going on in Saline County during the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s in an effort to interpret, or, perhaps, re-interpret, what was happening here politically. I was struck by the fact, for example, that the total population of Saline County rose from 14,649 in 1860 to 21,672 in 1870, and yet, fewer than one thousand votes were cast in the general gubernatorial election in Saline County in 1868. 587 of those Saline County votes were cast for Republican gubernatorial candidate Joseph W. McClurg! Clearly, a majority of voting-age Saline Countians did not vote in that election, either because they had been disfranchised by the Radical Republicans or because they thought that the candidates running for the state's highest office did not give them a clear choice. Or, as the author of an 1881 history of Saline County wrote, "The majority of the adult males of the county were anti-radical in politics; but as no one could vote unless he was registered, and as no one could be registered unless he could take the oath prescribed by the Drake constitution, and as but few could do that, there were hundreds of men disfranchised. There was a very great dissatisfaction throughout the county." (Four years later, by the way, 4,134 Saline County residents went to the polls and they cast 2,841 of their votes for the Democratic candidate and winner Silas Woodson, also a native of Kentucky. 1872, of course, marked the return of Democrats in the state to power). But the point is that Saline County residents must have been terribly frustrated during the late 1860s and into the 1870s; perhaps this frustration might help to explain why people of this area turned to vigilante action in the lynching of one of the persons accused of starting the destructive fire which took such a toll on Arrow Rock in 1873. Perhaps, also, it helps to explain why a vigilante group known as the Honest Men's League formed as early as 1866 in Saline County to protect property and lives from lawlessness. They simply didn't trust their elected officials to protect them. There were branches of the Honest Men's League organized in Arrow Rock, Miami, Brownsville, Cambridge, and Grand Pass. Older-than-middle-age Saline County residents, in particular, must have felt a great sense of relative deprivation when they thought back to the antebellum period and about how the so-called "Central Clique" of rulers who hailed from Howard and Saline counties and that included such famous men as Meredith Miles Marmaduke, Thomas Reynolds, Owen Rawlins, John Sappington, William Napton, and Claiborne Fox Jackson had wielded such power during that era. By the 1870s and 1880s, Arrow Rock and Saline County were on the periphery of power, and that reality must have hurt in a variety of ways. Another theme that dominated Missouri life during the generation that followed the Civil War was the dramatic change that occurred as a consequence of the building of railroads. No single force changed the lives of Missourians during the last half of the nineteenth century than did the railroads. The railroads changed people's notions of space. The isolation that Missourians had felt in their overwhelmingly rural state began to lessen in the generation after the Civil War. Distant urban centers of the East, so far away from most Missourians in the 1850s and 1860s that they were only abstractions, were brought closer by the faster and easier means of travel and communication available in the 1870s and 1880s. The railroads also changed people's notion of time. Indeed, the railroads defined time for Missourians. On November 8, 1883, Governor Thomas Crittenden, following the urging of "the managers of the railroads of the United States to adopt standards of time which shall be uniform," urged Missourians to adopt Central Time as their standard. They did so beginning at noon on November 18, 1883. With the coming of the railroad, trips to the nearest town could be measured in minutes rather than hours; trips across the state in hours rather than days; and trips across the country in days rather than weeks. The interconnectedness of life-the effect of each upon the other-became more apparent. Life in faraway places and at distant times became much less remote, much less abstract, because the places could be reached in much shorter amounts of time. The railroads changed the way most Missourians made a living. Missourians discovered that they could grow, make, and mine things that were wanted by people outside the state, and that those things could be shipped by rail anywhere in the country. Just as importantly, Missourians discovered that they could receive goods produced elsewhere in return. Missourians began, increasingly, to specialize in the production of those goods and commodities that would bring them the greatest cash profit, and with that cash they became consumers as they had never been before. But all of this occurred at precisely the same time that another great change was taking place in the lives of Missourians. The memory of the Civil War was still fresh in the minds of most Missourians in the 1870s. The men who had fought and suffered on the battlefields, and their wives and girl friends who had remained behind, had reached middle age and the peak of their productivity. Fiercely independent and suspicious of circumstances and people they could not control, they nurtured mutually inconsistent aspirations: they wanted the benefits and conveniences of commercial cosmopolitanism as well as the control and isolation of provincial localism. Nonetheless, the railroads, and the changes they brought, could not be stopped. By the 1870s, Missouri was embarked upon a new economic course that inspired hope in the hearts of most of the residents of the state. Ironically, the source of that hope-the railroads and the improved standard of living that they promised-also often brought economic disaster and despair. The future belonged, then, to those who best recognized the reality and nature of the economic changes that were upon Missouri and who were able to capitalize on this knowledge. I am reminded, in saying that, of course, the people such as Claiborne Fox Jackson and other members of the Clique who had been fiercely opposed to the railroads and, while in governmental power during the antebellum period, had fought against public funding for the building of railroads. Railroads were not new to Missouri in the 1870s, of course. The first Iron Horses entered the state in the in the mid-1850s, and over the next two decades several tracks crisscrossed the state. But in the 1870s and 1880s an ever-increasing number of feeder lines emerged, tying theretofore rural, semi-subsistent people into an expanding, urban, commercial economy. In 1870 Missouri had 2,000 miles of railroad completed. By 1880, that figure had nearly doubled, to 3,965 miles. Communities sought out, solicited, and even bribed railroad entrepreneurs to lay track through, around, or just near their towns. The town of Pilot Grove, not that far from here, was actually moved to gain access to the Missouri, Kansas and Texas (M.K.T.) Railroad. The current site of the town, about one mile from the previous site, was platted in 1873 by Samuel Roe, who owned a farm on the site. By 1880, Roe's town had grown to more than two hundred people and had become an important railroad, trade, and shipping center. In the early 1880s it featured several general merchandise and hardware stores, a bank, two restaurants, two tin shops, three blacksmith and wagon shops, two combination hotels and boardinghouses, two livery stables, one barbershop, several carpenters, and a number of resident railroad workers. As one agriculturist wrote in 1880, "An important matter for consideration, in computing the value of a country, is the means a country had to place the surplus products in a market where they will command a ready sale at good prices." The most available means for doing that throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century was the railroad. As the editor of the Lawrence Chieftain wrote in 1884, if Lawrence County residents could get a railroad to come to Mount Vernon, in southwest Missouri, it would create "a flourishing, wealthy town beyond the dreams and expectations of the most sanguine." Farmers were urged to accept the railroads as their friends and to specialize in the production of agricultural commodities in demand in distant urban markets. Henry Clay Dean put it this way in a November 1879 speech before the State Board of Agriculture: "We must penetrate every accessible part of the State with railways, until everything we have to sell is brought to the door of the market. Our wetlands must be drained and our uplands fertilized, and skilled farmers of other states invited to make their homes among us." By urging better transportation and more scientific agriculture, agricultural leaders fostered expansion of markets and increased production. Consequently, farmers brought previously unused and often marginal land into production. Often they could do this only by borrowing money that they hoped to repay with the profits they assumed would result from their ever-increasing productivity. Hence, Missouri farmers became debtors as never before, a situation that made them dependent on and often hostile toward their creditors. The 1870s and 1880s witnessed tight money supplies and massive deflation, which hurt debtors. Farmers were always supportive of ways to inflate the currency during this era through such means as the use of greenbacks and silver as legal tender. (This, you may recall, is another way trend that someone like Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Clique opposed during the pre-Civil War period). Such inflationary measurers, however, were always opposed by creditors. The degree to which Missourians succeeded in expanding their production is evidenced by the growth in the number of farms and acreage under cultivation. In 1870 Missourians cared for 148,328 farms and had 9,130,615 acres under cultivation. By 1880 those figures had jumped to 215,575 farms and 16,745,031 acres under cultivation. But even more than farmers in the generations before them, Missouri farmers of the period could neither control prices they received for their products nor the weather conditions that so importantly influenced their successes or failures. Farm prices generally declined after 1873. The price of corn, for example, went from sixty-seven cents per bushel in 1874 to twenty-four cents per bushel in 1875 and remained in the twenties and thirties for thirteen of the fifteen years between 1876 and 1890. Livestock prices varied in a similar fashion, ruled by the iron law of supply and demand because agriculture operated in a truly and increasingly competitive market. Despite the fact that Missouri agriculturists increased the acreage they farmed from slightly over nine million acres in 1870 to nearly seventeen million in 1880, the value of the products they produced actually declined from $10,035,759 in 1870 to $95,912,666 in 1880. Looking at figures such as these, farmers reasoned that something was terribly wrong; someone must have been to blame for their declining fortunes. Historian Floyd Shoemaker has written that, "The farmer's discontent was heightened when he saw how fortunes were being made in other enterprises." Still, the emergence of a national market brought with it the desire to produce more at a continually reduced cost. In manufacturing and industry, as in agriculture, machines that could perform simple repetitive jobs took the place of highly skilled artisans and craftsmen (such as Mr. Sites). Additionally, women and children were used increasingly to displace higher-paid, more highly skilled male workers. This was particularly true in the clothing, shoe, and tobacco industries. Census figures reveal that there were 8,592 manufacturing establishments reporting in Missouri in 1880 and that they employed 63,9995 workers who received salaries totaling $24,309,716. By 1890, those figures had changed substantially. In that year, there were 14,052 manufacturing establishments reporting with 143,139 workers who received salaries totaling $76,427,364. Again, nearly 84 percent (119,790) of those workers were males above the age of sixteen. But this time, 14.8 percent (19,858) of the workers were females above the age of fifteen. Indeed, the increase in the number of women working in factories had led the legislature to pass a law in 1885 that required factories "To provide and maintain suitable seats for the use of such female employees at or beside the counter or work bench where employed and to permit the usage of such seats by employees as may be reasonable for the preservation of their health." Despite the harshness of working conditions in the factories, some women clearly enjoyed the chance to be wage earners for the first time. In 1893, for example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics asked a number of women working in the manufacture of chewing and smoking tobacco if they preferred their present occupation to domestic work. Overwhelmingly, they said they did. One woman's response seemed to sum up the feelings of others: "At this occupation I am more independent than if doing house-work. I commence work at a certain hour and at a certain hour I quit. All the work is by the piece, and there is no fault-finding and scolding. My Sundays and evenings are my own. My services are appreciated, and my pay is according to the work done." By 1890, the number of children working in manufacturing had been reduced to 1.4 percent of the total labor force. The cost of materials used by manufacturers in 1890 was $177,582,382, with the value of products $324,561,993, for a value added of $146,979,551. While the number of Missourians living on the land had increased between 1870 and 1890, the state's urban population grew even faster. Indeed, Missouri's rural population actually declined from 74.8 percent of the state's total population in 1880 to 68 percent in 1890, as an increasing number of farm implements displaced agricultural laborers. President John Walker, speaking to the annual gathering of the State Board of Agriculture in 1882, lamented the fact that he "came too soon to get the benefit of recent inventions." Addressing the younger men in his audience, "who are aided by the genius of modern inventive skill," Walker told them they had "a more inviting field before you than we older pioneers who have constructed your roads and cleared your fields with the ruder implements then at hand. Those were the days when we walked after the plow and held it. Now you ride." J. R. Estill of Howard County encouraged his fellow farmers to raise more hay in 1880, arguing, "The great improvement in machinery within the last few years for cutting and saving hay has produced a revolution in this crop. Now a hundred acres of heavy grass does not look so formidable in labor as twenty did a ffew years since. With a good machine fifteen acres can be cut in a day; three men and four boys provided with long rakes and a stacker can save it, thus making forage faster than by any other process." Colman's Rural World, arguably the most popular farming magazine of the era, noted in 1879 that "with the improved implements and machines which we now have, a farmer with one hired man can carry on farming on a larger scale than he could a generation ago with half a dozen hired men." The State Bureau of Labor Statistics, in its Sixth Annual Report (1885), noted, "The barshare plow, requiring three to four men per acre a day of plowing, has given place to the sulky plow, asking for but one man per day for three acres of plowing. The corn planter has replaced ten men; the mower, four to five; the reaper, ten men; and so on for other field operations." The result: "expansion of labor-saving machinery on the farm has forced the laborer to seek other employment." Farm laborers not only were being pushed from the farm by increased use of labor-saving devices but also were finding more opportunities in the towns that were emerging and the cities that were growing. St. Louis, that city that the Clique hated so much, grew dramatically during the generation after the Civil War. Long an important trade center because of its location on the Mississippi River, St. Louis became even more important in the mid-1870s, after the completion of the famous Eads Bridge, which spanned the river in 1874. The Eads Bridge served as a symbolic and physical link between the city and the vast urban markets of the East. The value of manufactured products produced in St. Louis leaped from an estimated $27 million in 1870 to $114.3 million in 880, and then doubled again by 1890 ($228.7 million). Kansas City grew even more spectacularly during this era. The city had begun to grow exponentially immediately after the Civil War, with its population increasing from 3,500 in 1865 to more than 32,000 in 1870. A principal reason for this growth was the foresight of Joseph G. McCoy and others, who envisioned Kansas City as a railhead for Texas cattle drovers who wished to ship their beef by train to the Eastern urban markets. This focused marketing venture spawned two incredible explosive growth industries: meatpacking and milling. Plankington and Armour Company emerged as the major packer in the 1870s, slaughtering thousands of head of cattle and shipping beef initially in canning tins and later in refrigerated cars to distant markets. Kansas City canned beef rose from 778,720 tins in 1880 to more than a million tins in 1885. Likewise, a similar growth occurred in the volume of wheat received into the city. Wheat receipts for Kansas City stood at 678,000 bushels in 1871; that figure rose to more than 9 million by 1878. By 1880 eleven railway lines ran through Kansas City, and the burgeoning metropolis was attracting aspiring workers from all parts of Kansas and Missouri, including from Saline County. In particular, many eastern Kansas and western Missouri farmers who had never recovered from the grasshopper plague of the mid-1870s and the depression and poor crop prices of those years saw Kansas City as a mecca of opportunity. They imagined the wealth that could be gained working in the slaughter and packinghouses. Among the people leaving Saline County for greener pastures in the post-Civil War period were African-Americans, which gets me to the issue of race. I think it's hard to imagine what a dramatic transformation race relations took in this region when the Civil War ended slavery in 1865. At the very time that Missouri was undergoing a rapid transformation from an agricultural, semi-subsistent economy to a highly competitive industrializing economy, residents of the Boone's Lick were losing their captive labor force of African-Americans. It's worth remembering that in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, Saline County had a total population of nearly 15,000 people, roughly one-third of whom were African-American slaves. This, after all, was a region of the state that had strongly supported William Napton and Claiborne Fox Jackson in the so-called Jackson-Napton Resolutions of the 1840s, that "declared boldly and unequivocally that Congress had no right to legislate against slavery in the territories, thus securing Missouri to consistent opposition to free-soilism and abolitionism and those who supported either position. Slavery was a critical foundation of Boons Lick and Saline County life. But Missouri slaves were freed in January 1865. And by 1870, the black population of Saline County had declined by more than a thousand, while the white population grew by almost 7,000. The meant, of course, a dramatic decrease in the availability of black laborers, which, in turn, meant either turning to the production of less labor-intensive crops and/or hiring farm laborers and borrowing money from hated Eastern bankers to buy laborer-saving equipment. This, I would think, would have created a great frustration for many whites, a frustration that was exacerbated when they discovered that blacks could vote when many of them could not! Many white Missourians, Saline Countians among them, no doubt, must have agreed with the 1875 Constitutional Convention delegate who proposed granting women the right to vote so that they would cancel out black men's votes. He was outraged that the country had elected Ulysses S. Grant as president in 1868 and again in 1872. He blamed African-American voters. He wanted to give women the ballot, as he said, as "a remedy against . . . negro voters precipitated upon us." Arrow Rock Township, which included the village of Arrow Rock, lost 36% of its black population between 1860 and 1870, while the white population of the township grew by 7%. The more than 700 blacks who remained in Arrow Rock township continued to provide an important labor pool for local farmers, merchants, and business people. Indeed, in 1880, 15 years after slavery ended, nearly 60% of Arrow Rock's blacks still worked and lived in white households. Clearly, this situation of living in the white household dramatically limited African-American autonomy. Live in servants had no clear starting or stopping time for work. They were literally trapped in the white household, with no time of their own to control. They could be asked to do whatever the white head of the household wanted done, whenever he/she wanted it done. It was difficult for husbands or wives who "lived in" to fulfill family responsibilities to each other, or to their children, since their first responsibility was to the white heads of the household. Although there is no definitive extant documentary evidence to support the point, it is reasonable to assume that Arrow Rock blacks sought to escape this quasi-slavery and establish their independence from white control by living in their own households. The 1900 census reveals that they were extraordinarily successful in doing this. By 1900 all of the African-Americans were living in households headed by blacks. A black community, with its own institutions, had emerged on and around Morgan Street, on the northern border of the village. One question that I suspect I know the answer to, but I would love to find documentary confirmation of, is this: did whites facilitate Arrow Rock Township, which included the village of Arrow Rock, lost approximately one out of three Saline County residents was an African-American slave. By 1870, the African-American population of Saline County actually declined by roughly one thousand persons, while the white population of the county grew by almost 7,000. That meant, of course, a dramatic decrease in the availability of black laborers. It also, I would think, meant a great frustration for many whites. This frustration must have been exacerbated when whites discovered, for example, that many African-Americans could vote and they could not. Not surprisingly, it's not that difficult to find anti-Negro comments, especially with regard to black voting, in Saline County newspapers that exist for the post-war period. I have, as some of you know, made the point before that the census records reveal a dramatic transformation in race relations here in Arrow Rock during the last two quarters of the 19th century. In 1880, more than 60 percent of African-Americans living here in town were still living in white households. That situation apparently made for increased black frustration: "living in," as it was called, made it very difficult for domestic servants and hired hands to have a life of their own. It was hard for African-American men and women to fulfill their responsibilities to spouses and children when their primary responsibilities were to the whites for whom they worked and in whose households they lived. Thus, there seems to me to have been a conscious effort made on the part of blacks here to end that situation of "living in" and establishing their own households, away and apart from whites. By 1900 they succeeded with what can only be described as a remarkable transformation: in that census year, there was not one African-American living in a white household in Arrow Rock. Moreover, by that time, African-Americans had created their own "island community" with their own institutions (two churches, four lodges, and one school) on the northern border of the town. Clearly, the relationship between the races was changing and with that change must have come both frustration and anxiety. So, what does all of this mean? And where do we go from here in our attempt to understand historic Arrow Rock better? One of the great values of this gathering, I think, is this: it focuses our attention on a different time period of Arrow Rock's past. I do not mean to suggest that inquiry on antebellum Arrow Rock should cease, or that we know all that can be known about the town and the area in that era. But I, for one, welcome the opportunity to look at Arrow Rock in the postwar era and to try to understand what was happening here then, in the context of changes that were occurring elsewhere in the state and nation. After all, the postwar period is at least three times as long as the pre-war period! And yet, we know much less about it. Exactly how did Arrow Rock residents make their living during the postwar period? More specifically, exactly what crops did they grow, what merchandise did they buy and sell? In short, how and where did they get their money and how and where did they spend it? Let me just point out a couple of interesting things from the agricultural census of the period. In 1860, Saline County farmers produced 478,010 pounds of tobacco, with, of course, the help of slaves. By 1870, however, five years after slavery ended, Saline County farmers produced 215,475 pounds of tobacco. By 1880, however, they rebounded, more than doubling their tobacco production to 540,175 pounds. The number of acres in "improved land" went from 139,527 in 1860, to 200,799 in 1870 to 345,799 in 1880. This was made possible, in part, because Saline County farmers increased their investment in "farming implements and machinery" from $170,999 in 1860 to $299,521 in 1870 to $335,407 in 1880. They also began to use significantly more horses and mules and raise more beef cattle and more "milch cows," which, by the way produced 339,108 pounds of butter in 1870 and 408,439 in 1880. Farmers were producing more for market and less for their own use (the number of bushels of Irish potatoes, for example, was nearly ct in half from 1870-1880: farmers were selling a few cash crops and purchasing "groceries" rather than "supplies." Now, here's an interesting piece of data. Despite all of this change and increase, the total cash value of Saline County farms actually declined between 1870 and 1880, from $9,354,974 to $8,921,496 in 1880. No wonder farmers here were so frustrated. No wonder they formed groups such as the Grange and the Saline County Central Association in the 1870s. Beyond these issues, there are many others. Where did they seek their entertainment? How did the role of the church and the school change, if at all? What about fraternal and sisterhood lodges? Gathering and analyzing this kind of data is tedious and time consuming, but I think it would provide new insight into the history of this county and this community. Friends of Arrow Rock |
