Most of the North, on the other hand, was determined that no more slave states should be created. It was a sectional and not a party question. Practically there was only one party after 1816, the last national canvass in which the Federalist party participated, and the Democracy had the entire field to itself. A Northern Democrat, Tallmadge of News York, to the bill for the admission of Missouri, offered, in 1819, an amendment that no more slaves should be let into Missouri, and that the children born of slaves in the state after it was admitted should be free after reaching the age of twenty five. A contest then began which startled Jefferson, as he declared, “like a fire bell in the night,” which lasted two years, and which convulsed the country. Twice the House, in which the North was predominant, passed the bill with the antislavery proviso, but the restriction was each time defeated in the Senate. The latter at last yoked Maine, which was ready for admission, with Missouri, the South agreeing to let Maine in as a free state if the North would al low Missouri to come in with slavery. Then an adjustment was proposed, by a Northern Democrat of pro-slavery proclivities, Senator Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois, by which Maine was to be admitted as a free state; Missouri was to enter with slavery, but slavery was to be excluded from all the rest of the territory bought from France in 1803 north of latitude 360, 30’, which line was Missouri’s southern boundary through part of its length. This arrangement, • which the House fought for a time, but which it at last (in 1820) accepted9 was the Missouri Compromise proper. Missouri’ s constitution containing a clause which required the legislature to prevent the entrance of free Negroes into the state, another contest was precipitated in Congress. This was at last settled by a compromise offered by Clay, under which Missouri agreed not to shut out anybody recognized as a citizen by any state, and at that time Negroes were re cognized as citizens by several Northern states. Thus, by the Thomas adjustment, supplemented by the Clay concession, Missouri was thrust northward as a cape of slavery into a sea of freedom. The slavery interest drew Missouri toward the South, the slavery section, and toward the Democracy, the party which was generally predominant in that region. Other influences — mineral production, internal improvements at the national expense, and the tariff — drew Missouri in the opposite direction, harmonized it with the West, to which, by geography and the character of its principal products, it belonged, and built up within the state a considerable following for the various parties which successively were the antagonists of the Democracy throughout the country. “Dig for lead instead of silver. The lead that you will get here will bring you more silver than you will ever find in these rocks and hills.” These words were said to have been addressed to Renault, the director of the Mississippi Company already mentioned, while he was prospecting for silver in Missouri, in 1723, with a force of Negro slaves. The advice was taken. Lead mines — situated in the southeastern part of the present state, some of which are still being worked, a century and three quarters after Renault’s days — were opened, and rude smelters were constructed. The product was carried to the Mississippi on pack horses, conveyed across the river to Fort Chartres, in the present state of Illinois, sent down to New Orleans in keel or fiat boats, and then shipped to the outer world. Renault, the Frenchman, had been vainly seeking for gold and silver in Missouri for a year or two at this time, as Soto, the Spaniard, had been a century and three quarters earlier. 

Here, however, Renault, more than fifty years before the United States government was founded, eighty years before the Missouri region became part of the United States, and nearly one hundred years be fore Missouri became a state of the Union, began the development of Missouri’ s mineral resources, whose product, as mined throughout the world, has been of immeasurably greater service to man kind than all the gold and silver which have ever been dug out of the earth. Lead, zinc, coal, iron, quicksilver, cop per, manganese, tin, nickel, and many other minerals have been found in Missouri since the days when Renault’s slaves began to make their clumsy and tentative efforts to dig lead. In the production of some of them Missouri takes a high rank. According to figures furnished to the writer of this article by Mr. George E. Quinby, Missouri’s Inspector of Lead and Zinc Mines, the lead ore product of the state for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1899, was valued at $3,146,237, and the zinc ore at $5,974,624, or a total value of the two ores of $9,120,861, a gain of 53.59 per cent over the preceding year.’ The gain was chiefly in the zinc ore, which was 104 per cent, that in lead ore being 4.48 per cent. It is estimated that the output of the zinc ore in the year (181,430 tons high and low grade ore) equaled a product of 96,650 tons of spelter, while the total production of spelter in the United States was 99,980 tons in 1897, as shown by the government report. Missouri’s output, there fore, of zinc ore in 1899 came within 3330 tons of equaling the country’s en tire product in 1897. The inspector predicts that, on the basis of the new fields which are being opened, Missouri will prove to be the richest lead and zinc region in the world. In area of coal fields, 26,000 square miles, Missouri leads all the states, though in output it falls below many of them. In 1899, according to figures furnished by Mr. Charles Evans, State Inspector of Coal Mines, coal was mined in 36 of the state’s 115 counties, the product being 3,191,811 tons, the largest output in the state’s history, and 12.85 per cent over the previous year. The State Geologist, Mr. John A. Gallagher, tells the ‘writer that in the coal measures in the northwest part of Missouri the character and structure of the rocks suggest large bodies of coal yet untouched, as well as vast accumulations of petroleum and natural gas. “When fully explored and developed,” he declares, “Missouri will be the greatest producer of lead and zinc in the world, a large producer of copper, nickel, and cobalt, and always a producer of iron. The development of Missouri’s mines had a powerful effect in starting manu factories in the state. “In despite of the savages, Indian and British,” said the Missouri Gazette of St. Louis, the predecessor of the present St. Louis Re public, July 17, 1813, “the country is progressing in improvements. A red and white lead manufactory has been established in this place by a citizen of Philadelphia named Hartshog. This enterprising citizen has caused extensive works to be erected, to which he has added a handsome brick house on our principal street, for retailing merchandise. We understand that his agent here has already sent several hundred thousand weight of manufactured lead to the Atlantic states.” St. Louis at that time had a population of about 2000. Major Amos Stoddard, who, as an agent of France, received Upper Louisiana from Spain in 1803, and then turned it over to the United States, and who was made governor of the territory, said, “The in habitants generally cultivated sufficient cotton for family purposes, and spun and wove it into cloth.” From these small beginnings Missouri soon rose to prominence as a manufacturing community. The census report of 1890 showed that in that year, in round figures, the gross value of the products of its manufactures was $324,000,000, and the net value was $147,000,000. At that time 143,139 persons were employed in the manufactures of the state, and the wages paid to them that year was $76,416,364. Using the census fig ures in each case, Missouri in 1850 stood tenth on the roll of states in the gross value of manufactured products, ninth in net value, and thirteenth in the number employed and in the wages paid. By 1890 it had advanced to the seventh place in the gross and net value of pro duct, ninth in number of persons employed, and seventh in the wages paid. When the latest national census was taken the only states which stood ahead of Missouri in manufacturing were New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Massachusetts, Ohio, and New Jersey. St. Louis, Missouri’s chief city, stood in 1890, in the amount of capital invested in manufactures, fifth among the country’s cities, being led by New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Brooklyn only. It was said in an earlier part of this article that when Missouri in 1821 was admitted to statehood it was thrust northward as a cape of slavery into a sea of freedom. It was also thrust west ward as a promontory of civilization into an ocean of savagery. Outside of its boundaries were no settlements of any consequence west of the Mississippi except down near the Gulf of Mexico, in the state of Louisiana, and these were far out of the current of western travel. The state in which the paths of Coronado and Soto, one marching from Florida and the other from the Gulf of California, would have crossed if they had been extended a little farther, be came, early in the present century, the meeting place of mightier hosts than were ever arrayed under the banner of these Spanish cavaliers. It was the rallying point of forces which were gathering for the conquest of a continent. Here converged the streams of immigration coming from New England and New York; from Pennsylvania and Maryland; from Virginia and the Carolinas; from Louisiana and the other Gulf states, reinforced by contingents from every important country of the Old World. Within this remotest out post of civilization were assembled the most daring, restless, and resourceful of all the races under the sun. From St. Louis started Lewis and Clark in 1804 up the Missouri and down the Columbia to the Pacific, to learn the wonders and mysteries of the vast empire which Jefferson had just purchased from France, — the first among Americans, and the third among men of any nationality, to cross the continent, Cabeza de Vaca, the Spaniard, in 1528—36, traveling from Florida through Texas and Mexico, being the first man of any race to accomplish this achievement, and Sir Alexander Mackenzie, the Scotchman, in Canada in 1793, being the second. From St. Louis also Lieutenant Zebulon M. Pike sailed up the Mississippi in 1805 to trace out the sources of that waterway. A year afterward, moving from the same starting point, he discovered the peak in the Rocky Mountains which bears his name, — the first in stance, as Bryant said, in which “the speech of England” gave a designation to any part of that range south of the Missouri River, — and carried the American flag to the Rio Grande, then Spanish territory, forty years before Zachary Taylor’s approach to that river precipitated the Mexican War. Major Stephen H. Long, in 1819, moved from the same base, using the first steamboat ever employed for government exploration in the interior of the country, went up the Missouri, and then struck across to the Arkansas and the Red rivers to ascertain the boundary between the United States and Spain as laid down by the treaty of 1819 by which Florida was annexed. A quarter of a century later, Fremont, with the same city as a head quarters, began that career as a pathfinder in the Rockies and conquistadores in California which gave him the picturesqueness and prominence that captivated the imagination of his fellow countrymen in his day, and secured for him the nomination for President in 1856 of the new Republican party. When founded by Laclede and Chouteau back in 1764, under a patent from Louis XV., St. Louis was designed to be a post for the collection of peltries, and soon became the headquarters for this trade all over Upper Louisiana. Here John Jacob Astor, in 1819, established the western department of his fur company, and it remained the center of the fur trade in the United States to a re cent day. Here, too, for many years was the headquarters of the Indian agencies. The old and the new order among Indian fighters and pioneers met here. Daniel Boone, the last and most typical of the forest rangers, who had lived under two flags — the British and the American — while east of the Mississippi, and who was under three flags — the Spanish, French, and American — west of that stream, died in Missouri just as Kit Carson and Jim Bridger, the earliest and most eminent of plainsmen, were beginning their career at that point. From Missouri’s metropolis were started the first trade relations ever established between the United States and the Spaniards and Mexicans in the Southwest. The commerce which was opened in an unpromising way with Santa F~, New Mexico’s capital, by Auguste P. Chouteau and Julius P. Mun, in 1816, grew eventually to represent millions of dollars a year. It was carried by long trains of wagons whose story is invested with as much romance and mystery as that of the caravans laden with silks, cashmeres, spices, and precious stones which, moving from India to Europe, passed from the Persian Gulf up the valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris to the Black Sea in the days of Marco Polo. Previous to 1832 the eastern terminus of the Santa F6 trail was at Franklin, and afterward, until the railroad superseded the caravans, it was at Independence. Both are Missouri towns, but the headquarters and distributing point for the trade were in St. Louis. In Missouri began all the historic trails which, in the days before the ad vent of the railroads, were traversed by the immigrants and the explorers on the route to all parts of the West from New Mexico and California to Oregon. It was over one of these — that from Santa F~ to St. Louis on part of his course — that Marcus Whitman made that wild ride of several months in the winter of 1842—43 from the valley of the Columbia to Washington, to warn President Tyler and Congress that the British were preparing, through the importation of colonists from Canada, to secure Oregon, then dominated by the British monopoly — the Hudson’s Bay Company. Over another route, that leading from Westport, on the site of the present Kansas City, by way of the South Pass, Whitman returned in the summer of 1843, leading 800 immigrants with 200 wagons to the basin of the Columbia, and started the movement of Americans thither which won Oregon for the United States in the treaty with England in 1846. Through Missouri also passed part of the Mormons in their hegira from Nauvoo when they set up their Zion in the Salt Lake valley. Now let us see how these conflicting conditions registered themselves in Missouri’s politics. Slavery drew the state toward the Democracy, while the state’s mineral wealth and its manufactures, which caused a demand for tariffs for protection, pulled it toward the Democracy’s successive antagonists, — the National Republican, the Whig, and the Republican parties. The slavery influence, supplemented by other considerations after slavery was abolished, was, on the whole, the stronger.

A few facts, however, which are often lost sight of by writers on American politics, must be kept in view, in order that the history of the West in general, and that of Missouri in particular, in the days before the Civil War may be understood. The objection to slavery was not, in the free section of the country, so widespread or intense when Missouri was asking for admission as it became a quarter of a century later. The importance of slavery in Missouri’s industrial system was less than it was in any other of the fifteen states in which it existed. Relatively, slavery declined in Missouri from 1830 onward to emancipation. Many of Missouri’s dominant party, the Democracy, were personally opposed to slavery, and went into the Republican party when, by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854, the Whig party was destroyed, and the Free Soilers, Abolitionists, and antislavery elements of the Whig, Democratic, and Know Nothing organizations were swept into the coalition which adopted the Re publican name. In the free states west of the Alleghanies there was, at the outset, a powerful sentiment in favor of slavery. By the sixth section of the ordinance of 1787 the further introduction of slavery into the territory north of the Ohio River was prohibited, but some slaves remained in one or two of the states of that locality until near the middle of this century. It was only by a majority of one that a proposition to introduce slavery into Ohio was defeated in the convention which framed the constitution of that state in 1802, and the anti-Negro legislation known as the “black code” was not entirely swept away in Ohio until 1887. In the early days of the territory of Indiana William Henry Harrison, its governor, and delegate conventions appealed year after year to Congress to permit slavery to enter that locality. In the Illinois legislature of 1823—24 a proposition was carried by a two-thirds vote to hold a convention to alter the state’s constitution, the principal change desired being the elimination of the slavery exclusion clause, the aim being to align Illinois with Virginia, Kentucky, South Carolina, and the rest of the slave states. After one of the most exciting contests which ever occurred in the state the proposition for a new convention was beaten when it got before the people, and the state was saved to freedom, but Illinois, like Indiana, refused to join the Republican party until 1860. The Ohio River did not really become an extension of Ma son and Dixon’s line until after the re peal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854 gave slavery an equal chance with freedom in territory from which slavery had been excluded by that adjustment. It was then that the northern section of the agricultural West broke from the agricultural South and left the Democratic party; though Indiana and Illinois remained in partisan harmony with Missouri and the slave section in general until Lincoln’s first election. The Democrats controlled Missouri almost without interruption from 1821 to 1861, though often by only small majorities, and in the mineral producing and manufacturing districts there was a decided leaning toward the successive antagonists of the Democracy. There was a strong current of antislavery feeling in one section of that party, and it asserted itself when, in 1849, the legislature adopted the Jackson resolutions, — so called from the fact that Claiborne F. Jackson, who was the secessionist governor of the state in 1861, was chair man of the committee which reported them, — pledging Missouri, through its representatives in Congress, to assist the other slave states against all attempts to exclude slavery from the territories. Thomas H. Benton, then near the end of his thirty years’ service in the Senate, denounced the resolutions as aiming to disrupt the Union, refused to obey them, declared that slavery was an evil which he would neither sanction himself nor impose upon others, and appealed to the people of the state upon that issue. This split the Democracy in Missouri. The Benton, or antislavery element, was led by Francis P. Blair, Jr., B. Gratz Brown, Arnold Krekel, John D. Stephenson, and Richard A. Barrett. The most prominent pro-slavery Democrats were Benton’s colleague in the Senate, David R. Atchison, Governor Sterling Price, and Jackson. Benton was beaten for re-election, retired from the Senate in 1851, but kept up the fight, was elected to the House in 1852, in which body he made a powerful speech against the repeal of the Missouri Compromise; was defeated in 1854 in at tempting to get a second term, and was beaten in 1856 as the antislavery Democratic candidate for governor. The pro slavery section of the Democracy con trolled the state until the Civil War. Most of Benton’s Democratic supporters joined the Republican party at its appearance in 1854. Benton himself advocated the election of Buchanan in 1856, against his own son-in-law, John C. Fremont, the Republican nominee, but he did this because he feared a triumph for the Republicans would send the South out of the Union, though he turned against Buchanan in 1857 when the latter fell under the influence of the Southern extremists and attempted to force slavery upon Kansas. Benton died in 1858, but would undoubtedly have supported Lincoln had he lived to 1860, for he detested the secessionists, who had Breckinridge for a candidate in that year, and despised Douglas, whom he had, while in the House, denounced for repealing the Missouri Compromise and bringing slavery up in a portentous phase. Missouri gave only 17,000 votes to Lincoln in 1860, but Breckinridge got only 31,000, as compared with 59,000 for Douglas, the nominee of the North 71 section of the Democrats, and 58, 000 for Bell, the candidate of the Constitutional Union party of ex-Whigs and ex-Know Nothings. Thus the aggregate vote of the three Unionist ingredients of the citizens of Missouri was 134,000, as against 31,000 for the dis-unionists. In 1861 the secessionist faction, whose master spirit was Governor Jackson, was beaten in the convention held to decide whether Missouri was to leave the Union or remain in it, the popular vote on delegates to the convention showing a majority of 80,000 for the Unionist side, whose most active leader was Blair. Missouri was one of the four slave states which clung to the Union, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware being the others, and Kentucky was largely influenced in its course by Missouri. By throwing the immense weight of its resources and strategic position on the side of the government in this election for delegates, which was held several weeks before Lincoln’s inauguration; by the prompt and vigorous blows by which Blair and General Lyon defeated the plottings of the disunionists, and by the 109,000 soldiers which it furnished to the Federal armies, Missouri pushed back the northern line of secession to the Arkansas River, weakened the grip of the Confederates upon the Mississippi, and contributed materially toward the triumph of the Union cause. By an ordinance of its constitutional convention adopted January 11, 1865, before the Thirteenth Amendment was submitted to the states, Missouri abolished slavery within its limits, and it was the only slave state which emancipated its slaves voluntarily. The war of 1861—65 put the Republicans in control of Missouri. Lincoln in 1864 and Grant in 1868 carried it by large majorities, and two Republican governors — Thomas C. Fletcher and Joseph W. McClurg — were chosen, the latter of whom was elected in 1868. The Liberal Republicans, under the lead of B. Gratz Brown and Carl Schurz, in combination with the Democrats, carried the state in 1870, electing Brown governor, and every governor elected since then has been a Democrat. Why did the Republicans so quickly and so completely lose their hold on Missouri? Chiefly because of the adoption of the Drake constitution of 1865, popularly nicknamed the “Draconian code,” Charles D. Drake being the con trolling spirit in the convention which framed it. This constitution had some excellent features, one dealing with education being particularly admirable, but the provisions relating to the suffrage, particularly that part creating the test oath, aroused powerful opposition throughout the state. This was an oath of loyalty to the government, and nobody could vote, hold any state, county, or municipal office, practice law, teach in a secular or Sunday school, serve as a juror, preach the gospel, or solemnize marriage with out taking this oath, while the offenses which were named were so numerous and so comprehensive that those who could take the oath without committing perjury were comparatively few. Many of the Republican leaders in Missouri opposed the test oath, and in the election in June, 1865, to ratify or reject the constitution of which it was a part, it got a majority of only 1862 out of a total poll of over 85,000, although nobody was permitted to vote unless he could have qualified under the terms of the constitution if it had already been in operation. General Francis P. Blair, the leading spirit among the Unionists and Republicans, refused to take the oath, and brought suit against the registering officers for denying him permission to vote. Father John A. Cummings, who had been indicted for administering the rites of his church without taking the oath, brought the case before the Supreme Court of the United States, and that tribunal, in January, 1867, declared the test oath unconstitutional. The discriminations against ex-Confederates still imposed by the constitution were opposed by many Republicans, and these, who took the name of Liberal Republicans, led by B. Gratz Brown and Carl Schurz, bolted the regular convention in 1870, organized another convention, put up Brown for governor, and he was supported by the Democrats and elected. That was the beginning of the Liberal Republican party, which put up Greeley and Brown for President and Vice President respectively in 1872, and were supported by the Democracy. At the election of 1870, at which Brown was chosen governor, amendments were ratified abolishing the test oath and the disfranchisement clause. Thus the Republicans of Missouri were weakened by the secession of the Brown, Schurz, and Blair elements, and the Democrats were strengthened by the removal of the disabilities from the ex-Confederates. The Democratic party at once went to the front, elected the governor chosen in 1872, and has been dominant in the state ever since. Nobody in the party which was responsible for the Drake constitution defends that instrument now. It should be remembered, however, that passion blazed fiercely all over the country in 1865. Missouri had suffered seriously by the war. Many battles were fought in the state. The movements of armies continued in it for nearly four years. The state furnished 109,000 men to the Union army, and 30,000 to the Confederacy. Out of the Union contingent 14,000 were killed in battle or died of wounds or disease. Tens of thousands of people in the region harried by the contending armies moved out of the state. Immense losses of property were occasioned. Society was disorganized. These conditions explain, though they do not excuse, the legislation directed against the element which the Union party conceived to be the authors of the state’s woes.

But let it not be inferred that politics in Missouri is so one-sided that the minority party. is hopelessly in the minority. The state’s great natural wealth enabled it to recover so quickly from the effects of the war of 1861—65 that whereas it stood thirteenth on the roll of states in population in 1850, and eighth in 1860, it had jumped to fifth in 1870, and it has held that rank ever since. The only states which lead it in population are New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Ohio. Prosperity brought a softening of the asperities caused by the Civil War, and this has gradually narrowed the gap between the vote of the two great parties. While the Democrats have elected all the governors chosen in Missouri since 1872, the Republicans carried it for the part of the ticket (minor state officers) elected in 1894, and also carried one branch of the legislature in that year, and ten of the state’s fifteen members of Congress. The Democrats cast fifty three per cent of the vote of the state for President in 1896, but in that year they were in alliance with the Populists. Their proportion of the total vote of the state in 1898 for Supreme Court judge was only fifty one per cent. In the state’s  larger cities, particularly in St. Louis, the Republicans have been pre dominant for years. Among the Germans, who have been an important ingredient in Missouri’s population since the later “fifties,” the Republican party has always been particularly strong. The balance is getting so close in Missouri that the ideal political condition must soon be at hand when the two great parties will be forced by self -interest always to nominate their cleanest and ablest men, and to put forward a policy which will mean economy, efficiency, and progress.