Missouri

views updated

MISSOURI

Missouri's strategic location at the confluence of North America's great central river system made it both a popular place for settlement and a contested region. In the mid-eighteenth century approximately fifteen hundred French Creoles and African slaves occupying a handful of riverine villages on both sides of the Mississippi coexisted in relative peace with their Indian neighbors, even as rival European powers vied to control their destinies. France's defeat in the French and Indian War (1754–1763) momentarily dashed that nation's imperial ambitions in North America and forced it to relinquish its territories there. The Treaty of Paris (1763) confirmed the placement of Canada and the lands east of the Mississippi under British control and the cession of Louisiana to Spain. The change of regimes did little to alter the fundamental character of Upper Louisiana (present-day Missouri). To the contrary, an influx of Francophone newcomers fleeing British rule reinforced French ways of life in Ste. Genevieve (c.1750) and St. Louis (1764).

Under Spanish rule French remained the common tongue. The Creole villagers were Catholic, communal, deferential, cosmopolitan, reliant on trade and commerce, and generally respectful of Indian customs and sovereignty. More than one-third were slaves. Agriculture, fur trading, lead mining, and salt making produced the commodities of exchange that fueled Upper Louisiana's colonial economy.

The province's sizable Indian populace constituted another vital element. They were the principal suppliers of the valuable pelts that made St. Louis, Upper Louisiana's capital city, a major hub in the international fur trade. The Osage, Upper Louisiana's dominant resident tribe, forged a powerful and mutually beneficial commercial alliance with St. Louis's founding family, the Chouteaus. Members of several other Indian tribes, including the Missouri, Ioway, Sauk, and Fox tribes, also lived or hunted in Upper Louisiana. During and after the American Revolution they were joined by bands of eastern émigré Indians who moved westward to escape the ravages of conflict in their homelands.

Spanish officials primarily viewed Louisiana as a buffer that would protect their valuable possessions in New Spain (Mexico) from British encroachment. Although Spain governed Louisiana for nearly four decades, few Spaniards chose to live there permanently. With limited resources at their disposal, Spanish policymakers sought to strengthen their hold on the sparsely populated and poorly defended province by enticing Anglo-Americans from east of the Mississippi to settle there with offers of free land. The scheme was predicated on a belief that over time they could be transformed into Catholic subjects loyal to the Spanish king. But the English-speaking Protestants who accepted the offer were a different breed. Independent-minded and self-reliant, they shunned the existing communal French villages in favor of scattered and isolated farmsteads. They looked on land as the primary measure of wealth and, in contrast with their Creole neighbors, were predisposed to view Indians as menacing savages.

Napoleon Bonaparte's attempts to resurrect the French nation's imperial designs for the Western Hemisphere culminated in Spain's agreement in 1800 to retrocede Louisiana to France; but more urgent imperatives elsewhere soon dashed those dreams. To the Spaniards' chagrin, the French ruler unexpectedly changed course and offered to sell the sprawling western province to the United States. President Thomas Jefferson accepted the offer, and the Louisiana Purchase (1803) ushered in a new era.

When U.S. officials took charge in St. Louis in March 1804, Upper Louisiana's total population probably exceeded 17,000. That figure included more than 10,000 Euro-Americans, perhaps 1,800 African American slaves, a handful of free people of color, and 5,000 Indians divided almost equally between immigrant and indigenous groups. Americans, including famed pioneer Daniel Boone, who had flocked to the territory during the Spanish regime's waning days already outnumbered the old French inhabitants.

The new U.S. authorities faced a daunting task as they set out to build a stable and prosperous society grounded on republican principles in a place that Washington Irving later described as "more motley than Mackinaw." President Jefferson briefly flirted with the notion of temporarily closing Upper Louisiana to further settlement, but that quixotic scheme was quickly cast aside. The decision to place the region under the control of officials in the Indiana Territory drew howls of protest from local residents of all stripes, and in 1805 Congress authorized creation of the Louisiana Territory, not to be confused with the lower parts of Louisiana then called the Territory of Orleans.

Louisiana's first governor, the controversial and self-serving General James Wilkinson, succeeded in exacerbating tensions between longtime residents and incoming Americans eager to make their mark. Competing claims for the territorial lands pitted holders of large Spanish concessions against land-hungry newcomers. The outbreak of the War of 1812 compounded the challenges of defending exposed settlements in the Missouri Territory (renamed in 1812 when Louisiana became a state) and added to local uncertainty. The end of that conflict doomed Missouri's steadily declining Indian population to further dispossession and relocation and hastened new settlement in the booming Boonslick Country adjacent to the Missouri River.

Of Missouri's territorial governors, William Clark, in office from 1813 to 1820, proved to be the most adept as he steered the fractious territory through the perils of political and economic transformation that prepared it for statehood. In his failed attempt to become the state's first elected governor, the celebrated explorer and scion of Virginia's old republican order fell victim to a populist political dynamic that championed the common man while embracing Indian relocation and removal. Newly elected U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton and many other aspiring Missouri politicians quickly acknowledged the new realities and hitched their political fortunes to this rising national tide soon to be dubbed Jacksonian democracy. Missouri's 1818 bid to become a slave state unleashed a contentious national debate over slavery extension that was temporarily resolved with passage of the Missouri Compromise (1820), a measure that paved the way for its admission to the Union as a slaveholding state in 1821.

In the post-statehood era, Missourians were well positioned to capitalize on the looming opportunities of a dawning industrial age. St. Louis, already a major fur trade entrepôt and outfitting place for western explorers, traders, and overland travelers, took advantage of a developing road system and the advent of the steamboat era to become a major manufacturing, wholesaling, and commercial center and the nation's dominant inland city.

To accommodate the new migrants filling up Missouri's unoccupied interior spaces, officials moved the state's capital to centrally located Jefferson City. The opening of the Santa Fe trade in 1821 provided a new economic boost and made places like Franklin, Arrow Rock, and Independence way stations and outfitting places. The trade also presaged Missouri's future as the primary point of departure for the great western trails. Settlers from the Old South reinforced the state's slave base and Southern identity even as a vanguard of German and Irish immigrants along with a small cadre of Yankee businessmen provided added leavening to the border state's already diverse mix. The 1830 U.S. Census listed Missouri's population as 140,455, seventy times greater than the 1791 Spanish count. Official enumerations of all inhabitants (excluding Indians) conducted by Spain in 1791 (2,111) and 1800 (7,125) and the United States in 1810 (19,783), 1820 (66,586), and 1830 (140,455) detailed that growth, but they barely hinted at what lay ahead for a state clearly in its ascendancy.

bibliography

Ekberg, Carl J. French Roots in the Illinois Country: The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998.

Faragher, John Mack. "More Motley than Mackinaw: From Ethnic Mixing to Ethnic Cleansing on the Frontier of the Lower Missouri, 1793–1833." In Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830. Edited by Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Foley, William E. The Genesis of Missouri: From Wilderness Outpost to Statehood. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989.

Gitlin, Jay L. Negotiating the Course of Empire: The French Bourgeois Frontier and the Emergence of Mid-America, 1763–1863. Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 2002.

Kastor, Peter J., ed. The Louisiana Purchase: Emergence of an American Nation. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2002.

William E. Foley

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation