Laboring People and the
Civil War as an Agrarian Reform Movement
Contents
Old Kentucky
Home and Indiana-Illinois-Missouri Migration, 1830-1857. . |
2 |
Agrarian Program. |
6 |
Political
Activism for Reform. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . |
11 |
To Missouri. |
14 |
Baileys'
Activism on the Kansas-Missouri Border 1857-1861. . . . . . . . . . . |
17 |
Beliefs. |
20 |
Reform and the
Civil War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . |
23 |
Conclusion. |
33 |
Laboring People and the
Civil War as an Agrarian Reform Movement[1]
As
a young Whig representative of Illinois's Seventh Congressional District in
1847, Abraham Lincoln was indifferent to the agrarian land reform measure then
under consideration.[2] But by the 1860 presidential campaign,
he and the Republican Party platform had evolved toward demanding the
"cutting up of the wild lands into parcels so that every poor man may have
a home."[3] The agrarians had power and they
encouraged Lincoln, as one account put it, to become "a believer in the
labor theory of value," and of labor "deserving much higher
consideration than capital."[4]
This
is an account of one of the rank-and-file families which helped Lincoln and the
Republicans evolve toward reform. The Baileys, like the Lincolns and for
similar reasons, migrated to Illinois via Indiana from Kentucky. They lived
seventeen years in a central Illinois county that Lincoln served as a
circuit-riding attorney. About the time in the latter part of the 1850s that
Lincoln was seeking to head east to Washington, D.C., the Baileys were pushing
west to take up the fight on the Kansas-Missouri border, which was then the
center of the reform movement. For many farming families, the issue in the
Civil War was not so much preservation of the union or of the Constitution, but
reform, which included political, economic and social demands for free or cheap
land, schools and libraries, decent roads, bridges, transportation and mail
service, an inexpensive legal system, a homestead exemption in debtor
proceedings, public assistance for asylums or poor houses for the blind, lame,
elderly, retarded and mentally unsound and for a church that took the side of
working people. For the agrarians the "peculiar institution" was as
much Northern corporate interests as Southern slavery, both of which used state
and federal government for personal gain at the public's expense.
This
essay looks at the agrarian movement through the eyes of a laboring family, the
Baileys. In the antebellum and Civil War period they worked for and achieved
much of their program in spite of the difficulties imposed by the established
order. Starting in the 1830s they successively homesteaded in Indiana, Illinois
and Missouri. They grew subsistence and cash crops of corn, wheat and pork, and
they helped make a revolution that is too frequently attributed to the
political, military and religious leaders of the period. Abraham Lincoln
himself acknowledged that he rode on the shoulders of "the people."[5] Typically, on February 21, 1860, soon
after his election to the presidency, he had breakfast in New York with the
leading merchants. Their fortunes depended on the southern trade and they
dominated the Democratic and Whig Parties with their ability to finance
elections. They feared Lincoln would not yield to southern demands. Thinking to
impress or intimidate him, they boasted of their wealth. He countered that he
too was a millionaire. He had a million votes which made him their equal.[6]
Old Kentucky Home and
Indiana-Illinois-Missouri Migration: 1830-1857. The Bailey's story begins
on Clear Creek in the Kentucky River valley near Mortonsville in Woodford
County, Kentucky.[7] George Bailey and Judy Howard were
married there on October 31, 1825.[8] He was twenty-one, she was seventeen.[9] The tradition of reform by migration was
in their blood. For example, Judy's family, like many others, had come to
Kentucky in 1791 on the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap from
Richmond County on Virginia's Northern Neck in eastern Virginia.[10] Small farmers were being squeezed out by
landlords, slave labor and declining tobacco profits. For them the American
Revolution won an agrarian reform that opened up western land that had been off
limits under British rule.[11] Starting in 1779 Virginia's
revolutionary assembly authorized its land office to sell up to four-hundred
acres of unclaimed Kentucky land at $2.25 per one-hundred acres with
pre-emption rights for as many as one-thousand adjoining acres.[12]
Woodford
County was in the rich bluegrass region of Kentucky, about 20 miles from
Lexington. It was already a booming plantation and horse-breeding area in the
1790s. The Baileys and Howards were small farmers.[13] They raised grain, tobacco and livestock
on limestone soil.[14] Religion was important to them and gave
support to their agrarian beliefs. Judy's father was one of the five original
trustees at the Mount Edwin Methodist Episcopal church on the Oregon Road near
Clear Creek.[15] In contrast to "enslavement to the
material," which they believed characterized the landlords, the Methodist
farmers on principle wore plain dress. They resisted what they felt was
ostentatious consumption, including wealth monopolization, slavery, gambling,
alcoholism, usury, horse racing, and sexual promiscuity. Their alternative to
the market system was subsistence farming, self-help, ministering to less
fortunate neighbors and a culture of scripture reading, prayer and hymn singing
as a family and community.[16] They would go by wagon to their
neighbors for prayer meetings at which there would also be socializing and for
the children, spelling bees and play.
By
the time George and Judy Bailey began their family in the mid-1820s, the price
of even marginal land in Woodford County was beyond the reach of most working
people.[17] A recent account summarized the
resentment felt against the absentee landlord system:
In frontier
Kentucky, "the distribution of land betrayed the expectations of most
Kentucky settlers. It reflected the stranglehold of landlords, primarily
absentee, over Kentucky." Many settlers in Kentucky lived on the margins,
as squatters or tenants, and railed against speculators and land jobbers,
seeing them as oppressors. They felt a sense of victimization.[18]
As
they would do periodically throughout their marriage, the Baileys made their
own personal agrarian reform, as their parents had done, by migrating west.
This was in 1830, soon after the birth of their first daughter, Louisa. They
went to Danville in Hendricks County, Indiana, which lay twenty miles west of
Indianapolis on what is now U.S. Highway 36.[19] Peter Cartwright, a Methodist lay
preacher who migrated about the same time, spoke for many, when he wrote in his
autobiography that he moved because he thought, "I could raise my children
to work where work was not thought a degradation," and "could better
my temporal circumstances and procure lands for my children as they grew
up."[20]
One
of the principles used by subsistence farmers for "bettering" their
circumstances was to avoid borrowing money. The focus was on
"self-help," since the government and commercial system were at best
unreliable.[21] To avoid going into debt in Danville,
the Baileys did wage labor, which was supplemented by subsistence crops. They
were able to purchase and sell several town lots with small houses on them but
it took twenty years to accumulate enough to buy a farm.[22] This was because much land in central
and northern Indiana was held by speculators for prices beyond the reach of
most working people.[23]
George
worked as a shoe and bootmaker, a trade which was the source of pride.[24] Low-cost shoes were mass-produced but a
living could still be made from the trade. Shoemakers had five years of
training; they made and repaired other products besides shoes, such as horse
collars, saddles and harnesses. A shoemaker could sew fifteen stitches per
minute and in making shoes used stock sets of lasts (wooden forms) that allowed
a tolerance of less than a twelfth of an inch. Some shoemakers travelled a
circuit each winter. The farmers would have tanned hides ready and shoes would
be made for everyone in the family.[25] Some women were shoemakers, especially
widows, but most sold butter or chickens to market or took in washing or
boarders. To keep costs down they spun and wove their family's cotton and wool
garments, knitted their stockings and manufactured their soap and candles. This
was in addition to their normal clothes washing, cooking, child rearing and
scrubbing.[26]
In
the midst of the difficulties caused by the 1837 economic depression and at
about the time of the birth of their daughter Frances Ann, named after her
maternal grandmother, the Baileys moved to Greencastle in Putnam County,
Indiana. Greencastle was twenty miles west of Danville, not far from the
National Road, which is the present-day U.S. Highway 40. During the 1830s the
National Road ran from Cumberland, Maryland to Vandalia, which was then the
capital of Illinois.[27] In 1840 they moved again, encouraged
partly by another depression. They had to sell their lot in Greencastle for
$100, which was half what they had paid for it several years earlier.[28] An English traveler in 1840 described
the scene on the National Road:
Of these emigrant
families, there are often 12 to 15 persons in each, many of them young
children; a covered wagon, drawn sometimes by two horses, though frequently by
one only, containing all their household furniture, and provisions for the way;
and the women and children were piled on these. The men and the older boys
walked beside the wagon--and they made a journey of from 12 to 15 miles a day.[29]
The
Baileys moved fifty miles further west to Shiloh Township in Edgar County,
Illinois, near Bruelette Creek in the valley of the Wabash River. The county
seat of Edgar County was Paris, with a population of 700. The main trading
center was at Terre Haute, Indiana.[30] By the mid-1850s the Terre Haute, Alton
and St. Louis Railroad was running through Paris.[31] The Baileys stayed in Illinois seventeen
years (1840-1857), where they were employed, as earlier, in boot and shoe
making with subsistence farming on the side. They eventually bought a 120-acre
farm on January 3, 1852, some twelve years after moving to Illinois.[32] In Shiloh Township five additional
children were born. In all, they had
nine children.[33] A small farm generally had a pair of
horses, a wagon, a cow, a number of hogs, and domestic fowls and two ploughs,
one for breaking up the prairie and the other for tillage.[34] Some of the land in Edgar County was so
productive that, as one farmer commented, a person "could work one day and
live on it for six."[35]
Agrarian Program. During the antebellum
period, self-help migration such as the Baileys' was the main element of their
agrarian reform movement. Laboring people wanted free or cheap land. They had
to focus on self-help because they had only limited control of the government,
especially at the state and national level. Nevertheless, where they were able,
they made the demand for free land a legislative issue. One account remarked
that, "Land legislation lay close to the Western heart. It was the
greatest single interest in the West and it was a vital topic of discussion in
the settlers' cabins."[36] There was a continuing hostility to the
corporate interests that monopolized the government and its land policy.
Farming people believed it was their labor that improved the land and gave it
value. The land had no value in itself. Speculators added no value. The common
law doctrines used by speculators such as "title by grab,"
"title by first possession" and "title by conquest" were
condemned as rationalizations for greed and theft. Historian George Stephenson
summarized the hostility the reformers had for the "capitalist"
control of land distribution:
Agriculture was
taxed for the benefit of capitalists who "toil not, neither do their
spin." To those pioneers who considered that $1.25 per acre was too high
the idea of paying double that amount to corporations "who have neither
bodies to die or souls to damn" was exceedingly unpalatable. The great
majority of the pioneers, the Free Soilers, the "National Reformers,"
using that term in its most inclusive sense, and a considerable number of
friends of homestead in all sections of the country saw the danger in a policy
which would build up a great landed interest whose influence would be used in
antagonism to the common welfare and in debauching their legislative bodies.[37]
The
market system of farming was recognized by working people as dangerous. Twenty
percent of nineteenth-century farm families went bankrupt.[38] In the antebellum it cost $200 to
establish a 160-acre farm, build a cabin, clear three acres and fence it in. If
the start-up money was loaned, the family was at risk if drought or flood
ruined the crop, if sickness hit, or if panic and depression brought prices to
a ruinous level. A family would be without money to repay the loan, and as a
contemporary put it, "would lose everything to some land shark who
possessed capital."[39]
During
the 1850s the agrarian movement, which focused on the demand for homestead
legislation, was helped by the division that arose between the Northern and
Southern commercial interests. These two forces had tended to dominate the
Democratic Party and the government land policy in the antebellum. The division
itself arose out of land policy and whether slavery would be extended to the
western territory. The Democratic policy-makers believed they had solved the
problem and defeated the agrarians in 1854 with the Kansas-Missouri Bill.[40] In exchange for the North obtaining the
terminus of the first railroad to the Pacific, the South received squatter
sovereignty in the Kansas and Nebraska territories.[41]
It
was obvious from the start that Nebraska would be free. The mistake made by the
policy-makers was in assuming that labor would stand by and allow Kansas to be
slave.[42] The militancy of the Kansas settlers who
started migrating to the territory when it opened in 1854 was noted by
historian Jay Monaghan, "Political revolution was an ideal of the day and
it was noticeable that West-bound travelers affected the faddish full beard and
soft felt hat peculiar to the popular Hungarian revolutionist Louis
Kossuth."[43] The Kansas
Free State, which was established in 1854 at Lawrence, was filled with the
agrarian's revolutionary propaganda. Published by Josiah Miller and Robert G.
Elliott, both of whom, like the Baileys had migrated from the South, it
described the existing order as "the blighting curse of monopoly, not only
of class legislation which consigns a race to slavery, but that which withholds
from the poor and gives to the rich, what God designed equally for all--the
freedom of the soil."[44]
When
the slaveholders lost the battle of the ballot in Kansas, they held a bogus
convention. The Lecompton constitution which resulted purported to allow
slavery in Kansas. But the constitution needed the approval of Congress to
obtain authority. To retain his senate seat in the November 1858 election,
Stephen Douglas was forced to abandon the Southern wing of the Democratic Party
and pre-empt Lincoln by rejecting the Lecompton constitution. The vote of
working people in Illinois was too strong to be ignored.
The
resulting split within the party between Douglas Democrats, who supported a
free Kansas, and the Southern Democrats allowed the Republicans to take the
presidency in 1860.[45] As the coalition against reform in the
Democratic Party split, the Republicans gave support to homestead legislation.
Reformers at the July 1860 Republican convention talked of the land as
belonging to and being a "natural right" of the people. They proposed
schemes to protect it, like holding it in "sacred trust," and not
granting it to speculators; only actual settlers would be given use of it and
without cost. Such grants would be inalienable, thus protecting them from
claims for debts.[46]
It
was evident in the spring of 1860 that no party which opposed the agrarians
could carry critical Northern and Border States. In anticipation of the fall
1860 elections, a homestead bill was passed by the Republican-controlled
Congress in May 1860.[47] In the House the vote was 115 for to 65
against with 95 Republicans and 25 Democrats for it. There were 48 Democrats
and 17 Know-Nothings against it.[48] It was a compromise measure, stripped of
most of its homestead features. Abolishing the old price of $1.25 per acre, it
allowed heads of families, after five years of occupancy, to purchase quarter
sections at twenty-five cents an acre. One reason it passed lay in the
expectation that President Buchanan would veto it, which he did.[49] Working people "cursed the
interests that killed the Homestead Bill."[50]
The
"interests" that killed the Homestead Bill were both slavery and the
Northern iron and railroad corporations.[51] The grant of seven million quarter
sections would make worthless both military land warrants and the massive land
grants obtained by the railroads. Northern banks and land companies had
purchased the land warrants issued to veterans at a discount and expected to
profit.[52] The Homestead Act was the main issue for
agrarians in the 1860 election.[53] Historian Allan Nevins remarked,
"Everywhere from Ohio to Kansas the cry of free land had grown immensely
popular. People believed that it meant opportunity for the poor man and his
children, rapid development of the country, and a growth in the wealth of the
whole central valley. The sad situation of many settlers in Kansas and
Nebraska, utterly destitute after a summer and fall of drought, was used to
drive home the argument."[54] After the Republicans obtained power in
1861, a homestead measure was enacted.[55]
In
addition to cheap land, the agrarian program had other elements. Free public
education was one of them. Illiteracy was widespread. Private schools and
tutors were expensive. It was not unusual for a family to spend $75 or a
quarter of their $300 income on education.[56] Despite the expense, the Bailey children
all went to school and learned to read and write. It became easier for them
after 1845 as a series of free school laws were adopted in Illinois over the
opposition of landlords and merchants who did not want to be taxed.[57] By 1860 ninty-five percent of the school
age population were attending school six months out of the year.
At
the national level with the split between the Northern and the Southern
corporate interests, educational reform was advanced in June 1862 with the
Morrill College Land Grant Act. Thirty thousand acres of public land for each
senator and representative in Congress was given for colleges.[58] This gave the start to public higher
education such as at the University of Illinois.
A
third element of the agrarian program was the overthrow of laws authorizing the
manufacture and retail sale of alcoholic drinks.[59] The corporate, profit-motivated
destruction of those that were without impulse control, the youth, and the
mentally immature did not square with egalitarian morality. An Illinois
temperance convention summarized:
While we sympathize
with the inebriate and his unfortunate family, we should not forget to keep
before the people those abominable establishments (the fountainhead of all this
evil) in their true character, that manufacture and retail alcoholic drinks,
and the laws that authorize their existence.[60]
Illinois
agrarians in the 1850s backed the "Maine Law" movement, which sought
to place a state prohibition on the sale of alcohol. Such a law was enacted in
Maine in 1851. The local Edgar County circuit judge, David Davis, who did not
approve of it, described a Methodist-led temperance rally in May 1848 that took
place in Paris, "The Sons of Temperance had a procession formed at the
Court House & preceded by a brass band. They numbered 74. Their uniform was
a white sash thrown over the shoulders & united in front by a blue
bow." To hear the arguments for temperance, the judge went to the
Methodist Church, where "U.F. Linder, Esq. of Charleston . . . made a
pretty speech."[61] In 1855 the Illinois state legislature
under Whig control enacted a prohibition law. However, it was later defeated in
a referendum by the liquor industry in Chicago, which mobilized the German
vote.[62]
Another
part of the agrarian program was the abolition of private corporations and the
creation of state ownership of banks, railroads and other public utilities. In
1848, for example, the reformers attempted without success to prevent the state
from creating coproration.[63] In 1862 they wrote a state constitution
which said corporate charters could be amended or repealed by later
legislatures.[64]
Local Political Activism. In agitating
for their program in the antebellum and Civil War period, agrarians, as a
recent history commented, "breathed collective life into the county
institutions."[65] Elected officials worked in government
part-time and were farmers fulltime. County commissioners helped set fair
prices at local mills, ferries and taverns. They provided welfare for the
elderly, disabled and orphans. In March 1847 George Bailey, as part of the
Edgar county government, was appointed a fence viewer for Shiloh Township,
along with neighbors Archibald Myers and Thomas Dougherty. He was reappointed
in March 1850.[66] Split rails dominated, but starting in
1847 spiny Osage Orange imported from its native Arkansas and Kansas was used
as a hedge tree. It withstood drough and was "horse high, hog tight and
bull strong." Barbed wire was invented after the Civil War.[67]
In
the 1840s and early 1850s small farmers in central Illinois, where Edgar County
was located, were called "Henry Clay Whigs from Kentucky."[68] Their support of that party was not
because the Whigs were on the side of reform but because the Democrats, both at
the local and national level, dominated as they were by big money both in the
South and North, were negative.[69] Among the Whig and later Republican
leaders who came to support reform and obtained help in Edgar County was
Abraham Lincoln.[70] As part of the central Illinois
itinerant bar, he regularly visited Edgar County from 1845 to 1852.[71] Lincoln's conversion to Republicanism
and the beginnings of his evolution toward agrarian reform began in the summer
of 1856. At that time he made fifty speeches as one of the nominees for
elector-at-large in behalf of the "Republican Free-Soil Party"
presidential candidate, John C. Fremont (1813-1890).[72] One of those speeches was warmly
received in Paris on August 6, 1856.[73] A committees met him as he entered town
and escorted him to the meeting place. According to one account, he was back in
Edgar County in September 1856 for a town meeting in the village of Grandview.
A platform was set up in a fenced walnut grove with the two-foot high blue
grass providing a comfortable cushion on which the audience sat.[74] A month later on November 4, 1856, 952
Edgar County voters (36 percent) went for Fremont. The Democrat James Buchanan
won 1342 votes (51 percent) and the Know-Nothing Fillmore obtained the rest.[75] The Democrats won Edgar County, but in
earlier elections they had received as much as 65 percent of the vote. They
were fearful enough of their declining strength that some Illinois school
masters were dismissed because they voted for Fremont.[76]
Lincoln
later returned to Edgar County on the afternoon of September 7, 1858 as a
Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate against Stephen Douglas.[77] He spoke from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. and
summed up his reform beliefs in terms of the labor theory of value:
That is the issue.
It is the eternal struggle between two principles - right and wrong -
throughout the world. The one is the common right of humanity, the other is the
divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself.
It is the same spirit that says, "You toil and work and earn bread, and
I'll eat it."[78]
With Lincoln in Paris on September 7 was
the Kentucky-born, newly converted Republican, Richard Oglesby (1824-1899), who
was the local Seventh Congressional District Republican candidate. The Seventh
district was heavily populated with former Kentucky Whigs. The practice was for
political gatherings to be held in conjunction with the circuit court sessions.
Also
in town that day was Owen Lovejoy, an abolitionist and Republican member of
Congress from 1857 to 1864. He was chair of the homestead-supporting Public
Lands Committee. That evening Lovejoy denounced slavery and promoted the
Homestead Act from the same platform from which Lincoln had spoke. Lincoln was
on good terms with Lovejoy and they regularly collaborated. But speaking
publicly with him ran counter to Lincoln's normal campaign strategy, which was
to distance himself from the abolitionists, as well as from his own "House
Divided" speech and from ideas about the equality of the races. Lincoln
suspended his strategy in Paris because the people demanded it, as historian
Mark Plummer summarized:
The next morning
[September 7] Lincoln spoke to an audience of a thousand in Mattoon. Later in
the day in Paris in Edgar County, Lincoln spoke for two hours. The presence of
the abolitionist Owen Lovejoy in Paris was inconsistent with Republican
strategy, but he was loudly called for after Lincoln's speech. Lovejoy spoke
again in the evening to the approbation of the Chicago Tribune, which reported that the citizens of Edgar County
had discovered that he did not wear "horns and a tail." Oglesby was
the featured speaker at the Edgar County courthouse that night. "Dick made
a slam bang speech about an hour and a half in length," the Tribune reported.[79]
In
the 1850s and 1860s, seventy-five percent and more of those eligible, voted.[80] Lincoln, Oglesby and the Republicans won
Edgar County in 1858, but did not win enough elsewhere to gain election.[81] Lovejoy, in a different Congressional
district, was re-elected along with many other reform candidates throughout the
North and West. After the Civil War commenced, Copperhead Democrats received
rough treatment in Edgar County. The Democratic Congress member, John R. Eden
(1826-1909), was forced to cancel a speech in Paris during his re-election
campaign in 1864 because Union soldiers on leave there started a gight and
wounded three people. He lost his re-election bid.[82]
To Missouri. Despite the Bailey's
progress in purchasing and successfully running their farm, Illinois was a
difficult place for agrarians in the antebellum. Much of the land remained
unfarmed until after the Civil War because of the problem with speculators.
Working people could not afford to purchase it.[83] Typically, in 1850 Senator Stephen
Douglas persuaded Congress to grant 2,707,200 acres of Illinois land, scattered
over forty-seven counties, for the long-awaited Illinois Central Railroad.[84] The Illinois
State Register reported that the railroad bill "was prepared in New
York and first canvassed by Wall Street men before it was sent to Springfield
to secure legislative endorsement."[85] Governor Augustus French, Senator
Douglas, and a number of Democratic officials became wealthy because they
speculated in railroad stock and land. But the public suffered as land prices
increased fifty percent in value overnight. Railroad land was exempt from
taxation. There was no pressure to sell and it was held indefinitely for the
top price.[86]
Several
of the Bailey children by the 1850s had grown up, married and were trying to
establish their own families. For them to take up farming in Edgar County was
not possible because of the land costs. As a result in April 1856, after nine
years of marriage, their oldest daughter, Louisa, and son-in-law, George Craig,
along with their three small children undertook a self-help reform by migrating
to Nebraska. The land was cheaper there.[87] Prior to their move, they had farmed
with marginal success a forty-acre plot bordering the Bailey's farm.[88]
The
unhappy prospect of seeing their other children being forced to move away
pushed the Baileys in the following year to undertake a migration of their own
so that their children would be able to have more opportunity.[89] Adding to the push was the 1857 financial
panic, which made it impossible to accumulate purchase money. Western farmers
were described as "wearing their old patched clothes and doing without
coffee, sugar and spices; they are not able to buy a calico dress and denim
overalls to cover their rags."[90] After seventeen years in Illinois, the
Baileys said goodby to their church and friends and sold off their farm on
August 7, 1857 for $2,100.[91] With them on their move further west
came their unmarried children and also their married daughter Frances Ann
Holston and her family. Several years earlier at age sixteen Frances Ann had
married Thomas J. Holston (1833-1864) at the Bailey's home on August 11, 1853.[92]
The
Baileys settled in Henry County, Missouri near Lucas in White Oak Township.
This was part of Grand River Valley on Missouri's western border with Kansas.[93] During the 1850s Henry County had a
population of 8,621, which included 1,245 slaves.[94] A federal land office had been
established in the mid-1840s at the county seat in Clinton. Its receiver was
the Democratic slaveowner, Daniel Ashby (1791-1878), who by 1860 was the
Missouri State Treasurer. Three-fourths of White Oak Township was prairie with
an abundance of timber along the Grand River, White Oak Creek and other
streams. Swamp land sold for as little as $.50 an acre. But much of the land
was monopolized by absentee speculators. A local historian noted concerning
White Oak in 1883:
The township has
suffered a good deal with its non-resident land owners. At one time nearly half
of the township was in their possession. To a large extent the land was held
and is now held at too high a figure to bring immigration. It has no towns of
its own and its distance to market combined with the high price of its land has
retarded its growth to a very great extent. When its land owners show a
disposition to take a fair price for their holdings, White oak will take a
start and progress will mark her pathway.[95]
A
federal reform measure enacted in 1854, the graduation bill, aided the Baileys.
Authored by Senator Thomas Benton of Missouri, the law addressed one of the
problems with public land distribution. Big money took the most fertile and
best suited lands. This left much land unsold and resulted in the government
having to maintain land offices that did not pay for themselves in the older
public land states such as Missouri. The graduation bill reduced the land price
according to the number of years the land remained unsold, until it was given
away free in 80-acre lots.[96]
To
the push of family preservation and the pull of relatively cheap land, there
were other factors that motivated the Baileys' migration to Missouri's western
border, rather than in the footsteps of daughter Louisa to Nebraska. Three of
Judy's siblings, James and John Howard (b. 1820) and Sarah "Sally"
(Howard Elliston) Rumsey (1825-1898) and their families, plus her maternal
uncle, Silas Hammond, were living in the same Kansas-Missouri border area.
During the 1840s Silas had started farming in Johnson County, which bordered
Henry County to the north.[97] Also making their migration easier was
the railroad. Construction of it by 1857 had reached west from St. Louis to
Jefferson City, Sedalia and Warrensburg in Johnson County, which was north of
Henry County.[98]
The Baileys' Activism on the Kansas-Missouri
Border: 1857-1861. Besides family preservation and the prior settlement of
relatives, a desire to act on their reform beliefs drew the Baileys to
Missouri. Within a few years of their migration, a number of the Baileys had
their lives taken for this. Big landlords dominated Missouri in the antebellum
and working people suffered disadvantages in taxation, representation,
education and government services.[99] But as noted, in the 1850s the
North-South coalition that had prevented reform was coming apart. Greed,
short-sightedness and panic at the increasing success and electoral strength of
working people helped bring the division earlier in the Kansas-Missouri area
than elsewhere. Among those who set off the panic were the Baileys who moved
there in the summer of 1857, which was then the center of the reform movement.
Missouri
slaveowners were especially threatened by the militancy on the Kansas border
because they were the outpost slave state. With what they considered
abolitionists to the east in Illinois and to the north in Iowa, they could not
survive being surrounded by "abolitionists" on their western side.[100] Sheriff Samuel Jones of Westport,
Missouri, who sympathized with the slaveowners, in recruiting to fight the
Kansas agrarians in 1856, summarized the problem:
Arm yourselves, for
if they abolitionize Kansas, you lose $100,000,000 of your property. I am
satisfied I can justify every act of yours before God and a jury.[101]
On March 6, 1857 the Supreme Court in the
Dred Scott decision which involved a
Missouri slave, tried to guarantee slavery in the territories. But the decision
only added fuel to the free-soil militancy. Lincoln commented, "The people
of these United States are the rightful masters of both Congress and the
courts."[102]
Despite
considerable bloodshed and even because of it, by 1857 some 5,000 laboring
migrants, many of whom arrived that spring, had won the battle for Kansas,
merely by outnumbering the slave forces four to one.[103] Cheap soil had attracted them and, for
many, it was also because they were reformers. Historian Oswald Villard pointed
out the principled nature of the migration, "By emigrant aid societies, by
widespread appeals to the liberty-loving citizens of the North to settle in
Kansas, by mass meetings and public subscriptions to the funds raised to
forward settlers in large parties to the new territories - in a hundred
different ways, some of the necessary thousands were induced to become a living
bulwark to the extension of slavery."[104]
Once
Kansas was secure, the fight turned towards "Africa" itself, as
Missouri and the other slave states were called.[105] Paul Nagel in his history of Missouri
described the progress of the Kansas Jayhawk offensive:
Violent encounters
[in Kansas] continued until the autumn of 1857 when fresh election returns
showed that Kansas had been claimed by free-soil sentiment, despite everything
Missouri had done. Then the scene shifted to Missouri as Kansans took their
turn in making forays into Missouri, motivated at times by what they only
imagined to be threats, and at other times by vengeance. The assailants from
Kansas, known as Jayhawkers, included John Brown, who on one occasion carried
away eleven slaves after slaying their Missouri owner.[106]
Even
more dangerous for the existing order than the Jayhawks were the free-soil
families who moved into Missouri itself. Shortly before the Baileys' migrated,
officials had attempted to blockade Missouri to agrarian reformers to prevent
them from settling in Western Missouri.[107] Migrants were diverted to Iowa. The Baileys
with their Kentucky origins, spoke "Southern" and, like many others,
evaded the authorities.
Missouri
had been a slave state since 1820. By 1840 the fifteen most fertile counties,
most of which bordered the Missouri River, were dominated by slaveowners who
had moved there from the South. This became known as Little Dixie.[108] The landlords were only two percent of
the population, but they controlled the Missouri Democratic Party.[109] The small number of slaveowners
explains, in part, why it took only a small number of principled migrants and
native Missourians to quickly bring Missouri slavery to despair. An account by
a contemporary summarized the decline of Missouri slavery beginning in the
summer of 1857:
Many Missouri
slaveholders now began to voluntarily dismantle the system. While some masters
allowed their "runaways" to simply walk away to Kansas and freedom,
others shipped their bondsmen to southern markets by the thousands. "At
the rate slaves have been sold South for the past six months," a happy Kansas
editor reported, "slavery in western Missouri will cease before the end of
three years."[110]
Just
as the prospects for the Missouri slave forces in the years before the war were
declining, those of the agrarians were rising. The first year following their
move to Missouri, the oldest boy, twenty-four year old, William T. Bailey,
married and started his own farm near Urich, not far from his parents.[111] A little more than a year later, on
January 9, 1860, the Baileys celebrated another marriage at their homestead,
that of their twenty-one year old son, John W. Bailey.[112]
At
Lucas the farmers averaged forty bushels of wheat per acre. Five acres yielded
200 bushels, only 50 bushels of which were needed for a year's bread and seed.
The rest was sold or traded.[113] The farm, which the Baileys pioneered,
was already valued at $1,000 by 1860.[114] The children helped with the farming but
they also went to school. In 1860 three of them were in school. These were
17-year-old James, 14-year-old Sarena and 12-year-old Mary. Amanda, age 19 was
living at home but not in school. Also not in school at that particular time
was George Jr., age 10.[115]
Beliefs. The Baileys were Methodists
and their denomination supported the reform movement. Their religion was
important to them. They celebrated big events, such as births, marriages, and
deaths within a religious context and recorded them in the family bible. For
example, their oldest daughter, Louisa, at age seventeen, married George W.
Craig on September 27, 1847. Family and neighborhood friends attended the
ceremony, which was performed by James Flack, who combined farming with being
both a justice of the peace and a Methodist Episcopal minister. Born in 1800,
he had come to Dudley in the western part of Edgar County from Lincoln, Kentucky
in 1830. The first Methodist church was at his house.[116] According to one of George Craig's
granddaughters, her grandfather did not drink and smoked only a little.
Abstinence from alcohol and tobacco was part of their religion.[117]
In
Missouri the church to which the Baileys belonged at White Oak was called a
union church. This was because both the Methodists and Baptists jointly owned
the building.[118] It was less expensive that way. Their
church made little distinction between clergy and laity. Methodism permitted
both blacks and women to preach, exhort and discipline.[119] A result of these practices was that
they were baited by the established order, "Would you have your daughters
marry blacks?"[120] In the Methodist view, however, these
sentiments stood reality on its head. Slavery was a system of prostitution.
"Race bleaching and amalgamation" had always been part of it.
Methodism
was about both the hereafter and also about the consequences that flowed in a
capitalist economy from being one's neighbor's keeper and the commandments
against greed, envy, theft and killing. Many such as the Baileys tended to
maximize subsistence farming and to minimize the market economy and what they
felt were its evils. A student of their anti-wealth beliefs summarized:
Clearly sporting,
indolence, laziness, taking time off, enjoying life, lack of ambition (all the
words are loaded with values of one kind or another) had their origins in other
things as well as a life outside the market economy. In particular, celebration
and recreation had economic functions as well as social. They established
connection and obligation. The effect of having relatively few needs was
liberating of time as well as paid labor. Having relatively few needs that the
market could satisfy meant that commoners could work less. Karl Polanyi might
say that thrift spared commoners the "humiliating enslavement to the
material, which all human culture is designed to mitigate." In other
words: commoners had a life as well as a living.[121]
The
anti-market character of Edgar county's subsistence farmers was condemned by
representatives of the wealthy, such as Edgar County circuit judge David Davis,
"The country between Paris [in Edgar County] & Charleston is handsomer
than any I have ever seen in the state, & if Yankees, instead of
Kentuckians and Tennesseeans had the control of it, it would blossom as the
rose. The houses generally frame, some log, rarely any whitewash or paint - in
fact the village looks like a southern village and the people are Kentuckians
& have a slipshod appearance."[122] Unlike Judge Davis, the agrarians tended
not to equate God with money nor to encourage a reverence for the dignity of
wealth or a belief in the existence of a wise overlordship of the affluent.
They often had doubts that under the kindly guidance of capital's intelligent
government, there ever could be justice, mercy and peace.[123]
Minimizing
market involvement did not mean being lazy or limiting productive work, as
Judge Davis maintained. But it did involve the relegation of profit-oriented
activity to a less lofty level. Nor did it mean political quietism. Activism
against slavery as on the Missouri border in the summer of 1857 was part of
Methodism. One authority remarked that the "keystone of Southern Methodist
antislavery efforts was the Golden Rule," as set forth in Matthew 7:12 and Luke 6:31.[124] From the start John Wesley had denounced
slaveowners because they robbed slaves "of all their labor" in order
to live in luxury.[125] This condemnation, as historian Cynthia
Lyerly put it, "Fit squarely within Methodist opposition to conspicuous
consumption and wealth."[126] Methodist emancipationist Francis Asbury
(1745-1816) preached the story of Moses, the flight from Egyptian slavery,
jubilee (Leviticus 25), and the labor
theory of value. As St. Paul in First
Thessalonians 3:10, put it, those that did not work, meaning the
slaveowners, should not eat.[127] The Methodist church finally split in
1845 between North and South on the issue of slavery.[128]
In
successive Methodist communities, the Baileys were supported by like-minded
agrarians. At church they propagandized about slave labor reducing the value of
white labor and complained about the monopolization of the best land by
slaveowners. They resented that in a reverse form of carpetbagism, the profits
from slavery along with those from Northern capital, as Lincoln put it,
"debauched" the political parties, the state and federal governments,
the courts, the military officials and sheriffs, the educators, media and many
pulpits. Not only the blacks, but also the whole country was enslaved.[129] Because of its outspoken views,
Missouri's established order attacked the Methodist church and its members.[130]
Reform and the Civil War. Agrarians had
long been battling against the market system when, on April 12, 1861, the
Confederacy seized Fort Sumter. For the reformers the Civil War that ensued was
merely a continuation of their struggle. Between 1857 and 1861
"subversion" of the U.S. Constitution by those like the Baileys had
made the Henry County, Missouri Democratic machine and its counterparts
throughout the South, desperate to secede from and barricade themselves against
further invasion. Illustrative of the Henry County Democratic fears had been
the resolutions adopted at their convention in the county seat at Clinton on
January 9, 1860, the same day the Baileys were celebrating ten miles away the
marriage of their son John:
Resolved,
second, That we regard the so-called Republican party of the north as a
sectional and fanatical one, whose
avowed principles are directly subversive
of the constitution, and whose ultimate triumph would be a national calamity -
greatly endangering the union of the states; and that we look with extreme
reprobation at its attempted organization in our own state.
Resolved, fifth, That we endorse the
Cincinnati platform, adopted June, 1856, and the principles in the Dred Scot case. . .
Resolved, eighth, That while we view the
recent outrages committed at Harper's Ferry, as the fruits of the teachings and
"irrepressible conflict" principles of the Republican party of the
north, and sincerely sympathize with and approve of the course pursued by the
state of Virginia, we regard the union meetings recently held in the north as
manifesting the spirit of patriotism calculated to check the disorganizing
principles of the Abolition party, and preserve the union of the states on true
Constitutional grounds.[131]
Election
day, November 6, 1860, did not go well for the established order. In Missouri
the Republicans won only ten percent of the vote.[132] This matched the vote for the
secessionist candidate. Seventy percent of the vote went to the Douglas
Democrats and Bell's Constitutional Union movement.[133] Despite his small support in Missouri,
much of which was in St. Louis, Lincoln was elected. After the election, the
Henry County Democrats held a meeting at the Clinton, Missouri courthouse on
November 20, 1860. They still controlled the local government, but with
Republican appointments expected to the land office, post office, federal
courts, military and other positions, their power would be diminished. They
feared the Republicans would "clean the slaves out of Southern
Missouri."[134] They were led by landlords and
Democratic office holders like Daniel Ashby, who would soon be an officer in
the Confederate army, and by John Williams, the federal district judge in
Kansas, who had been run out of the territory by the reformers. At their
meeting in Clinton the Democrats adopted a resolution to establish a militia
under their control and to move toward armed-struggle.[135] The militia which they and the Democrats
in other counties established was called the Missouri State Guard.
In
the November 1860 elections, Claiborne Fox Jackson had been elected to the
Missouri governorship as a non-secessionist Democrat. Four months later,
however, in February 1861 at the same time that a Confederate government was
being organized in Montgomery, Alabama, Governor Jackson and the Missouri
commercial interests called an election of delegates to a state convention in
order to lead the state into secession. But to their astonishment, not a single
advocate of secession was chosen. Of the 140,000 votes cast in selecting
delegates, only 30,000 went to secessionists. The Missouri majority were not
slaveowners. When the state convention met starting on February 28, 1861, it
ruled against secession and then recessed, but did not disband.[136] When Jackson and the slave interests
persisted in siding with the Confederates, the state convention reassembled on
July 31, 1861 at Jefferson City, declared vacant the state offices, put in
Hamilton Gamble as governor, and moved the state capitol to St. Louis.[137]
In
June 1861 at the same time the magnates were organizing the Missouri State
Guard to defend themselves, the oldest Bailey boys, William T. (age 27) and
John W. (age 22), were taking up arms in behalf of the agrarians.[138] They helped form Company "D"
of the Cass County Regiment Home Guard, Cavalry Battalion.[139] Their regiment, which was also known as
the First Missouri Home Guard, fought the slaveowners in their own backyard.[140] The Bailey's farm at Lucas was two miles
from the Cass County border and thirty miles east of the Kansas border.[141] The Cass County Guard was a full-time
organization. It did duty not only in Cass County, but in Henry and the other
adjoining counties.[142] They scouted and camped out, often
without tents or sufficient clothing. They protected bridges, roads, and towns.
From
the early days of the war in 1861 bands of state troops sympathetic to one side
or the other operated continuously in and around Henry County, which was
divided in sentiments.[143] Typically, on July 7, 1861 Brigadier
General Lyons' Federal Army of the West joined up with major Samuel Sturgis and
his 2,200 Kansas troops who were camped on the banks of the Grand River west of
Clinton. This was near the Bailey homestead. To celebrate their meeting up, a
parade was put on, which was described by Lyon's biographer:
First came Lyon on his gray-dappled
stallion, followed by his staff and 10 mounted bodyguards in steel-gray
uniforms and in lines of five. A company of regulars and recruits, armed with
rifled muskets, preceded Voerster's Pioneers. The latter had Sharps' rifles
slung across their backs, hunting hats on their heads, and axes, shovels, and
picks on their shoulders. Next came Totten's Battery, each section drawn by
heavy and well-matched horses, and accompanied by veteran artillerists.
Now
came the real show-stopper. The First Iowa Regiment in azure-gray jackets,
feathered hats, and marching with such precision that it seemed but the single
footstep of a giant. Less spectacular, but equally impressive in soldierly
appearance, was Blair's First Missouri led by Lieutenant Colonel George L.
Andres in the absence of Colonel Blair whose Congressional duties kept him in
Washington. Both regiments were singing "The Girl I Left Behind Me."[144]
Some
maintain that the "federal doom of the Confederacy was written in the West
rather than in the East."[145] The Confederates were not able to win
Missouri, Kentucky and Tennessee. Their lack of success was not won by the
Confederacy, it was not for want of trying. William Sherman was famous for the
devastation his federal troops caused in the South toward the end of the war.
However, similar death, sickness and destruction were common on the Missouri
border both before and throughout the war. In 1861 alone, the Baileys in
Company "D" of the Cass County Home Guard battled or skirmished at:
Parkersville,
Missouri [Parkerville, Platte County?], (July 17-19, 1861)
Harrisonville in Cass County (July 27, 1861)
Jonesborough [Jonesburgh, Warren County?]
(August 21-22, 1861)
Old Randolph (Lexington?) (September 14,
1861)
Bush Ridge Road (October 14, 1861)
Butler in Cass County (November 20, 1861)
Grand River in Bates County (November 30,
1861)
Dayton in Cass County (December 23, 1861)
Wadesburg in Cass County (three miles
west of Lucas, December 24, 1861)
One
of the biggest battles and loses for the Union that year, with 15,000 troops
engaged and 2,500 dying, was at Wilson Creek on August 10, 1861. The Federals,
who were outnumbered five to one, were attempting to protect southwestern
Missouri from a force that had been brought up from Arkansas.[146] Wilson Creek occurred less than a month
after the first big eastern battle at Bull Run on July 21, 1861, which was also
a loss for the Union with 460 federal soldiers dying.
In
the midst of the early Civil War, the Baileys celebrated the marriage of their
20-year-old daughter, Amanda, to 27-year-old Samuel Paxton (1834-1903) of
neighboring Deepwater Township on September 8, 1861 at their Lucas farm.
Officiating at the marriage was justice of the peace, John van Story.[147] The marriage was not recorded at the
courthouse because the certificate along with the justice of the peace were
captured on the way to the courthouse. Among those present at the marriage was
the Baileys' youngest son, George, Jr. and Samuel Paxton's 16-year-old sister,
Nancy Paxton (Miles).[148]
Not
long after Amanda's marriage, the Baileys suffered the first of twelve deaths
arising from the war. Around December 1861, 57-year-old George and his
18-year-old son, James, were shot in front of their home by "Southern
guerrillas." Among the witnesses was George's grandson and namesake,
George Holston (1857-1937), who was four years old.[149] Another witness was Bailey's youngest
son, George Jr., who was eleven. He gave a brief account many years later:
He was shot down by
guerrillas at the beginning of the Civil War because of his Union sympathies.
He was taken from his home in company with his son, James, and shot down by a
band of Southern men. Seven children were left fatherless.[150]
George's fourteen-year old, Mary, was
also present. A newspaper account of her 100th birthday in 1947 reported,
"While living in Henry County, Missouri, she saw her father and brother
dragged from the cabin and killed by bushwhackers. She remembered that her
mother buried coverlets in a wooden grain box outside the cabin to keep them
from being stolen."[151] George and James were buried in a
makeshift cemetery near the family homestead. Sandstone markers were put on the
graves.[152]
George
and his son were not soldiers but they were not "innocent
bystanders." They were attacked because they were known in their
neighborhood to have taken sides, spoken up and worked for the overthrow of the
established order. The older Bailey boys and two son-in-laws had been under
arms against the local landlords. A student of the war summarized, "Civil
War soldiers lived in the world's most politicized and democratic country in
the mid-nineteenth century. They had come of age in the 1850s when highly
charged partisan and ideological debates consumed the American polity. A
majority of them had voted in the elections of 1860, the most heated and
momentous election in American history. . . Newspapers were the most sought
after reading material in cmap--after letters from home. Major metropolitan
newspapers were often available only a day or two after publication."[153] The fighting on Missouri's western
border was not random. George's wife and young children were not hurt. The
practice of swift "justice" was characteristic of border warfare.[154]
One
of John Bailey's comrades in the Home Guard, orderly sergeant Woodson Wade from
Creighton, commented on the Baileys' activism:
At the outset of the
war the guerrillas came in there and killed his father and one of his brothers,
and for that reason he and his brother William were always willing to go
whether they were able to or not, in the hope that they might get revenge.[155]
Actually the Baileys' adult sons had been
active in the Home Guard for six months preceding their father's death. If they
were like many of their Methodist neighbors, their militia involvement had
started as soon as they came to Missouri and was motivated more by the desire
for survival than revenge. As James McPherson commented:
The bushwhacking war
in Missouri fired Unionists there with a desperate conviction "that it is
to be a war of extermination. . . It is life or death. Union men will have to
leave or pitch in and kill as many secesh as they can before they kill [us].[156]
William
and John Bailey and their brothers-in-law, Thomas Holston and Samuel Paxton,
served for the duration of the war in the Guard and its successors, Company
"G" of the Seventh Regiment Missouri State Militia Cavalry (SMC).[157] They were in all the major and many of
the minor Missouri battles.[158] In all, 1,162 battles or skirmishes were
fought in Missouri, eleven percent of those fought in the nation and more than
occurred in any other state except Virginia and Tennessee.[159] About 27,000 Missourians were killed,
much property was destroyed, and whole counties were devastated. Railroads,
highways, bridges, and public buildings were damaged.
About
the same time that George and James were killed, John Bailey's 22-year-old
wife, Mary, also met her end. John and Mary had only been married two years. On
December 13, 1861 Mary was thrown from a horse and died of the injury.
Brother-in-law William Bailey was among those who attended the funeral. Even
before her death, one of her two children had died. John, in the Home Guards,
was left a widower with one child. Blueford Jones, John's comrade in the Guards
had his father take care of the baby.[160] Later the child died.
After
the 1861 deaths, Judy Bailey and her children continued to farm in White Oak
Township. Nearby was daughter-in-law Sarah (Grafford) Bailey and married
daughter Frances Ann Holston. Judy would go to visit the graves of George and
James in the evening. Because she wore a white bonnet, the children, seeing her
at the graves, thought she was a ghost.[161] Soon she had another child in the grave.
Six
months after the death of George and James, 25-year-old Frances Ann Holston
died on June 5, 1862 at the home of her brother and sister-in-law, William and
Sarah Bailey, which by then was at Warrensburg in neighboring Johnson County.
Present at the funeral were her husband Thomas, mother Judy, brothers, sisters
and their families.[162] Frances Ann's two children, George Henry
and Laura Holston, aged five and two, went to live with their newly married
aunt, Amanda (Bailey) Paxton. Several years later Thomas Holston was killed in
battle.[163] In the midst of death there was also new
life. Amanda was pregnant with her first child, who was born on September 12,
1862 and named after his recently deceased grandfather, George Bailey Paxton.
By
mid-1863, as the war weighed down on the remaining Baileys, the Confederacy was
on the retreat in much of the West. Union forces under U.S. Grant had beaten
them at Fort Donelson in Kentucky on February 6, 1862 and Vicksburg on July 4,
1863.[164] Some 12,000 Southerners surrendered at
Fort Donelson and 30,000 at Vicksburg. But on the Missouri border the war still
raged. Because of safety considerations, the Baileys and many of their
neighbors were forced to retreat from Henry County.
The
retreat was precipitated by an attack in August 1863, in which Confederate
troops under William Quantrill took Lawrence, Kansas, the abolitionist capital.
This was seventy miles northwest of Lucas. They burned 185 buildings, and
killed 150 inhabitants. The violence was nothing new but to curb further raids,
Union General Thomas Ewing, commanding the Headquarters District of the Border,
issued Order No. 11 on August 25, 1863. It required the evacuation of the
20,000 inhabitants of Cass, Jackson, Bates and part of Vernon County within
fifteen days. The towns in the area were burned, the crops destroyed and the
animals confiscated. For years afterwards it was called the "Burnt
District." As a result, the raiders were less able to live off the land.
Many of the inhabitants of the proscribed counties relocated near Union
garrisons in neighboring counties.
There
was no order to evacuate Henry County, which bordered the proscribed Cass and
Bates Counties. But Judy and her three unmarried children, 18-year-old Sarena,
16-year-old Mary, and 13-year-old George Bailey, Jr., did so, like many others.
They moved about fifty miles northeast to Cooper County, Missouri.[165] That was where their in-law, Samuel
Paxton, was from. His parents were still there. Along with them came Amanda
Paxton and the Holston children.[166] Despite their displacement, the Baileys
celebrated several marriages during this period, including John Bailey's
remarriage. In the spring of 1864 Judy and her children moved again; this time
to a farm in Morgan County, which was forty miles east of their White Oak
homestead. They farmed there for a year until the spring of 1865.[167] They then located on a farm southwest of
Warrensburg in Johnson County, Missouri, which was thirty miles north of their
White Oak farm. They moved each time to stay close to relatives in the union
military forces.[168]
In
October 1865 John Bailey's family, which had been living close to Judy Bailey's
family in Johnson County, came down with smallpox. Both his boys, one age three
and the other a few months old, died. John suffered from it too and had to
convalesce. His face had scars afterwards. A neighbor, Andrew Mack, who had
already had smallpox and so could not contract it, helped them.[169] At the time, with the war over, John had
been working as a farmhand, cutting wheat in the Bristleridge area southeast of
Warrensburg in Johnson County.
In
the fall of 1865, Judy and her children returned to their White Oak homestead.[170] Those that survived the war all incurred
permanent ailments such as "lung disease," rheumatism and lameness.
John W. Bailey and in-law George Craig soon died from the consumption they had
contracted from their service. Samuel Paxton's ailments were chronic, but he
lived to help raise several of his wife's sister's children plus three of his
own. He was a laborer and in old age, his war-related disabilities made it
impossible for him to earn a living. He and his wife Amanda went to live with
one of their children. Samuel echoed a common reformer complaint about
inadequate federal benefits, "It is infuriating to me that those who risk
life and health for the country's defense in peril fail to have a decent
pension."[171]
Conclusion. Agrarian politics involved
life and death issues: employment, education, housing, food and clothing. Basic
survival required contention against a system that often had not only no regard
for these necessities but that worked to strip them away. The Baileys'
experience runs counter to studies which find that the Civil War rank and file
did little thinking, had no ideology and fought merely for reasons of
"courage" or "masculine identify."[172] Their experience also contrasts with
studies that find rank-and-file ideology was limited to abstractions such as
"fighting for the maintenance of law and order," "defending the
country in her hour of peril" and duty "to God and to country."[173] The Bailey family in their migration,
labor, politics, religion and armed struggle contended against the established
order. The Civil War speeded up the process. It not for them a rich person's
war and a poor person's fight, as some maintained at the time.[174]
At
the national level, beginning in 1862 the agrarians helped achieve reforms such
as the establishment of the Department of Agriculture, the passage of the
Homestead Act and the Emancipation Proclamation.[175] To obtain labor's help in fighting the
war, the government made concessions.[176] At the local level there was also
progress, especially in Missouri and the other slave states. The Missouri
Republican Party increased in size after Lincoln's election and split into
factions.[177] Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in
1862 applied only to states that were in rebellion. Missouri was not in
rebellion and slavery continued.[178] On July 1, 1863, a property-dominated
faction of the Missouri Republican Party obtained passage of a state
emancipation act under which slaves would be freed on July 4, 1870 with
compensation to the slaveholders for their $40,000,000 investment. But the
agrarians won control of the party after the 1864 election. They called a state
constitutional convention which abolished slavery immediately and without
compensation. Missouri was thus the first of the slave states to free its
slaves. There was no compensation to the capitalists.
In
addition to clearing slavery from the state, the reform constitution which was
put in force on July 4, 1865, gave generous aid to public schools. Missouri
landlords had always opposed this.[179] The aid included funding from the
general revenue for Missouri University, Lincoln Institute for Negroes at
Jefferson City and normal schools to educate public school teachers at
Kirksville and Warrensburg.[180] Other reforms introduced by the new
constitution were the regulation of corporations and the prohibition of further
aid to railroads. To redistribute wealth towards its producers, taxes were
raised to the highest level in Missouri's history. A Bureau of Immigration was
established to encourage settlement, particularly of Europeans. A Missouri
Department of Agriculture was created, which employed a state entomologist.
Finally, a "Test Oath" was designed to keep the former slaveowners
out of power by providing that no one could vote, hold state office, preach,
teach, or practice law in Missouri who could not take an oath that they had
never in any way aided or sympathized with the Confederate cause.[181] Reflecting on Psalm 136, "They that
sow in tears shall reap in joy," George Brown, editor of the Lawrence,
Kansas Herald of Freedom, believed
that the agrarians' joy in the gains made by their struggle was proportional to
the tears which were shed by the widows and the orphans; they were convinced
that "liberty, equality and all other human rights are heaven-born
principles."[182]
Agrarian
politics and religion involved what Lincoln called irrepressible conflict.
Working people rejected abstract notions of "God and county," and
doctrines of "freedom," "constitutionalism," and
"union" that failed to mention freedom and union for whom and for
what. Lincoln ridiculed "the perfect liberty they sigh for, . . . the
liberty of making slaves of other people."[183] The Baileys conceded no
"freedom" or Constitution for the monopolization of land and labor.
Preservation of the union was not obtained in order for the market system to
enslave. The odds against their success and the price to achieve it were high.
But agrarianism was a tradition and way of life which derived from the nature
of working people. For the Baileys, as for the politician who became their
leader, it was something worth living for; living to see all the results was not
the point.
ENDNOTES
[1]Toby Terrar is a graduate of Georgetown
University and UCLA (Ph.D. 1991). His focus is family and church history. He
can be reached at TobyTerrar@aol.com. He acknowledges the help of Mildred
Bailey of Leeton, Missouri, Glen and Margie Doll of Lucas, Missouri, Chester
and Doris Jean Redford of Clinton, Missouri, Lorraine Graham of Vancouver,
Washington, and Betty Clark of Washington, D.C.
[2]Donald Riddle, Congressman Abraham Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1957), pp. 16, 144; Olivier Fraysse, Lincoln,
Land and Labor, 1809-1860 (Urbana, Illinois: University of
Illinois Press, 1994), pp. 131, 142-144; Ralph McGinnis and Calvin Smith, eds.,
Abraham Lincoln and the Western
Territories (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1993); Albert Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1858
(Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1928), vol. 1, pp. 372-383.
[3]Abraham Lincoln, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln: 1848-1965, ed. Roy Basler (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), vol. 4, p. 202; Carol Ayres, Lincoln and Kansas: Partnership for
Freedom (Manhattan, Kansas: Sunflower University Press, 2001).
[4]Phillip Paludan, "A People's Contest": The Union and Civil War, 1861-1865
(New York: Harper and Row, 1988), p. 178. Lincoln's copperhead critics, such as
Edgar Lee Masters in Lincoln the Man
(New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1931), pp. 38, 216, 497, have treated him as
incapable of agrarian-influenced growth. But this was his strength.
[5]Lincoln remarked on July 4, 1861, as
quoted in Phillip Paludan's "A
People's Contest," p. ix, that, "This [the dispute with slavery]
is essentially a people's contest."
[6]The shipping merchant, William H.
Aspinwall, as quoted in Anonymous, "The Diary of a Public Man," North American Review
(Boston, Massachusetts), vol. 129, issue no. 273 (August 1879), pp. 125-141,
made the following observations about the breakfast:
Mr. Lincoln made a bad
impression. . . Somebody said to Mr. Lincoln he would not meet so many
millionaires together at any other table in New York. "Oh, indeed, is that
so? Well, that's quite right. I'm a millionaire myself. I got a minority of a
million in the votes last November." Perhaps this was rather a light and
frivolous thing for the President-elect to say in such a company, or even to
one of the number; but, after all it shows that he appreciates the real
difficulties of the position, and is thinking of the people more than of the
"millionaires," and I hope more than of the politicians.
[7]U.S.
Census, 1850 (Woodford
County, Kentucky), U.S. Archives, Microfilm, p. 468. The family name was also
spelled "Baley," "Baily," "Baly" and
"Bayly." The variations were in part because they had limited
schooling and did not often spell their name. Nevertheless, the Bailey family
bible, published in 1836, indicates that the family was reading and writing.
Birth and other important dates were recorded. The bible was described in
"Affidavit of Hester Bailey," in "Civil War Pension File of John
W. Bailey, Jr.," widow's application no. 275348 (manuscript, Washington,
D.C.: National Archives)." According to one source, in one of the family
moves, their wagon turned over in a creek and the bible was destroyed. However,
the same bible was said to be in the possession of George W. Bailey, Jr. in the
early 1900s. See "Affidavit of George W. Bailey, Jr." in "Civil
War Pension File of John W. Bailey." The U.S. Census, 1860 (Henry County,
Missouri), U.S. Archives (microfilm), p. 104, stated that George was not
literate but that "Juda" was literate. Nevertheless, in selling some
land in Hendricks County, Indiana in 1839, George signed his name. See
"Deed Book," Hendricks County Courthouse, Greencastle, Indiana
(manuscript, January 19, 1839).
[8]See "Marriage Records,"
Woodford County Courthouse, (manuscript, Versailles, Kentucky).
[9]George Bailey was born in Bourbon County
in 1804. His parents were William and Sarah (Haithman) Bailey. They had been
married in Bourbon County on August 25, 1803 by John Whiteker. See
"Marriage Records," Bourbon County Courthouse, Paris, Kentucky
(manuscript); George William Bailey, Jr. "Biography of George W. Bailey,
(b. 1850)," in Uel W. Lamkin (ed.), History
of Henry County, Missouri (Topeka: Historical Publishing Co., 1919), p.
512. U.S. Census, 1850 (Edgar County, Illinois), microfilm, U.S. Archives, p.
147.
[10]Judy's parents, grandparents, uncles,
aunts, and on her father's side, great grandparents, came out to Woodford
County from the Moratico River (North Furnham Parish) area of Richmond County,
Virginia. See "Isaac Howard File," Draper Manuscript Collection:
Series CC, Kentucky Papers (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin,
[1944] 1973), vol. 11, Section CC, p. 253; "Howard Family File"
Woodford County Historical Society (manuscript, Versailles, Kentucky), which
gives citations to census, marriage, probate and land records. Judy's parents,
Vincent Howard (1783-1859) and Fanny Hammond (1787-1844) were children at the
time of the Virginia exodus.
[11]Daniel Friedenberg, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Land: The Plunder of Early America
(Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1992), p. 177.
[12]Cash D. Bond, History
of Southern Woodford County (Versailles, Kentucky: 1990), p. 5;
John Selby, The Revolution in Virginia:
1775-1783 (Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 1988),
pp. 144, 231; Thomas Abernethy, Western
Lands and the American Revolution (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company,
1937), pp. 218-219, 224-225.
[13]Thomas Abernathy, "Kentucky" in
Three Virginia Frontiers
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1940), pp. 63-96; Malcolm
Rohrbaugh, The Trans-Appalachian Frontier:
People, Societies, and Institutions, 1775-1850 (Belmont,
California: Wadsworth Pub., 1990), pp. 32, 44; Reginald Horsman, The Frontier in the Formative Years,
1783-1815 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), p. 53.
[14]Bond, History
of Southern Woodford County, p. 2; Lewis Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern
United States to 1860 (Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith,
[1933], 1958), vol. 2, pp. 861-863. The fertile limestone soil yielded fifty to
sixty bushels of corn per acre and thirty bushels of wheat.
[15]The church was part of the Lexington
Circuit. See Bond, History of Southern
Woodford County, p. 29; Mary Edwards (compiler), A Brief History of the Versailles United Methodist Church
(Versailles, Kentucky: 1981), pp. 1-2.
[16]Frank Owsley, Plain
Folk of the Old South (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), p. 96
[17]In 1821, as the result of forced sales,
one-third of Kentucky's land belonged to banks and capitalists. Abraham
Lincoln's father was forced off his farm by one of twenty-one speculators who
claimed twenty-five percent of Kentucky's land. See Fraysse, Lincoln, Land and Labor,
p. 11-12.
[18]James Davis, Frontier
Illinois (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 278;
Stephen Aron, "Pioneers and Profiteers: Land Speculators and the Homestead
Ethic in Frontier Kentucky," Western Historical
Quarterly (May 1992), pp. 176-198.
[19]Louisa was born in Woodford County on
April 12, 1830. See U.S. Census, 1850
(Edgar County, Illinois), U.S. Archives, manuscript, microfilm roll 105, p.
114. On a sheet of paper in the handwriting of one of Louisa Bailey's
granddaughters is the following:
Louisa Bailey Craig was
born in Lasell Kentucky on April 12 1830. Buried at Cedar Kansas. Husband was
name George Craig and was born in Illinois and died in Linn County Kansas. No
other record on him. The old family bible burned in the fire in Missouri. These
are what Henrys mother had written off and was in the bible that Henry has.
See Lena Gergen Breese, "Manuscript,"
(1950s?) in possession of Toby Terrar. The Lasell Kentucky mentioned above may
be a misspelling for Versailles.
[20]Peter Cartwright, Autobiography
of Peter Cartwright (Nashville, Tennessee: Abindgon Press, 1861),
pp. 165-166. In 1833 Cartwright beat Abraham Lincoln in a race for the Illinois
legislature. But in August 1846, Lincoln turned the tables. He beat the
preacher in a race for the U.S. Congress, despite accusations that he scoffed
at religion. Lincoln once attended a Cartwright service. At the conclusion the
preacher asked all who wanted to go to heaven to stand. Lincoln remained
seated, whereupon the cleric asked where he wanted to go. "To
Congress," Lincoln replied.
[21]Paludan, "A People's
Contest," p.
320. Typical
of labor's anti-borrowing philosophy was an article that appeared in the May 1,
1840 Statesman (Paris, Illinois).
This was a newspaper for the county in which the Bailey family was then living.
Titled "Wages of Labor," the author, George Bancroft, debunked the
notion that national monetary and fiscal policies and the banking system had
the support of working people:
When I hear asserted that the interests of labor are
bound up inseparately with the unstable character of our currency, my heart
bleeds within me at the thought of the monstrous deception which is attempted.
The argument stripped of its sophistry, is this: high wages can be maintained
only by the present elastic credit system; therefore take care of the banks,
and by so doing you take care of the laboring classes.
The laboring class in the United States is not
dependent on banks, but rests self-sustained, and is safe for these causes: 1.
The laboring class is not in debt, and therefore has no sympathy with
speculators and men who seek prosperity without labor. 2. The nation has a vast
domain, where fertile land is always open to purchasers at moderate prices;
where the industrious squatter can, without aid of paper money, achieve an
independence.
[22]The Baileys bought and sold several lots
with dwellings on them while in Danville. On November 6, 1833 "George and
Juda Baley" deeded lot four in square sixteen on the corner of Kentucky
and Clinton Street for $100. See "Deed Book," Hendricks County
Courthouse, Putnam, Indiana (manuscript), No. 2, p. 491. On July 3, 1835
"George and Juda Baley" deeded lot four in square three on the corner
of Jefferson and Clinton St. for $67.50. See "Deed Book," Hendricks
County Courthouse, Putnam, Indiana (manuscript), No. 3, p. 248.
[23]See Ray Billington, "The Frontier in
Illinois History," Journal of the
Illinois State Historical Society (Spring 1950), pp. 28-45;
Robert Howard, Illinois: A History of the Prairie
State (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William Erdmans Publisher, 1972),
p. 256.
[24]The U.S.
Census, 1840, (Edgar County, Illinois), p. 65, listed George, his
wife and five children as living in Edgar County, Ill. and engaging in
"manufacturing," not agriculture. In U.S.
Census, 1850, (Edgar County, Illinois), p. 147, George Bailey was
listed as a "shoe and bootmaker." He was not listed as engaged in
agriculture; but he lived in a rural area and owned farm-sized acreage and did
farming.
[25]Anonymous, My
Foks Came in a Covered Wagon: A Treasury of Pioneer Stories Handed Down in the
Families of Capper's Weekly (Topeka, Kansas: Capper Publishers,
1956), p. 35.
[26]John Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1986), p. 111. At least one child, William T. Bailey, named
after his paternal grandfather, was born in Danville on March 3, 1834. There
was perhaps also a daughter born in the early 1830s. See U.S. Census, 1840
(Edgar County, Illinois), U.S. Archives, microfilm, p. 65.
[27]On March 16, 1837 the Baileys paid $250
for the west half of lot 171 on the corner of Washington and Ephraim Street,
which is present-day College Street. There was a house on the lot.
[28]On January 19, 1839 the Baileys sold
their Greencastle lot. See "Deed Book," Putnam County Courthouse,
Greencastle, Indiana. According to the deed, Judy could not write her name but
George could. In the same year that the Baileys moved to Greencastle, DePauw
University, which was then called Indiana Asbury University, was established
there by the Methodists. In 1838 the state government of Indiana went bankrupt
because of a large but corrupt public works program. The government had
contracted to make roads, canals and bridges at inflated prices. To repay its
debt, Indiana imposed heavy direct taxes, which helped push the Baileys west.
[29]J. S. Buckingham quoted in Howard, Illinois: A History, p.
164.
[30]Douglas Meyer, Making
the Heartland Quilt: A Geographical History of Settlement and Migration in
Early Nineteenth-Century Illinois (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 2001), p. 127.
[31]Richard Heckman, Lincoln
vs. Douglas: The Great Debates Campaign (Washington, D.C.: Public
Affairs Press, 1967), p. 83.
[32]The legal description of the Bailey's
land was "T 15, R 13, S 36." On June 23, 1855 they added more land in
"T 15, R 13, S 25." See "Deed Book," Edgar County
Courthouse, Paris, Illinois.
[33]These children were Amanda (Paxton) born
in 1841, James in 1843, Sarena (Lane) in 1845, Mary A. (Blaylock) in 1847 and
George William in May 1850. See U.S. Census, 1850 (Edgar County, Illinois),
U.S. Archives, manuscript, microfilm roll 105, p. 147.
[34]Howard, Illinois:
A History, p. 265.
[35]H.P. Bromwell, quoted in Anonymous, Memoirs of Abraham Lincoln in Edgar
County, Illinois (Paris, Illinois: Edgar County Historical
Society, 1925), p. 24.
[36]George Stephenson, The Political History of the Public Lands,
from 1840 to 1862: From Pre-emption to Homesteads (Boston: R. G. Badger,
1917), p. 20.
[37]Ibid., p. 123.
[38]Tony Freyer, Producers versus Capitalists: Constitutional
Conflict in Antebellum America (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1994), p. 37.
[39]Senator A.G. Brown, quoted in Allan
Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln: 1859-1861 (New York: Charles Scribner's Co.,
1950), vol. 2, pp. 189, 304; Paludan, "A People's Contest," p. 134.
Reformers complained that farmers, unable to pay the government $200 in gold
for a farm of 160 acres, obtained land by borrowing money to purchase a
warrant. A warrant for 160 acres might be had as low as $150. But to obtain the
$150, the borrower had to pay interest at five percent per month. From thirty
to fifty percent of the land cost was the usury. Benjamin Hibbard in A
History of the Public Land Policies
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), pp. 357-358, 362, described
pamphleteers who put out publications with such captions as: "Land Sales!
Land Sharks! Forty-eight percent for money! How Democracy Protects Workingmen,
Starving Women, and Helpless Babes! Need of a Homestead Law."
[40]King, Lincoln's
Manager, pp. 101-101. The Kansas Territory had been opened for
settlement on July 1, 1854. The Congressional act organizing the territories of
Nebraska and Kansas in 1854 included clauses repealing the Missouri Compromise
of 1820, in which all territory south of the compromise line of 36 degrees and
30 minutes had been slave.
[41]Frank H. Hodder, "The Railroad
Background of the Kansas-Nebraska Act," Mississippi
Valley Historical Review (June 1925), vo. 12, pp. 3-22; Philip
Foner, Business and Slavery: The New York
Merchants and the Irrepressible Conflict (New York: Russell and
Russell, 1968), p. 89.
[42]Jay Monaghan, Civil War on the Western Border, 1854-1865 (Boston: Little, Brown
& Co., 1955), p. 4. The slaveowners had wanted to use Congress to exclude
white migration into the West. With their success in the Mexican War, they
talked of seizing the federal government and nationalizing slavery. The
agrarians opposed the doctrine of manifest destiny and wanted Congress to
exclude slavery from the West. See Marvin Cain, Lincoln's
Attorney General Edward Bates of Missouri (Columbia, Missouri:
University of Missouri Press, 1965), pp. 66, 74, 76. Lincoln commented, as
quoted in Nevins, The Emergence of
Lincoln, p. 362, "We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that
the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their state free, and we
shall awake to the reality instead that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a
slave state."
[43]Monaghan, Civil War on the Western Border, p. 5.
[44]Quoted in David Johnson,
"Free-Soilers for God: Kansas Newspaper Editors and the Antislavery
Crusade," Kansas History (1979),
vol. 2, p. 76.
[45]Wayne Williams, A
Rail Splitter for President (Denver: University of Denver Press,
1951), pp. 139, 202; Frank Vanderlinden, Lincoln:
The Road to War (Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Pub. 1998), p. 40. The
South walked out of the Democratic convention in 1860 because the platform did
not approve the extension of slavery to the new states.
[46]Following the labor theory of value, the
agrarians at the Republican Convention maintained that land was worth no more
than the cost of developing it and, hence, the unfairness of demanding a price
for it. The view of settlers as paupers or supplicants for public bounty was
condemned. See Nevins, The Emergence of
Lincoln, vol. 2, pp. 189, 304.
[47]Ibid., vol. 2, p. 189; Congressional Globe, (Washington, D.C.: Blair and Rives,
1834-1873), 36th Congress, 1st Session, 1114-1115; Roy Robbins, Our Landed Heritage: The Public Domain,
1776-1970 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, [1942] 1976),
p. 180. In support were those influenced by George H. Evans and similar
figures. Andrew Johnson maintained that Rome had decayed because a few people
monopolized the land, shutting the working people out of security. Agrarian
reformers were called "Gracchi" after their counterparts in the Roman
era. See Reeve Huston, Land and Freedom:
Rural Society, Popular Protest and Party Politics in Antebellum New York
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 4; Congressional
Globe, 36th Congress, 1st Session, 1556.
[48]John Sanborn, Congressional
Grants of Land in Aid of Railways (New York: Arno Press, [1899],
1981), p. 318.
[49]Congressional
Globe, 36th Congress,
1st Session, 3159, 3179. According to Buchanan, the Constitution gave Congress
no power to make such a huge donation; it would be unjust to earlier settlers
who had paid $1.25 an acre and to veterans with bounty warrants; it would hurt
the old States by reducing the value of their lands and tempting their people
to migrate; it would open a vast field for speculation, as rich sharpers
settled poor people on the land under secret agreements to divide their
homesteads; and it would diminish the public revenues and so increase taxation.
[50]Nevins, The
Emergence of Lincoln, vol. 2, p. 191.
[51]Slaveowners were against homestead
legislation because the 160-acre plots were too small for slave production. See
Stephenson, The Political History of the Public
Lands, p. 126.
[52]Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln, vol. 2, pp. 189, 206; Sanborn, Congressional Grants of Land in Aid of
Railways, p. 58. Railroad magnates influential in the Democratic Party in
the 1850s included Dean Richmond of Buffalo and Henry B. Payen of Cleveland.
Richmond headed the New York Central, owned Buffalo elevators and lake
shipping, and led the New York state delegation at the 1860 Democratic
convention. George Stephenson in The
Political History of the Public Lands, p. 125, summarized, "Capital
invested in railroad lands usually opposed a homestead law because it feared
that free land would lower the price of their lands." When a homestead act
came up for consideration in Congress in 1858, it was the Democratic
representatives from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois that voted
against it. Among the Republicans, there were 82 for and only one against. All
fifteen Know-Nothings opposed it. In 1860 Pennsylvania's iron and railroad
industry representatives were still opposing it.
[53]Republican conventions in every Northern
state and in Missouri and Kentucky adopted homestead planks; Democratic
conventions in every Northwestern state, four New England states and New York
and New Jersey, did the same. See Nevins, The
Emergence of Lincoln, vol. 2, p. 302.
[54]Ibid., vol. 2, p. 189.
[55]Paludan, "A
People's Contest," pp. 135-136; Robbins, Our Landed Heritage, p. 178. Between
1863 and 1865, 26,500 homesteads were claimed. At the same time, the
capitalists did not suffer. In June 1862 Congress gave the promoters of the
Union Pacific Railroad Bill fifteen million acres and two years later, the
amount was doubled, plus interest-free loans were made. Between 1862 and 1871
the railroads were given a total of 94 million acres of public land.
[56]Philip Racine (ed.), Piedmont Farmer: The Journals of David Golightly Harris, 1855-1870
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), p. 5.
[57]Cole, The
Era of the Civil War, pp. 231-234; Federal Writers Project, WPA Guide to Illinois
(New York: Pantheon, 1935), p. 651.
[58]Paludan, "A
People's Contest," p. 131.
[59]Herbert Wiltsee, "The Temperance
Movement, 1848-1871," Transactions of the
Illinois State Historical Society (1937), vol. 44, pp. 82-92. The
Sons of Temperance, a secret society, was established in Illinois in 1847.
[60]Faragher, Sugar
Creek, p. 195. That Abraham Lincoln was a non-drinker was
appreciated by the agrarians. See William Miller, Lincoln's
Virtues: An Ethical Biography (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2002), p.
147.
[61]King, Lincoln's
Manager, p. 83. Biographer King described a colloquy between the
circuit judge and Linder at a later point. For two terms Linder had been drunk
and appeared before the court only to secure continuances of his cases, which
the judge reluctantly granted. On the third occasion, however the judge
admonished him, "Mr. Linder, I must give you some advice. You must drink
less and work more, or you will roll in the gutter." Linder, outraged by
this paternalism, stiffened up and responded to the portly judge, "And I
must give your Honor some advice. You must eat less and [in the flattest term]
eliminate more or you will bust."
[62]Clifford Griffin, Their
Brothers' Keeper: Moral Stewardship in the United States, 1800-1865
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1960), p. 231.
[63]Howard, Illinois:
A History, p. 233.
[64]Stanley Jones, "Agrarian Radicalism
in Illinois: Constitutional Convention of 1862," Journal
of the Illinois State Historical Society (Autumn 1955), vol. 48,
pp. 271-282.
[65]Faragher, Sugar Creek, p. 137.
[66]See "Supervisors Book," Edgar
County Courthouse, Paris, Illinois (manuscript for 1847), p. 506; (manuscript
for 1849-1851), p. 33.
[67]Wayne Williams, A
Rail Splitter for President (Denver: University of Denver Press,
1951), p. 50; Howard, Illinois: A History,
p. 264.
[68]Willard King, Lincoln's Manager, David Davis (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1960), pp. 61, 80. The Whig candidate and Mexican War hero, General
Zachary Taylor, won the 1848 presidential election. Although a slaveowner from
Louisiana, he claimed to be "undecided" on the issue of slavery.
[69]John Faragher in Sugar Creek, p. 194, summarized the "support by default"
of the Whigs in central Illinois:
Democratic failure to
represent the interests of the rural poor was probably more important in
accounting for Whig successes than was Whig sophistry. The strength of Whig precinct
organization, when compared to Democratic weakness, was also decisive. The
party forged an alliance with the leadership of local churches. Whigs and
churchmen alike preached "improvement" not only through their
economic program but also through the notion of individual reform.
[70]After the birth of the Republican Party,
which was launched at a convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on February 23,
1856, and after the success of abolitionist Owen Lovejoy (1811-1864) who was
the party's central Illinois congressional candidate in June 1856, Lincoln
switched from the Whig to the Republican Party.
[71]King, Lincoln's
Manager, pp. 61, 73, 88. Lincoln came to Edgar County on
horseback and later by buggy for a few days in the spring and fall when the
circuit court convened at the county court house in Paris. Edgar County was
part of the Eighth Circuit, which consisted of fourteen counties in central
Illinois. They were Sangamon, Tazewell, Woodford, McLean, Logan, DeWitt, Pratt,
Champaign, Vermilion, Edgar, Cole, Shelby, Moultrie, Macon, Christian, Mineral,
and Livingston. In 1852, the county was assigned to another circuit.
Springfield, Illinois, with a population of 4,500, was Lincoln's base and the
largest town in the circuit. Kirby Benedict was one of the Edgar County
lawyers. The cases heard during a normal term involved minor misdemeanors for
gambling or selling liquor and, on the civil side, appeals from the justice of
the peace, many land title suits, cases involving cattle ownership, slander and
libel, and a few divorces and bastardy proceedings. See King, Lincoln's Manager, pp. 71-73; Anonymous,
Memoirs of Abraham Lincoln in Edgar
County (1925).
[72]Anonymous, Memoirs
of Abraham Lincoln in Edgar County, Illinois (Paris, Illinois:
Edgar County Historical Society, 1925), pp. 14, 23.
[73]Abraham Lincoln, "Speech" Prairie Beacon (Paris:
Aug. 8, 1856); Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The
Prairie Years (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1926), vol. 2,
pp. 88-89. In his politicking, Lincoln traveled by railroad, stage, buggy and
wagon. The meeting place was usually a hall or courthouse or grove where the
steer was over the fire for a barbecue. He was easily recognized as the speaker
of the day because of his stovepipe hat that made him look even taller than his
normal six-foot four-inch body.
[74]Anonymous, Memoirs
of Abraham Lincoln in Edgar County, pp. 23-24. The program
started at 1:00 p.m. Lincoln spoke last and was said to have made a good
impression but made few converts. A straw vote produced ninety for the
Democrats, forty-six for Fillmore and six for the Republicans.
[75]Abraham Lincoln, Collected
Works, ed. Roy Basler, vol. 2, p. 477.
[76]Arthur Cole, The
Era of the Civil War, 1848-1870: The Centennial History of Illinois
(Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries, [1919] 1971), pp. 133, 414, 200, 307.
In 1824 the landlords unsuccessfully sought to hold a convention to amend the
state constitution to allow slavery. Edgar County was strongly against the
convention with 234 opposed and only three for it. In contrast Gallatin County
in southern Illinois voted 596 for and 133 against.
[77]For the Lincoln-Douglas debate in
neighboring Charleston, Illinois on September 18, 1858, there were 600 from
Edgar County who went over in ten "side door Pullmans," that is,
stock cars with heavy boards on trestles for seats. Twice that number drove
over in wagons and on horseback. In Charleston they formed into two groups. One
group marched behind a banner "Old Edgar for the Tall Sucker." The
other paraded behind a banner, "Edgar County, 500 Majority for
Douglas." See Anonymous, Memoirs of Abraham
Lincoln in Edgar County, p. 15.
[78]Federal Writers Program, The WPA Guide of Illinois (New York:
Partheon Books, 1939), pp. 35, 404; King, Lincoln's
Manager, pp. 80, 104, 110; Allan Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln: Douglas, Buchanan and Party Chaos, 1857-1859
(New York: Charles Scribner's Co., 1950), vol. 2, pp. 124, 189. Stephen Douglas
had spoken in Paris on July 31, 1858. See Heckman, Lincoln
vs. Douglas, p. 83.
[79]Mark Plummer, Lincoln's
Rail Splitter: Governor Richard J. Oglesby (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2001), p. 35. Some accounts divide Illinois in the 1850s into a
Republican upstate and a Democrat downstate, with the latter dominated by
proslave Kentuckians. But the Democrat Stephen Douglas was from upstate and the
Kentucky migrants such as the Baileys were not part of the slave economy.
[80]Paludan, "A
People's Contest," p. 11.
[81]Heckman, Lincoln
vs. Douglas, p. 134.
[82]Charles Coleman, "The Charleston
Riot, March 28, 1864," Journal of the Illinois
State Historical Society (March 1940), vol. 33, pp. 7-56; Howard,
Illinois: A History, p.
315.
[83]Ray Billington, "The Frontier in
Illinois History," Journal of the
Illinois State Historical Society (Spring 1950), vol. 43, pp.
28-45.
[84]Carlton Corliss, Mainline
to Mid-America: The Story of the Illinois Central (New York:
Creative Age Press, 1951). In 1851 articles of incorporation were granted by
the legislature to a group of Eastern financiers, headed by Robert Rantoul of
Massachusetts, on condition that the State be paid seven percent of the gross
receipts annually. In September 1856 the railroad was completed. Seven other
roads were constructed in this period, and one, the Galena and Chicago, was
able to pay dividends of twenty percent after the first year of operation.
[85]Quoted in King, Lincoln's
Manager, p. 33; see also, pp. 100-101.
[86]Robbins, Our Landed Heritage, p. 255.
[87]They moved to Cass County, Nebraska.
Their post office was at Rockbluff. The three children of Louisa Craig were
Jane Craig (Dodson) (1849-1918), Robert H. Craig (b. 1851) and Phoebe Ann Craig
(Seymour), (b. 1856). George W. Craig sold his land in Edgar County, Illinois
on April 19, 1856 to Archibald Myers for $150. See "Deed of George
Craig," "Deed Books" (Edgar County Courthouse, Paris, Illinois);
U.S. Census, 1860 (Cass County,
Nebraska), U.S. Archives (manuscript, microfilm), p. 29. Rosetta
"Rosie" Craig (Gergen) (b. March 12, 1858) and another child were
born in Nebraska.
[88]The legal description of the Craig land
was "T 15, R 13, S 25." See "Deed Book," Edgar County
Courthouse, Paris, Illinois (manuscript). John Faragher in Sugar Creek, p. 204, suggests the type of farming they did:
twenty-five acres of corn, another five to ten of wheat and oats and five more
of grass for hay and grazing. They kept two or three draft animals (oxen,
horses or mules), two or more milk cows, and a dozen hogs. They produced from
700 to 1,000 bushels of corn, 100 to 200 bushels of wheat and oats, and 10 to
15 tons of hay. Such subsistence farms made up sixty percent of the farming
households in Illinois.
[89]If the account of Samuel Paxton
(1834-1903) is accurate, the Baileys migrated in 1856, not 1857. Paxton, who
married Bailey's daughter, Amanda in 1861, gave his account at the beginning of
the twentieth century. See Samuel Paxton, "Letter," in William M.
Paxton, The Paxtons (Platte
City, Missouri: Landmark Printing, 1903), p. 283.
[90]"Letter of a Chicago Merchant,"
Tribune (June 16, 1858),
as quoted in Foner, Business and Slavery,
p. 143.
[91]This was a large sum. The average income
of a working person was $300 per year. The value represented years of labor and
the inflation caused by speculators.
[92]Officiating at the marriage ceremony of
Frances and Thomas Holston was Rev. Van Sickle. Among those present were the
parents of the bride and her brother, William. Thomas Holston was illiterate.
See "Affidavit of Julia Bailey and William Bailey," in "Civil
War Pension File of Thomas J. Holston," widow's application no. 82915,
certificate no. 180428; minor application no. 201796, certificate no. 180429,
(manuscript, Washington, D.C.: National Archives); U.S. Census, 1860, U.S. Archives (manuscript, microfilm), p. 102.
[93]Anonymous, History of Henry and St. Clair Counties (St. Joseph, Missouri:
National History Company, 1883), pp. 259, 448.
[94]Instructional Computing Group,
"United States Historical Census Data Browser" (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences Computer
Services, 1999).
[95]Anonymous, History of Henry and St. Clair Counties, p. 449.
[96]Stephenson, The
Political History of the Public Lands, pp. 127-128.
[97]Silas Hammond took up farming in Johnson
County, Kentucky in the 1840s. He was the son of James Hammond (d. 1803) and
brother of Frances Hammond (Howard) (1787-1847), who was Judy's mother. See
"Howard Family File" Woodford County Historical Society (manuscript,
Versailles, Kentucky). Judy's brother, John Howard and his first wife, Martha
Ann Carter (1825-1865) came to Columbus in Jackson Township, Johnson County
from Woodford County, Kentucky about the same time the Baileys came from
Illinois in the 1850s. One of John's seven children was born in Johnson County
on May 6, 1858. John worked as a farm hand on his sister Sally's and
brother-in-law, William Rumsey's farm. Sally had no children. During the
Christmas holiday period in 1860 John and his family went back for a visit to
Woodford County. One could take a steam boat on the Missouri River to St.
Louis, then another steamer on the Mississippi to Cairo and then another up the
Ohio to Frankfurt, Kentucky. John's youngest child was born at Woodford County,
Kentucky on December 25, 1860. In 1870 John was still working on his sister's
farm. By then Sally was a widow for the second time. The farm was described in
the 1870 census as being worth $5,000 and near the Kingsville post office in
Madison Township, Johnson County, Missouri. See U.S. Census, 1860 (Johnson County, Missouri), U.S. Archives,
manuscript, microfilm, p. 816; ibid.,
1870 (Johnson County, Missouri), p. 539. Judy's brother James Howard and
his wife Nancy Johnson, who married in 1848, also farmed in Johnson County. In
later years (1870), Judy's nephew, William Howard (born 1841), son of William
W. Howard (1813-1878) and young William's wife Emma Hutchenson (born 1843),
came to live in the Center View Township part of Johnson County, near his Aunt
Sally Rumsey.
[98]King, Lincoln's
Manager, p. 101; J. W. Starr, One
Hundred Years of American Railroading, p. 181. The last section
of the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad across northern Missouri was finished
in 1859.
[99]Nevins, The
Emergence of Lincoln, vol. 1, p. 214.
[100]Oswald Villard, John Brown, 1800-1859: A Biography Fifty Years Later (Gloucester,
Massachusetts: Peter Smith, 1965 [1910]), p. 80.
[101]Ibid., p. 130.
[102]Nevins, The
Emergence of Lincoln, vol. 2, p. 56.
[103]Some 200 people were killed, and
$2,000,000 worth of property was destroyed. Workers of the Writer's Program of
the Work Projects Administration [hereafter WPA], Missouri: The WPA Guide to the "Show Me State (New York:
Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941), p. 51; Villard, John Brown, pp. 94, 100. In his history of Kansas, Oswald Villard, ibid., p. 146, found that from May 1856
onwards, because of slavery's strong-arm tactics and the even greater militancy
of abolitionists like John Brown, no effort was needed by the free-soilers to
raise colonies of emigrants. They raised themselves.
[104]Villard, John
Brown, p. 80.
[105]Ibid, p. 248.
[106]Paul Nagel, Missouri, A History (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press,
1988), p. 127.
[107]Villard, John
Brown, pp. 225, 260.
[108]In 1860 two-thirds of Missouri's 114,000
slaves were in Little Dixie. A quarter of the population was black. See R.
Douglas Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery in
Missouri's Little Dixie (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), pp.
x-xiii.
[109]Nagel, Missouri, p. 128. In 1860 Missouri had a population of 1.2 million,
with 25,000 slaveowners.
[110]Thomas Goodrich, War to the Knife: Bleeding Kansas, 1854-1861 (Mechanicsburg,
Pennsylvania: Stackpole Press, 1998), pp. 249-250; Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln,
vol. 2, pp. 149, 151. Don Dodd, ed., Historical
Statistics of the United States: Two Centuries of the Census, 1790-1990
(Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993), p. 51.
Between
1850 and 1860 the Missouri slave population dropped by nine percent in
comparision with the free population. Even before the 1850s slavery was in
decline throughout the upper South and proving to be less profitable than
further South. Investors made twelve percent per year on their slaves in Texas
and Mississippi and three percent in Missouri.
[111]William Bailey married Sarah E. Grafford
of Pike County, Missouri on September 26, 1858. They eventually had six
children. See "Marriage Certificate of William Bailey and Sarah
Grafford," "Marriage Book," (Pike County, Missouri: Courthouse),
vol. 3, p. 233, no. 869; "Civil War Pension File of William T. Baley
(sic),"invalid application no. 746368, certificate no. 862111; widow's
application no. 869273, certificate no. 631624, (manuscript, Washington, D.C.:
National Archives); "Obituary of William T. Bailey, May 11, 1907," in
Kathleen Miles, Annals of Henry County
(Clinton, Missouri: K. W. Miles, 1973-1974), vol. 2, p. 233. In October 1858, a
month following his marriage, William Bailey became a Baptist, although in his
later-life, he was not a steady church goer.
[112]"Affidavit of George W. Bailey,
Jr." in "Civil War Pension File of John W. Bailey, widow's
application no. 275348" (manuscript, Washington, D.C.: National Archives);
U.S. Census, 1860 (Henry County,
Missouri), U.S. Archives (manuscript, microfilm), p. 102. John Bailey married
Mary H. Bivens (b. 1839). During the first year of their marriage, they lived
with his sister, Frances, and her husband Thomas Holston at Lucas. John worked
as a farm hand there.
[113]John Ise, Sod
And Stubble (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press,
1936), p. 68.
[114]Their personal property was valued at
$800. U.S. Census, 1860 (Henry
County, Missouri), U.S. Archives (manuscript, microfilm), p. 104.
[115]U.S. Census, 1860 (Henry County, Missouri), U.S. Archives
(manuscript, microfilm), p. 104.
[116]When a church was later built, it was
called McReynolds Chapel. See Anonymous, Portrait
and Biographical Album of Vermillion and Edgar County, Illinois (Chicago:
Chapaman Brothers, 1889).
[117]Margaret Maye Gergen Terrar, et al, Gergen Family Interviews with EF (Toby)
Terrar: 1969-1979 (manuscript in
possession of Toby Terrar, 81 pages), p. 17 (Nov. 26, 1969).
[118]Anonymous, History of Henry and St. Clair Counties, p. 441.
[119]Owsley, Plain
Folk of the Old South, p. 96; Donald Matthews, Slavery and Methodism: A Chapter in
American Morality, 1780-1845 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1965), pp. 3-61.
[120]Monaghan, Civil War on the Western Border, p. 292.
[121]J. M. Neeson, Commoners:
Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 178. Historian Alfred Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and
the American Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), pp. 28, 68, is
negative toward, George Hewes (1742-1840), who, like George Bailey, was a
Methodist shoemaker. Hewes, among other things, did not marry with a view
toward upward mobility and at age forty had little to show for it. But this was
not negative in Heweses' view; it simply was operating from a morality common
among working people. Heweses' treasure, as in Proverbs
31:10, was his wife and children.
[122]King, Lincoln's
Manager, pp. 84-85.
[123]The negative role of the Whig judge and
similar politicians was resented by reformers. Davis was paid ten times what
working people made. His job was to protect the market and keep the farmers in
their place. Among his cases were those involving "disruptions" that
resulted from political controversies growing out of Methodist gatherings and
camp meetings. See King, Lincoln's Manager,
p. 82.
[124]Cynthia Lyerly, Methodism and the Southern Mind, 1770-1810 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998), p. 129.
[125]John Wesley, The Works of the Rev. John Wesley (London: Methodist Book Room,
1872), Sermon 30, discourse 10 ("Upon our Lord's sermon on the
mount").
[126]Lyerly, Methodism and the Southern Mind, p. 131.
[127]Historian Reeve Huston in Land and Freedom, p. 111, remarked,
"The labor theory of value - the notion that labor creates all wealth -
had been commonplace in American economic thought since the late eighteenth
century." Tony
Freyer makes the same finding in Producers versus
Capitalists, p. 4.
[128]Paludan, "A
People's Contest," p. 343.
[129]Nevins, The
Emergence of Lincoln, vol. 2, p. 56; Villard, John Brown, p. 237. Jay Monaghan in his
study, Civil War on the Western Border,
1854-1865 (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1955), p. 146, remarked
concerning the attitude of farming people like the Baileys:
They had seen their
meetings spied upon. They had been stopped at night by patrols seeking fugitives.
They had had their elections rigged and their statute books defaced with laws
abridging freedom of speech and the press. They were determined to crush the
last vestige of a system which depended on such tactics for survival.
For their part, the slaveowners condemned the
anti-slave church as antinomian for believing in the "inner light,"
for rejecting the doctrine of obedience, and for having "no respect of
persons" (Acts 10:34). The
Methodists were also called Armenian for teaching "free grace,"
universal salvation and for calling each other "brother" and
"sister" in accord with the belief that they were all one family
united with a "loving God" who watched over their lives. See Lacy
Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism: The
South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1988), p. 27; Peter Linebaugh, The
Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the
Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), p. 85.
[130]Nevins, The
Emergence of Lincoln, vol. 2, p. 307.
[131]Anonymous, History of Henry and St. Clair Counties, Missouri: Containing a History
of these Counties, their Cities, Towns . . . Biographical Sketches (St.
Joseph, Missouri: National Historical Co., 1883), pp. 311-312.
[132]Nagel, Missouri, p. 128.
[133]Missouri was the only state which Stephen
Douglas won. See Vanderlinden, Lincoln: The Road to
War, p. 94.
[134]Among those who spoke at the courthouse
on November 20, 1860 was the pro-slave Federal District Judge from the 3rd
District of the Kansas Territory, John Williams. He had recently been forced
out of Kansas. He summarized his concerns in a letter to the Missouri governor,
which, as quoted in Anonymous, History of
Henry and St. Clair Counties, pp. 309-310, stated in part:
James Montgomery has
been at Boston during part of the summer and returned with plenty of money to
enlist recruits. Many of his men are freshly imported. He has taken possession
of Fort Scott and other towns on the border near the Missouri line. He has
murdered Mr. Moore, a grand Juror; Mr. Harrison, Mr. Samuel Scott, Mr. Hindes,
and obliged all of the United States officers, including myself, to fly for our
lives. His openly expressed design in a public speech, as he said,
"without concealment," is to keep possession of Fort Scott and other
places near the state line, to prevent "a fire in the rear," while he
cleaned out "Southern Missouri of Slaves." So far, he has carried out
literally his declared program. The citizens of Missouri on the Osage,
Marmaton, and in Bates and Vernon, are flying from their homes into the
interior.
[135]Anonymous, History of Henry and St. Clair Counties,
pp. 308-309.
[136]William Connelley in Quantrill and the Border Wars
(New York: Pageant Book Co., 1956), p. 207, commented on the slim support which
the Missouri slaveowners had:
The people of Missouri
were for the Union by an overwhelming majority every day of the Civil War, and
they demonstrated that fact by enlisting in the Federal army. Including
militia, nearly one hundred and fifty thousand soldiers were furnished the
Union by Missouri. And, all told, the Confederacy did not get fifty thousand.
The man with the farm of medium or small size, the merchant, the business man,
and the dwellers in cities were generally for the Union. The man with a
plantation and slaves was for the Confederacy. These were the main divisions,
and they carried their different influences to the uttermost bounds of society.
There were many exceptions in both directions.
Confederate general, Ben McCulloch, as quoted in
Hans Adamson, Rebellion in Missouri: Nathaniel Lyon
and his Army of the West (Philadelphia: Chilton Co., 1961), p.
282, remarked on August 24, 1861 at Springfield, Missouri, "We had as well
be in Boston as far as the friendly feeling of the inhabitants is
concerned." See also, Albert Castel, General
Sterling Price and the Civil War in the West (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1968), p. 57.
[137]John Nicolay, Abraham
Lincoln: A History (New York: The Century Press, 1890), vol. 4,
p. 225; Castel, General Sterling Price,
p. 59. The Confederacy in Missouri was not able to collect taxes, have a
capitol or control territory, but on October 20, 1861 at Neosho in Missouri's
southwestern corner, a rump session of the legislature that still adhered to
the deposed Governor Jackson passed without a quorum an ordinance of secession
and elected senators and representatives to the Confederate Congress. On
November 28, 1861 the Confederate Congress declared Missouri the twelfth member
of the Confederate States.
[138]Villard, John
Brown, p. 158.
[139]Company "D" was commanded by
Sandy Lowe from Wadesburg in Cass County.
[140]One of the Cass County slaveowners was
Colonel H.W. Younger of Harrisonville. His son, Cole Younger became a famous
Confederate trooper. See Albert Castel, William
Clark Quantrill: His Life and Times (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, [1962], 1999), p. 67.
[141]The Baileys did their marketing at
Creighton, which was just over the line in Cass County. The guard members were
not paid, which made them unusual in the history of U.S. militarism. See
"Affidavit of John Wells" in "Civil War Pension File of John
Wells," invalid application no. 906037, certificate no. 894036
(manuscript, Washington, D.C.: National Archives), which stated that Company
"D", Cass County was "not paid by Hawkins Taylor
Commission." Company "D" may also have been part of Colonel
Nugent's Home Guard. See "Civil War Pension File of Sandy Lowe,"
invalid application no. 218086, certificate no. 333110; widow's application no.
772624, certificate no. 652717 (manuscript, Washington, D.C.: National
Archives).
[142]William Bailey later said that he did not
actually "enlist" with the home guard, but he did serve with them.
Others who served in it were private John W. Wells from Urich, Jacob Buzan,
Blueford Jones, and Elisha Edward Bridges. See Frederick Dyer, A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion
(Des Moines, Iowa: Dyer Pub. Co., 1908), vol. iii, p. 1312; "Affidavit of
William T. Bailey" in "Civil War Pension File of John W.
Bailey."
[143]John McCorkle, Three
Years with Quantrill: A True Story by his Scout with Notes by Albert Castel
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), p. 3; Castel, General Sterling Price,
pp. 58, 62. Among the dozens of slave-supported partisan bands were those led
by Bill Anderson, George Todd, John Thrailkill, Clif Holtzclaw,
"Coon" Thornton, Dick Yaeger and William Clarke Quantrill.
[144]Adamson, Rebellion
in Missouri, p. 153.
[145]Ibid., p. x.
[146]Ibid., pp. ix, 284.
[147]It was the first and only marriage for
both Amanda and Samuel Paxton. See "Affidavit of Samuel Paxton," in
"Civil War Pension File of Samuel Paxton."
[148]Amanda and Samuel eventually had three
children. Samuel Paxton was born in Kanawha County, West Virginia and came to
Cooper County, Missouri in 1842. In 1856 he settled in Deepwater Township. See
Anonymous, History of Henry and St. Clair
Counties.
[149]The date of the killings is not clear.
George Holston's granddaughter, Lorraine Graham, stated, "I remember
grandpa saying he was almost 5 when his grandfather was killed and his birthday
is in January, so maybe it happened in the late fall of 1861." See
Lorraine Graham, "Letter to Toby Terrar" (manuscript, July 8, 2001),
in possession of Toby Terrar. Their death may have been tied to a battle that
Company "D" of the Cass County Home Guard fought at Wadesburg,
Missouri on December 24, 1861. This was three miles west of Lucas. Years later,
Judy Bailey died on November 28, 1876. Called "Judy Bailey" on her
large tombstone, she was buried at Fewell Cemetery in White Oak Township. On
her tombstone was written, "Mother rest in quiet sleep." Fewell
Cemetery is a mile south of George's grave, four miles south of Urich on
Highway K and one mile north of George Jr.'s farm. It was the cemetery used by
George Jr.'s wife's family, Margaret (Long) Bailey. See DAR Udolphus Miller
Dorman Chapter, Henry County, Missouri
Cemetery Inscriptions (Clinton, Mo.: 1976), p. 16; "Civil War Pension File of Thomas J.
Holston."
[150]Bailey, Jr. "Biography," in
Lamkin (ed.), History of Henry County,
p. 512.
[151]"Town to Honor Woman, 100: Mrs. Mary
Blaylock of Gentry, Missouri has 116 Descendants," newspaper clipping,
October 1947, in possession of Chester and Doris Jean Redford, Clinton,
Missouri.
[152]See Joseph Bailey (1905-1988), "Memo
to William Bailey at Leeton, Missouri" (February 28, 1963), in possession
of Toby Terrar, which stated, "G.W. Bailey, born about 1805. Killed by
bushwackers along with oldest son. Buried on Emmett Doll farm south of
Urich." See also, Glen and Margie Doll, "Letters to Toby Terrar"
(October 22, 2002 and November 15, 2002), in possession of Toby Terrar. The
legal description of the burial site is White Oak Township, 42 N, Range 28 W,
Section 27, in the corner southeast area which was owned by Royal L. Burge in
the 1870s and is now owned by Kevin and Mary Molz.
[153]James McPherson, For
Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 92.
[154]After the war a fellow Henry County
resident, Sally Boone, as quoted in Marge Sullivan, ed., My
Folks and the Civil War: A Treasury of Civil War Stories (Topeka,
Kansas: Capper Press, 1994), p. 96, reported her family's encounter with
bushwhackers:
My uncle was in the
Northern Army, and when they were camped close to home he would come home. They
were camped near Chillhowee, and one dark cloudy night he walked home. Some of
our close neighbors were bushwhackers and were waiting for him. Grandmother had
a one and a half story house and part of the family kept watch from the
upstairs window. During the night they saw the bushwhackers coming, and my
uncle climbed out one of the upstairs windows onto the roof. He hid behind a
large fireplace chimney. They watched the house for a long time before they
finally gave up. He got back to camp safely.
[155]"Affidavit of Woodson Wade" in
"Civil War Pension File of John W. Bailey." Vengeance may have
belonged to the Lord (Romans 12:19),
but many made themselves his instrumentality. James Phersonin For Cause and Comrades,
p. 153, remarks that revenge, or as the bible (Exodus
21:24, Leviticus 24:30) put it,
"An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," were a big motive in the
border states, where people had to move off their farms.
[156]McPherson, For
Cause and Comrades, p. 153, quoting Philander Draper,
"Letter to Edwin Draper" (July 12, 1861), Draper-McClurg
Papers, State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbus, Missouri;
William and Henry Crawford, "Letter to 'Dear Friends,'" (August 5,
1864), Crawford Letters, State
Historical Society of Missouri, Columbus, Missouri.
[157]After the Guard was disbanded, a similar
local organization was eventually formed. John Wells was one of the Bailey's
comrades from Urich. He joined the newly reconstituted home guard. He
recollected the self-help nature of its founding in "Affidavit of John
Wells" in "Civil War Pension File of John Wells:"
About May 1, 1863 the
loyal men in the neighborhood to the number of 50 or 60 organized under a
permit from the military authorities into a company of "citizen
guards" for self-defense from the guerrilla bands that infested the
country. We did this while we cultivated some of our lands to make a support
for our families and save the country as well as we could from further
destruction.
[158]Several months after George's death the
First Missouri Home Guard was disbanded at Harrisonville in Cass County. During
the eight months of its existence, the Guard lost sixteen troops, six of whom
were killed in battle and ten by disease. Many of the guard troops, including
William T. Bailey, age 28, and John Bailey, age 23, enrolled at Warrensburg,
Johnson County in Company "G" of the Seventh Regiment Missouri State
Militia Cavalry (SMC), which was organized in March and April 1862. The state
militia operated only in Missouri, but, unlike the Home Guard, was funded by
the federal government. Also in the new regiment were in-laws Thomas J.
Holston, age 30, who was a corporal and Samuel Paxton. During the course of its
three-year existence, the regiment lost 152 by disease and 56 killed in battle.
William Bailey's service record stated that he deserted on August 3, 1862. However,
he merely transferred, without bothering with formalities, to Company
"C," 12th Kansas Volunteer Infantry. He spelled his last name as
"Baley," in the 12th Kansas records. He was a commissary sergeant
there. The 12th Kansas Regiment along with the 11th and 13th Kansas Regiments
were organized on August 4, 1862 by James Lane. See Carol Ayres, Lincoln and Kansas: Partnership for Freedom
(Manhattan, Kansas: Sunflower University Press, 2001), p. 9; Dyer, A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion,
vol. iii, pp. 1308, 1312; "Compiled Service Records of William T.
Bailey," (manuscript, Washington, D.C.: National Archives, microfilm);
"Civil War Pension File of William T. Baley (sic);" "Affidavit
of William T. Bailey" in "Civil War Pension File of John W. Bailey;"
Sherman Pompey, Keep the Home Fires
Burning: A History of the 7th Regiment, Missouri State Militia Cavalry in the
Civil War (Warrensburg, Missouri: Johnson County Historical Society, 1962),
p. 5.
[159]WPA, Missouri,
p. 53.
[160]"Affidavit of Blueford Jones,"
in "Civil War Pension File of John W. Bailey."
[161]Terrar, et al, Gergen Family Interviews: 1969-1979, p. 13 (November 26, 1969).
[162]Judy Bailey on December
10, 1875, not long before her own death, gave an affidavit about Frances Bailey
Holston and her family. The affidavit, in "Civil War Pension File of
Thomas J. Holston," was to help the Holston's orphaned children obtain a
pension. Judy stated:
I Juda Bailey of County
of Henry State of Missouri being duly state that I was acquainted with Thomas
J. Holston deceased late soldier Co. G 7th MSM Cavalry and with the children of
said deceased George Henry and Laura M. Holston and with Samuel Paxton their
guardian who applies for pension for them No. 207150 and was also acquainted
with their mother Frances M. Holston formerly Bailey. I was present when Thomas
J. and Frances M. intermarried in Edgar Co., Ill. They were married at my
house. She died at Warrensburg, Mo. in 1862. I was present at the birth of the
children, George Henry was born in Edgar Co. Ill. on the 25th day of January
1857 and Laura M. was born in the County of Henry in the state of Mo. on the
20th day of July 1859. I am sixty seven years of age and am grandmother of the
children above named and mother of Mrs. Holston their mother. I have no
interest in the prosecution of this claim.
X
(her mark)
Juda
Bailey
[163]A few weeks after his wife's death,
Thomas Holston was wounded on June 17, 1862 and in the hospital at Warrensburg.
But he was back on duty in July 1862. A year later on November 1, 1863 Holston
married Martha Jane Harlow. Performing the ceremony was R. A. Foster, a
minister of the gospel. Martha was from Girard in Macoupin County, Illinois. On
August 15, 1864 Thomas's third child, Willan (Willie Ann) Holston was born.
Several months afterwards, Thomas was drowned on October 6, 1864 at Castle Rock
in Cole County near the state capital at Jefferson City. He was trying to swim
the Osage River to escape the enemy. Thomas and seven others had been on a
detachment and were engaged by a force of several thousand Confederates under
General Joseph Shelby, a large Missouri slaveowner. Three of his comrades died
with him. Their deaths were part of the defense against the 12,000 troops of
Southern General Sterling Price who had come up from Arkansas, through Pilot
Knob, which was to the southeast of Henry County. Confederate raids into
Missouri were an annual event. The Confederates hoped to take St. Louis, then
move the war into Illinois and on eastward. But they did not have the strength
for this. See Monaghan, Civil War on the
Western Border, pp. 290, 302, 306, 311, 314, 321.
[164]Paludan, "A
People's Contest," pp. 74, 293.
[165]Bailey, Jr. "Biography," in
Lamkin (ed.), History of Henry County,
p. 512. John Bailey recuperated with his wife at Ottenville (Otterville?).
[166]John Bailey's new wife was Elizabeth
Angelina Cockram. She was from Marshfield in Webster County near Springfield in
Southern Missouri, where John was stationed at the time. When the 7th Regiment
in October 1863 moved to Warsaw in Benton County, Missouri and nearer to Henry
County, Elizabeth Angelina moved there and "took their traps with them and
kept house." See "Civil War Pension File of John W. Bailey."
[167]Bailey, Jr. "Biography," in
Lamkin (ed.), History of Henry County,
p. 512.
[168]Ibid.
[169]See "Affidavit of John A.
Adams" in "Civil War Pension File of John W. Bailey."
[170]Twenty-two year-old Mary A. Bailey
married William Henry Blaylock there, soon after. He had been born in July
1843. They had seven children, five of whom were alive in 1900. The first child
was named "Julia" after her grandmother. The Blaylocks lived in Boyle
Township, Gentry County, Missouri. Henry Blaylock was a farmer. A clipping from
an unidentified Gentry County newspaper, in the possession of Chester and Doris
Jean Redford, Clinton, Missouri, reported on her 100th birthday in 1947:
Mary Blaylock traveled
to Gentry County with her husband, Henry Blaylock in 1865. It took them nine
days by covered wagon. They built a cabin of round poles and chinked with mud.
The chimney was made of blue grass sod.
See U.S.
Census, 1870 (Gentry County, Mo.), U.S. Archives (manuscript, microfilm),
enumeration district 270, sheet 3, line 14;
U.S. Census, 1920 (Gentry County, Missouri), manuscript, microfilm, U.S.
Archives, enumeration district 84, sheet 110, line 32.
[171]Samuel Paxton's pension record describes
one of his scouting expeditions on April 29, 1864. See "Civil War Pension
File of Samuel Paxton."
[172]Gerald Linderman, Embattled
Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New
York: Free Press, 1987); Reid Mitchell, Civil
War Soldiers (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989).
[173]See James McPherson, What They Fought for, 1861-1865
(New York: Doubleday, 1995), pp. 32-33.
[174]McPherson, For
Cause and Comrades, pp. 20, 102.
[175]The Homestead bill was signed by Lincoln
on May 20, 1862. The Emancipation Proclamation was announced on September 22,
1862. Both went into effect on January 1, 1863. See Hibbard, A History of the Public Land Policies,
p. 385.
[176]The Missouri politician, Edward Bates,
for example, represented land speculators who wanted to monopolize western land
for the transcontinental railroad and were against the Homestead Act. But in
seeking to keep alive politically, he had to endorse the Homestead Act. See
Cain, Lincoln's Attorney General Edward
Bates, pp. 73, 104.
[177]Paludan, "A
People's Contest," p. 257. In the 1864 national election,
Lincoln beat the Democratic presidential candidate, George McClellan in
Missouri and the Republicans continued to control the state legislature.
[178]Ibid., p. 79. In September 1861 John Fremont,
the Federal military commander in Missouri, issued an emancipation
proclamation. But Lincoln revoked it because he wanted to retain the loyalty of
the border state slaveholders in Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia and Maryland,
who sided with the Union.
[179]Monaghan, Civil
War, p. 15.
[180]WPA, Missouri,
p. 55.
[181]Ibid., pp. 54-55. To insure the approval of
the new constitution an ordinance was passed limiting the franchise to those
who could take the Test Oath. All judges of the supreme, circuit, county, and
legislative courts of record, all court clerks, circuit attorneys, sheriffs,
and county recorders had to vacate their offices on May 1, 1865, and their
places were filled by appointment of the Governor for the remainder of their
terms. When the supreme court judges refused to vacate on the grounds that the
ordinance was unconstitutional, they were ousted by force. Ministers, priests,
and nuns who engaged in teaching Southern propaganda were arrested, and in some
cases fined or imprisoned. A Registry Act passed in 1865 provided that a
superintendent elected in each county should be the sole judge as to who was
qualified to vote; three years later, the office was made appointive.
[182]George Brown in the Herald of Freedom (April
11, 1957), as quoted in David Johnson, "Free-Soilers for God: Kansas
Newspaper Editors and the Antislavery Crusade," Kansas
History (1979), vol. 2, p. 82.
[183]Roy Basler, ed., The
Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (9 vols., New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1955), vol. 2, p. 250.