1860: Missouri during and after the Civil War
While Missouri entered the United States as a slave state, Missouri entered the Civil War as a border state, with Unionists and Confederates struggling for power.
Campbell wrote that “one of the first skirmishes following the battle of Fort Sumter occurred in St. Louis in May 1861, when Confederate and Union militia fought over an arsenal in the city” (2013, p. 14). Recognizing the importance of the Mississippi River in supplying war efforts, both sides fought vigorously for control of the state. By August of 1861, martial law had been declared in St. Louis and Confederate property was being seized.
Missouri Governor Claiborne Fox Jackson. After he was elected in 1860 as a “conciliatory” candidate, Fox Jackson immediately began working secretly to support Missouri’s succession from the Union.
Source: Wikipedia
A large number of battles were fought in Missouri, and as Campbell found, “the war’s economic impact was devastating to St. Louis. With Southern markets and ocean access both closed, trade along the Mississippi River evaporated, and stores and businesses along the river-front suffered accordingly” (2013, p. 14).
St. Louis suffered economically as a result of the war.
Campbell noted that “By war’s end, St. Louis’s ‘second city’ ambitions were lost to Chicago. River traffic, facing new competition from railroads, never returned to prewar levels…the drive to bridge the Mississippi took on a new urgency” (2013, p. 14-15). However, once the Mississippi was bridged, St. Louis’s post-war economy recovered for the most part, and “by 1900, St. Louis was the second largest railroad hub in the United States” (2013, p. 15).
With the economic rebound of the city, came increased racial tensions.
The wealth generated by the rail network benefited St. Louis citizens with the means to take advantage of these new opportunities. This set the stage, however, for white flight to St. Louis County as Reconstruction era segregation and Jim Crow laws in the South spurred the Great Migration of Black people to cities like St. Louis.