The secession crisis of 1860-1861 impacted residents of the Trans-Mississippi differently. In November 1860 the Republican Party candidate, Abraham Lincoln, won the presidency on a platform pledging to prevent slavery from spreading beyond its existing boundaries. Between December 20, 1860, and February 1, 1861, seven states (including Louisiana and Texas) left the Union. In secession ordinances, accompanying documents of explanation, newspaper editorials, and speech after speech, Southern leaders explicitly cited the preservation of slavery as the reason for withdrawing from the Union. On February 22, they created the Confederate States of America.
Residents throughout the upper Trans-Mississippi were divided in sentiment and passions ran high. War nearly broke out on February 8, 1861, when local militia groups seized the federal arsenal in Little Rock, Arkansas. In March, Missourians elected to a statewide convention to consider the crisis adamantly rejected secession, but some warned that they would change their stance if Lincoln’s administration attempted to coerce the seceded states. Then on April 12 Confederate forces fired upon Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. Lincoln called for 75,000 state militia to suppress what he labeled a domestic insurrection, and within a month four more states, including Arkansas, left the Union.
During the 1860 election the majority of Missourians had avoided extremes, rejecting both Republican Abraham Lincoln and the Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, favoring instead the Northern Democrat Stephen A. Douglas. Many Missourians hoped the state might maintain a neutral stance. In Missouri the issues and choices were complex, for they now involved more than the future of slavery. There was state rights and the legality of secession. There was the preservation of the Union versus coercion. And there was the fear that taking any stance would rip apart not only the state, but communities and families. Support for the Confederacy, either overtly or conditionally, was strongest where the presence of slavery was greatest, in the Missouri River valley (later nicknamed “Little Dixie”) and the southeastern “bootheel” region. It was also strong along the Missouri-Kansas border, were resentments lingered from Jayhawker incursions during the “Bleeding Kansas” years. Most residents of the Ozarks were firmly for the Union, as was the German population in St. Louis. Missouri’s largely urban Irish population was split. St. Louis was also home to one half of Missouri’s 3,572 free African Americans. Segregated by strongly held social customs, they watched as the political system that excluded them threatened to collapse.
