The Winds of War
In 1860, the United States was a divided nation. Seeking a better life, our Landwehr family found themselves living in a nation poised on the brink of civil war. It was a war that would impact nearly everyone in border states like Missouri, and our Landwehr family would be no exception. To review some of the events that led up to outbreak of the Civil War, we will briefly go back to 1850, ten years before the arrival of the Landwehrs. Much of the material in this chapter was extracted from A Brief History of the United States by Franklin Escher, Jr.
By 1850, times were prosperous everywhere. A network of railroads was being built, the factories of the Northeast were humming, grain was pouring in from the Midwest, and California was enjoying a gold boom. The South thrived under "King Cotton."
Out of a total population of approximately nine million in the South in 1850, slightly over three million were slaves. Only a small minority of white men were slave owners, however, and most of the Negroes toiled on the big plantations of a few thousand wealthy and aristocratic families. The Constitution had forbidden further importation of slaves after 1808, but by that time a plentiful and continuing supply had been assured.
Conditions for the slaves varied; for the most part they were handled firmly but without cruelty. On the better plantations, they received some education and church training, and were allowed to come and go as they pleased, as long as they performed their prescribed duties. Quite a few were paid small amounts for their services and were allowed to purchase their freedom after a number of years.
In some cases, however, the slaves were overworked, beaten and mistreated, and families were split up at auction sales. Unwilling to bear their fate, many of these victims took their chances and ran away, hoping to find freedom in the North or in Canada. Often they received help from sympathetic Northerners, who violated the fugitive slave laws by refusing to return them to their masters.
The North had given up what little slavery existed there soon after the Revolution. Hearing tales of atrocities, or meeting runaway Negroes directly, the Northern people became increasingly disturbed over the moral issue of slavery. A small group called Abolitionists agitated for the immediate stamping out of the institution. And in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a novel of plantation life, Uncle Tom's Cabin, which sold like wildfire in the North and incensed public opinion further.
But more incendiary to Northerners than Uncle Tom's Cabin or anything that had gone on before was the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. The work of Senator Stephen Douglas, Democrat, of Illinois, it repealed the Missouri Compromise forbidding slavery in the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase and opened up the vast tract of nearly half a million square miles to "popular sovereignty." Once again the South had a chance to extend its slavery foothold.
Just why Douglas took the step remains something of a mystery. It may have been that he had presidential aspirations and sought Southern support. He had real estate interests in the Northwest and may have wanted to promote development there by giving it territorial status. He had a Southern wife and she may have influenced him.
At any rate, the area was divided into the Kansas and Nebraska Territories, and settlement began. Almost immediately, North and South began vying for Kansas, and civil war broke out as ruffians and fanatics from both sides tried to impose their will on each other. Many Missourians who lived near the western border of the state feared that the newly organized Kansas Territory would become a free state. As more and more anti-slavery families settled in Kansas, scattered warfare broke out between Missourians and Kansans. "Popular sovereignty," however attractive it had sounded, failed to work in Kansas and caused only bloodshed.
Three years later, the slavery cause achieved a triumph in the Supreme Court's decision in the historic Dred Scott case. Scott, a Missouri slave, sued for his freedom because he had once been taken into a free territory by his master. Chief Justice Taney ruled against Scott, because, he said, there were no free territories in America. Slaves were property under Constitutional law, and Congress had no right to exclude them from the territories. Henceforth, slavery could be introduced in every new state. The ruling greatly increased ill feeling between the North and the South.
Meanwhile, a new political party was forming in the North. Calling themselves Republicans, its adherents demanded flatly that the extension of slavery in the territories be halted. One of the first leaders of this party, which has continued in existence to the present day, was Abraham Lincoln, a lawyer and politician from Springfield, Illinois.
Although Lincoln was a popular figure in his home state of Illinois, he did not become known nationally until his debates on slavery with Stephen A. Douglas, "the little giant," in 1858. Both men were running for the United States Senate from Illinois, Lincoln on the Republican ticket and Douglas on the Democratic.
In view of the Dred Scott decision--Lincoln asked the champion of popular sovereignty in debate--could the people of a territory lawfully exclude slavery from its limits when it became a state? Douglas replied that it could--that the government could not force slavery, though it was legal, on people who did not want it. This answer cost Douglas his carefully built-up Southern support, for if slavery was legal, the South reminded him, slaveholders in the territories were entitled to protection of their property, by force if necessary.
Douglas won the Illinois Senate seat from Lincoln by a narrow margin, but a bigger contest between them loomed. The prophetic words of Lincoln, "I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.... It will become all one thing or all the other," were winning him respect and support from people throughout the North.
The nation was shocked in 1859 (the year our Landwehr family arrived in America) when a fanatical Abolitionist, John Brown, led a raid on a government arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Brown, with nineteen men, planned to seize the weapons in the arsenal and start a slave insurrection in the South. Captured by United States soldiers commanded by Robert E. Lee, Brown was tried and hung. The rank and file of people in both North and South condemned Brown's rash actions, but a group of New England Abolitionist intellectuals, among them the great poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, lauded Brown as a martyr and likened him to Christ. The incident inflamed the South, which was continually fearful of slave uprisings.
Passions came to a boil as the election campaign of 1860 got under way. President Buchanan, a Democrat, had been a mediocre Executive, unable to act in the crisis over slavery. Thus his candidacy was not considered. Convening at Charleston, South Carolina, in the heart of the South, the Democrats hoped to preserve a united front, possibly by nominating Stephen A. Douglas. But "the little giant" could not agree with Southern demands that slavery must be protected and enforced in the territories, and the Northern and Southern factions of the party split. John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky was the choice of the Southern Democrats, and Douglas was later nominated by the Northern wing at another convention.
The Republicans met in Chicago, expecting to name Senator William H. Seward of New York, but a strong Lincoln sentiment quickly developed and the "rail splitter" won on the third ballot. The party platform called for a halt to the extension of slavery and demanded admission of Kansas as a free state. Further angering the South, it advocated a higher tariff to protect industry and a strong federal "internal improvements" or public works program.
A fourth party, the Constitutional Unionists, entered the field with John Bell of Tennessee as its candidate. Designed to get votes in the border states, it sidestepped the slavery issue and merely advocated allegiance to the Constitution.
Missouri was one of the border states that were so stategically important to both the North and the South in the Civil War. As our immigrant Landwehr family began to move around Franklin County, they undoubtedly observed that slavery was an important force in the Franklin County economy. Of the total population of 18,085 in 1860, 1600 of the Franklin County inhabitants were slaves.
Slavery, then, was a very important issue to Franklin County voters in the election of 1860. Anna Landwehr did not, of course, vote in that election. Women would not receive the right to vote for another sixty years. And Henry Landwehr, while old enough to vote, was excluded from the polls because he was not a citizen. But it is probably safe to assume that our Landwehr family was exposed to some of the strong political feelings that marked that 1860 election.
Frederick William Pehle was a prominent Franklin County real estate agent, farmer, and stock raiser who was in later years elected as a State Senator. He lived about two miles southwest of Henry and Anna Landwehr Guese. In describing the 1860 election, Frederick Pehle recalled:
"In 1860 new voting places had been established at Berger and Miller's Landing, now New Haven. I went to Berger and furnished the voters with Lincoln tickets and cast my first vote (he was twenty-three years old) for the old Rail Splitter for President of the United States, which caused a fight in which one person was crippled and quite a number of others hurt, but I escaped with my tickets uninjured. The next day I went to New Haven to find out how many votes Lincoln had received and at that place I found the newly elected president of the United States hung in effigy on the spot now known as the Shelton mule lot."
When the votes of the nation were all finally tallied, the Republicans were victorious. Lincoln polled only forty per cent of the total ballot and not one border or Southern state voted for him; nevertheless, he had the highest vote of any of the four candidates and received a majority in the Electoral College. Douglas was second with a strong Northern showing, and Breckinridge and Bell were supported only in the border and Southern states.
The results in Franklin County were as follows:
Douglas, Democrat (northern), 888
Bell, Union, 577
Lincoln, Republican, 494
Breckinridge, Democrat (southern), 108
Statewide, Lincoln was very unpopular in Missouri. The totals were as follows:
Douglas, Democrat (northern), 58,801
Bell, Union, 58,372
Breckinridge, Democrat (southern), 31,317
Lincoln, Republican, 17,028
News of Lincoln's victory brought quick retaliation from the South. South Carolina seceded from the Union in December, and several other states from the lower South followed her. Meeting at Montgomery, Alabama, in February, 1861, they organized themselves into the Confederate States of America and elected Jefferson Davis President. Davis, a West Pointer and Mexican War hero, had served as a United States Senator and a Secretary of War.
Missouri became the center of national interest. The nation wondered whether Missouri would secede from the Union and join the Confederacy. Early in 1861, Missouri Governor Claiborne F. Jackson recommended that a state convention be called to determine the will of the people. The convention was held in February and March. Jackson and some members of the convention were strongly pro-South, but the convention voted to remain in the Union. Most Missourians wanted to stay neutral if war should come.
With the Union splitting, Congress tried various methods of compromise to lure the South back, or to hold those Southern states still remaining in the Union; but the efforts were in vain. In Lincoln and the Republican Party, the South saw a movement aimed at its very heart. Unless slavery could be extended, the growing North would gain control of the country and dominate the South politically and economically. To have such federal authority imposed by a hostile majority on a section that had traditionally leaned to the states-rights theory of government was more than could be borne. Southerners felt that the interests of the two regions, one industrial and the other agrarian, had become incompatible.
President Lincoln adopted a conciliatory, almost pleading attitude toward the South in his Inaugural Address in March, 1861. He said he was opposed only to extension of slavery, not to the institution itself where it already existed. Reminding Southerners of the nation's common heritage, he declared that it was spiritually, physically and politically impossible for the two sections to go their separate ways, and promised not to use coercive force unless force was used first against the United States Government.
The South's answer came a month later in Charleston harbor, where the United States maintained a small island garrison at Fort Sumter. Provisions were running low, and Lincoln was faced with the choice of sending more by sea, or of yielding the outpost to the Confederate government. He chose to send provisions, at the same time specifying that no military supplies were included; but the move was interpreted as hostile and Confederate artillery batteries opened fire on the Fort on April 12, 1861. Two days later the garrison surrendered and the Stars and Stripes were hauled down, to be replaced by the Confederate banner of Stars and Bars. The Civil War had started.
Exultation swept the South, and rage the North when the news of Fort Sumter became known. On April 15, the day after the surrender of Fort Sumter, President Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to reassert Federal authority throughout the nation.
By 1850, times were prosperous everywhere. A network of railroads was being built, the factories of the Northeast were humming, grain was pouring in from the Midwest, and California was enjoying a gold boom. The South thrived under "King Cotton."
Out of a total population of approximately nine million in the South in 1850, slightly over three million were slaves. Only a small minority of white men were slave owners, however, and most of the Negroes toiled on the big plantations of a few thousand wealthy and aristocratic families. The Constitution had forbidden further importation of slaves after 1808, but by that time a plentiful and continuing supply had been assured.
Conditions for the slaves varied; for the most part they were handled firmly but without cruelty. On the better plantations, they received some education and church training, and were allowed to come and go as they pleased, as long as they performed their prescribed duties. Quite a few were paid small amounts for their services and were allowed to purchase their freedom after a number of years.
In some cases, however, the slaves were overworked, beaten and mistreated, and families were split up at auction sales. Unwilling to bear their fate, many of these victims took their chances and ran away, hoping to find freedom in the North or in Canada. Often they received help from sympathetic Northerners, who violated the fugitive slave laws by refusing to return them to their masters.
The North had given up what little slavery existed there soon after the Revolution. Hearing tales of atrocities, or meeting runaway Negroes directly, the Northern people became increasingly disturbed over the moral issue of slavery. A small group called Abolitionists agitated for the immediate stamping out of the institution. And in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a novel of plantation life, Uncle Tom's Cabin, which sold like wildfire in the North and incensed public opinion further.
But more incendiary to Northerners than Uncle Tom's Cabin or anything that had gone on before was the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. The work of Senator Stephen Douglas, Democrat, of Illinois, it repealed the Missouri Compromise forbidding slavery in the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase and opened up the vast tract of nearly half a million square miles to "popular sovereignty." Once again the South had a chance to extend its slavery foothold.
Just why Douglas took the step remains something of a mystery. It may have been that he had presidential aspirations and sought Southern support. He had real estate interests in the Northwest and may have wanted to promote development there by giving it territorial status. He had a Southern wife and she may have influenced him.
At any rate, the area was divided into the Kansas and Nebraska Territories, and settlement began. Almost immediately, North and South began vying for Kansas, and civil war broke out as ruffians and fanatics from both sides tried to impose their will on each other. Many Missourians who lived near the western border of the state feared that the newly organized Kansas Territory would become a free state. As more and more anti-slavery families settled in Kansas, scattered warfare broke out between Missourians and Kansans. "Popular sovereignty," however attractive it had sounded, failed to work in Kansas and caused only bloodshed.
Three years later, the slavery cause achieved a triumph in the Supreme Court's decision in the historic Dred Scott case. Scott, a Missouri slave, sued for his freedom because he had once been taken into a free territory by his master. Chief Justice Taney ruled against Scott, because, he said, there were no free territories in America. Slaves were property under Constitutional law, and Congress had no right to exclude them from the territories. Henceforth, slavery could be introduced in every new state. The ruling greatly increased ill feeling between the North and the South.
Meanwhile, a new political party was forming in the North. Calling themselves Republicans, its adherents demanded flatly that the extension of slavery in the territories be halted. One of the first leaders of this party, which has continued in existence to the present day, was Abraham Lincoln, a lawyer and politician from Springfield, Illinois.
Although Lincoln was a popular figure in his home state of Illinois, he did not become known nationally until his debates on slavery with Stephen A. Douglas, "the little giant," in 1858. Both men were running for the United States Senate from Illinois, Lincoln on the Republican ticket and Douglas on the Democratic.
In view of the Dred Scott decision--Lincoln asked the champion of popular sovereignty in debate--could the people of a territory lawfully exclude slavery from its limits when it became a state? Douglas replied that it could--that the government could not force slavery, though it was legal, on people who did not want it. This answer cost Douglas his carefully built-up Southern support, for if slavery was legal, the South reminded him, slaveholders in the territories were entitled to protection of their property, by force if necessary.
Douglas won the Illinois Senate seat from Lincoln by a narrow margin, but a bigger contest between them loomed. The prophetic words of Lincoln, "I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.... It will become all one thing or all the other," were winning him respect and support from people throughout the North.
The nation was shocked in 1859 (the year our Landwehr family arrived in America) when a fanatical Abolitionist, John Brown, led a raid on a government arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Brown, with nineteen men, planned to seize the weapons in the arsenal and start a slave insurrection in the South. Captured by United States soldiers commanded by Robert E. Lee, Brown was tried and hung. The rank and file of people in both North and South condemned Brown's rash actions, but a group of New England Abolitionist intellectuals, among them the great poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, lauded Brown as a martyr and likened him to Christ. The incident inflamed the South, which was continually fearful of slave uprisings.
Passions came to a boil as the election campaign of 1860 got under way. President Buchanan, a Democrat, had been a mediocre Executive, unable to act in the crisis over slavery. Thus his candidacy was not considered. Convening at Charleston, South Carolina, in the heart of the South, the Democrats hoped to preserve a united front, possibly by nominating Stephen A. Douglas. But "the little giant" could not agree with Southern demands that slavery must be protected and enforced in the territories, and the Northern and Southern factions of the party split. John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky was the choice of the Southern Democrats, and Douglas was later nominated by the Northern wing at another convention.
The Republicans met in Chicago, expecting to name Senator William H. Seward of New York, but a strong Lincoln sentiment quickly developed and the "rail splitter" won on the third ballot. The party platform called for a halt to the extension of slavery and demanded admission of Kansas as a free state. Further angering the South, it advocated a higher tariff to protect industry and a strong federal "internal improvements" or public works program.
A fourth party, the Constitutional Unionists, entered the field with John Bell of Tennessee as its candidate. Designed to get votes in the border states, it sidestepped the slavery issue and merely advocated allegiance to the Constitution.
Missouri was one of the border states that were so stategically important to both the North and the South in the Civil War. As our immigrant Landwehr family began to move around Franklin County, they undoubtedly observed that slavery was an important force in the Franklin County economy. Of the total population of 18,085 in 1860, 1600 of the Franklin County inhabitants were slaves.
Slavery, then, was a very important issue to Franklin County voters in the election of 1860. Anna Landwehr did not, of course, vote in that election. Women would not receive the right to vote for another sixty years. And Henry Landwehr, while old enough to vote, was excluded from the polls because he was not a citizen. But it is probably safe to assume that our Landwehr family was exposed to some of the strong political feelings that marked that 1860 election.
Frederick William Pehle was a prominent Franklin County real estate agent, farmer, and stock raiser who was in later years elected as a State Senator. He lived about two miles southwest of Henry and Anna Landwehr Guese. In describing the 1860 election, Frederick Pehle recalled:
"In 1860 new voting places had been established at Berger and Miller's Landing, now New Haven. I went to Berger and furnished the voters with Lincoln tickets and cast my first vote (he was twenty-three years old) for the old Rail Splitter for President of the United States, which caused a fight in which one person was crippled and quite a number of others hurt, but I escaped with my tickets uninjured. The next day I went to New Haven to find out how many votes Lincoln had received and at that place I found the newly elected president of the United States hung in effigy on the spot now known as the Shelton mule lot."
When the votes of the nation were all finally tallied, the Republicans were victorious. Lincoln polled only forty per cent of the total ballot and not one border or Southern state voted for him; nevertheless, he had the highest vote of any of the four candidates and received a majority in the Electoral College. Douglas was second with a strong Northern showing, and Breckinridge and Bell were supported only in the border and Southern states.
The results in Franklin County were as follows:
Douglas, Democrat (northern), 888
Bell, Union, 577
Lincoln, Republican, 494
Breckinridge, Democrat (southern), 108
Statewide, Lincoln was very unpopular in Missouri. The totals were as follows:
Douglas, Democrat (northern), 58,801
Bell, Union, 58,372
Breckinridge, Democrat (southern), 31,317
Lincoln, Republican, 17,028
News of Lincoln's victory brought quick retaliation from the South. South Carolina seceded from the Union in December, and several other states from the lower South followed her. Meeting at Montgomery, Alabama, in February, 1861, they organized themselves into the Confederate States of America and elected Jefferson Davis President. Davis, a West Pointer and Mexican War hero, had served as a United States Senator and a Secretary of War.
Missouri became the center of national interest. The nation wondered whether Missouri would secede from the Union and join the Confederacy. Early in 1861, Missouri Governor Claiborne F. Jackson recommended that a state convention be called to determine the will of the people. The convention was held in February and March. Jackson and some members of the convention were strongly pro-South, but the convention voted to remain in the Union. Most Missourians wanted to stay neutral if war should come.
With the Union splitting, Congress tried various methods of compromise to lure the South back, or to hold those Southern states still remaining in the Union; but the efforts were in vain. In Lincoln and the Republican Party, the South saw a movement aimed at its very heart. Unless slavery could be extended, the growing North would gain control of the country and dominate the South politically and economically. To have such federal authority imposed by a hostile majority on a section that had traditionally leaned to the states-rights theory of government was more than could be borne. Southerners felt that the interests of the two regions, one industrial and the other agrarian, had become incompatible.
President Lincoln adopted a conciliatory, almost pleading attitude toward the South in his Inaugural Address in March, 1861. He said he was opposed only to extension of slavery, not to the institution itself where it already existed. Reminding Southerners of the nation's common heritage, he declared that it was spiritually, physically and politically impossible for the two sections to go their separate ways, and promised not to use coercive force unless force was used first against the United States Government.
The South's answer came a month later in Charleston harbor, where the United States maintained a small island garrison at Fort Sumter. Provisions were running low, and Lincoln was faced with the choice of sending more by sea, or of yielding the outpost to the Confederate government. He chose to send provisions, at the same time specifying that no military supplies were included; but the move was interpreted as hostile and Confederate artillery batteries opened fire on the Fort on April 12, 1861. Two days later the garrison surrendered and the Stars and Stripes were hauled down, to be replaced by the Confederate banner of Stars and Bars. The Civil War had started.
Exultation swept the South, and rage the North when the news of Fort Sumter became known. On April 15, the day after the surrender of Fort Sumter, President Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to reassert Federal authority throughout the nation.
