Laboring People and the Civil War as an Agrarian Reform Movement

Contents

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