The Civil War from the View of Laboring People: Agrarian Reform or Tragedy?

Contents

The Civil War from the View of Laboring People: Agrarian Reform or Tragedy?^[1]

            The role of laboring people in the American Civil War is sometimes pictured as tragic, with the focus being the 600,000 that died.^[2] However, many workers viewed themselves as reformers, not victims. No one wanted to die, but living was not the only or even the main concern. The Civil War for them was the continuation of a long-standing reform struggle, involved political, economic, religious and social demands. They sought 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 and poor houses for the blind, lame, elderly, retarded and mentally unsound and a church that took the side of working people. For reformers the "peculiar institution" was as much Northern corporate interests as Southern slavery, both of which often used state and federal government for personal gain at the public's expense.

            This essay looks at the war's reform dimension through the eyes of a laboring family, the Baileys, who lived in Henry County, Missouri, near the Kansas border. Some 27,000 Missourians died in the war, including twelve of the Baileys. Several other family members received life-long ailments. Despite the hardships, the war was viewed by them as part of the reform movement and glorious. In it they achieved much of their reform program.^[3]

            Reform in their Blood: Migration, 1830-1857. A basic agrarian reform for 19th-century farmers centered on migrating west to cheaper and better land. The Baileys' story began on Clear Creek in the Kentucky River valley near Mortonsville in Woodford County, Kentucky.^[4] George Bailey and Judy Howard were married there on October 31, 1825.^[5] He was 21, she was 17.^[6] The tradition of reform by migration was in their blood. For example, Judy's parents 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.^[7] Working people in Eastern Virginia were then 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.^[8]

            Woodford County was in the rich bluegrass region of Kentucky. It was already a booming plantation and horse-breeding area in the 1790s. The Baileys and Howards were small farmers.^[9] Religion was important to them and gave support to their reform beliefs. Judy's father was one of the 5 original trustees at the Mt. Edwin Methodist Episcopal church on the Oregon Road near Clear Creek. In contrast to the world of the magnates, the Methodist farmers on principle wore plain dress and resisted what they felt was "enslavement to the material," which for them meant wealth monopolization, ostentatious consumerism, slavery, gambling, horse racing, and sexual promiscuity. Their alternative to the market emphasized ministry to less fortunate neighbors. Family hymn singing and prayer were common.^[10]

            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 their reach. A recent account summarized the resentment felt by working people against the Kentucky 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.^[11]

            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 20 miles west of Indianapolis.^[12] Peter Cartwright, a Methodist lay preacher who migrated at 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."^[13]

            One of the reforms for "bettering" the temporal circumstances of subsistence farmers was not to borrow money. The focus was on "self-help," since the government was at best unreliable.^[14] To avoid going into debt in Danville, the Baileys did wage labor. George worked as a shoe and boot maker, a trade in which pride was taken.^[15] Low-cost shoes were mass-produced but a living could still be made from the trade.^[16] They were able to successively purchase and sell several lots with houses on them but it took them 22 years to accumulate enough to buy a farm.^[17] This was because much land in central and northern Indiana was held by speculators for prices beyond the reach of most working people.^[18]

            In 1837 when their daughter Frances Ann was born, the Baileys moved to Greencastle in Putnam County, Indiana. Greencastle was about 20 miles west of Danville, not far from the National Road. In 1840 they again moved. An economic depression at the time caused them to sell their lot in Greencastle for $100, which was half what they had paid for it several years earlier.^[19] They went 50 miles further west to Shiloh Township in Edgar County, Illinois, near Bruelette Creek in the valley of the Wabash. The county seat of Edgar County was Paris, with a population of 700.^[20] They eventually bought a 120-acre farm on Jan. 3, 1852, some 12 years after moving to Illinois.^[21] In Shiloh Township 5 additional children were born. In all, they had 9 children.^[22]

            Elements of the 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."^[23] There was a continuing hostility to the corporate interests that monopolized the government and its land policy. From the view of farming people, it was their labor that improved the land and gave it value. The land had no value in itself. Speculators added no value. 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.^[24]

            The market system of farming was recognized by working people as dangerous. Twenty percent of 19th-century farm families went bankrupt.^[25] 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."^[26]

            During the 1850s the reform movement, including the demand for homestead legislation, was helped by the division that arose between the Northern corporate interests and Southern slave interests. These two forces had dominated the Democratic Party and the government land policy in the antebellum. The division itself between Northern and Southern big property arose out of land policy, that is, whether slavery would be extended to the western territory. The Democratic magnates believed they had solved the problem and defeated the reformers in 1854 with the Kansas-Missouri Bill.^[27] In exchange for the North getting the terminus of the first railroad to the Pacific, the South obtained squatter sovereignty in the Kansas and Nebraska territories.

            It was obvious from the start that Nebraska would be free. The mistake made by the corporate interests was in assuming that labor would stand by and allow Kansas to be slave.^[28] 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."^[29]

            When the slaveholders lost the battle of the ballet 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 resulting split within the party between Douglas Democrats, who supported a free Kansas, and the Southern Democrats allowed the Republicans to win the presidency in 1860.^[30] 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 corporations, but allowing actual settlers the use of it without cost. Such grants would be inalienable, thus protecting them from claims for debts.^[31]

            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.^[32] In the House the vote was 115 for to 65 against with 95 Republicans for it along with 25 Democrats. There were 48 Democrats and 17 Know-Nothings against it.^[33] 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.^[34] Working people "cursed the interests that killed the Homestead Bill."^[35]

            The "interests" that killed the Homestead Bill were both slavery and the Northern iron and railroad corporations.^[36] The free grant of 7 million quarter sections would make worthless the massive land grants obtained by the railroads and the land warrants. Northern banks and land companies. The land warrants had been issued to veterans and purchased at a discount and the corporate speculators expected to profit.^[37] The Homestead Act was the main issue for agrarians in the 1860 election.^[38] 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."^[39] After the Republicans got power in 1861, a homestead measure was enacted.^[40]

            In addition to cheap free land the agrarian reform 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.^[41] Despite the expense, the Bailey children all went to school and learned to read and write. It got 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.^[42] By 1860 95% of the Illinois school age population were attending school 6 months out of the year. At the national level with the split between the Northern and the Southern magnates, 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.^[43] This gave the start to public higher education such as at the University of Illinois.

            A third element of the reform program was for the overthrow of laws authorizing the manufacture and retail sale of alcoholic drinks. The corporate, profit-motivated destruction of those that were without impulse control, the youth, and the mentally immature was viewed as wrong. 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.^[44]

            Illinois agrarians in the 1850s backed the "Maine Law" movement, which placed 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 number 74. Their uniform is a white sash thrown over the shoulders & united in front by a blue bow." To hear the speeches on temperance, the judge went to the Methodist Church, where "U.F. Linder, Esq. of Charleston . . . made a pretty speech."^[45] In 1855 the Illinois state legislature enacted a prohibition law; it was later weakened by the liquor industry in Chicago, which mobilized the German vote.^[46]

            Local Political Activism for Reform. In agitating for their program in the antebellum and Civil War period, agrarians, as a recent historian commented, "breathed collective life into the county institutions."^[47] Elected officials worked in government part-time and were farmers fulltime. County commissioners set fair prices at local mills, ferries and taverns. They provided public assistance to 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.^[48] Split rails, not barbed wire, dominated.^[49]

            In the 1840s and early 1850s small farmers in central Illinois, where Edgar County was located, were called "Henry Clay Whigs from Kentucky."^[50] 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.^[51] Among the Whig and later Republican leaders who came to support reform and got help in Edgar County was Abraham Lincoln. As part of the central Illinois itinerant bar, he regularly visited Edgar County from 1845 to 1852.^[52] When a young Whig representative of Illinois's 7th Congressional District in 1847, Lincoln had been indifferent to the agrarian land reform measure then under consideration.^[53] 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."^[54] 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."^[55]

            Lincoln's conversion to Republicanism and the beginnings of his evolution toward agrarian reform began in the summer of 1856 when he made 50 speeches in behalf of the Republican presidential candidate, John C. Fremont (1813-1890). One of those speeches was warmly received in Paris on Aug. 6, 1856.^[56] Several months later on Nov. 4, 1856, 952 (36%) of the Edgar County voters went for Freemont. The Democrat Buchanan got 1342 votes (51%) and the Know-Nothing Fillmore got the rest.^[57] The Democrats won Edgar County, but in earlier elections they had gotten as much as 65% of the vote. They were fearful enough of their declining strength in Illinois that some school masters were dismissed because they voted for Freemont.^[58]

            Lincoln later returned to Edgar County on the afternoon of Sept. 7, 1858 as a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate against Stephen Douglas. He spoke from 3 to 5:00 PM 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.'"^[59]

            Also in Paris on Sept. 7, 1858 was Owen Lovejoy, an abolitionist and Illinois Republican member of Congress during the period 1857-1864. 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 [Sept. 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."^[60]

In the 1850s and 1860s, 75% and more of those eligible, voted.^[61] Lincoln and the Republicans won Edgar County in 1858, but did not win enough elsewhere to gain election.^[62]

            To Missouri. Despite the Baileys' progress in purchasing and successfully running their farm, Illinois was a difficult place for farming people in the antebellum. Typically, in 1850 Senator Stephen Douglas persuaded Congress to grant to a single corporation some 2,707,200 acres of land, scattered over 47 counties, for the long-awaited Illinois Central Railroad.^[63] 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."^[64] Governor French, Senator Douglas, and many Democratic officials became wealthy because they speculated in railroad stock and land. But the public suffered as land prices increased 50% in value overnight. Railroad land was exempt from taxation so that there was no pressure to sell and it was held indefinitely for the top price.^[65]

            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 9 years of marriage, their oldest daughter, Louisa, and son-in-law, George Craig, along with their 3 small children undertook a self-help reform by migrating to Nebraska. The land was cheaper there.^[66] Prior to their move, they had farmed with marginal success a 40-acre plot bordering the Bailey's farm.^[67]

            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.^[68] After 17 years in Illinois, they sold off their farm on Aug. 7, 1857 for $2,100. With them on their move further west came their unmarried children and also their married daughter Frances Ann and her family.^[69] They settled on vacant land in Henry County, Missouri near Lucas in White Oak Township. This was part of Grand River Valley on Missouri's western border with Kansas.^[70] A federal land office had been established in the mid-1840s at the county seat in Clinton. Its administrator was the Democratic slave owner, 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 in 1883:

The township has suffered a good deal with its non-resident landowners. 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 landowners show a disposition to take a fair price for their holdings, White oak will take a start and progress will mark her pathway.^[71]

            A federal reform measure enacted in 1854, the graduation bill, aided the Baileys. Authored by Senator Thomas Benton of Missouri, the law had addressed one of the problems in public land distribution. Big money took the most fertile and best suited lands. This left much land unsold. As a result, the government had 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 in these areas according to the number of years the land remained unsold, until it was given away free in 80-acre lots.^[72]

            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 already on the Kansas-Missouri border. Silas had started farming there in the 1840s in Johnson County, which bordered Henry County to the north.^[73] 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.^[74]

            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 other government services.^[75] But in the 1850s the dissolution of the national Northern-Southern coalition that had prevented reform had especially positive results in Missouri. Greed, short-sightedness and panic at the increasing success and electoral strength of working people helped bring the division there earlier than elsewhere. Among those who set off the panic were those like the Baileys that moved to the Kansas-Missouri border in the summer of 1857, which was then the center of the reform movement.

            Missouri slave owners felt threatened by the militancy on the Kansas-Missouri border because Missouri was the outpost slave state. With what they considered abolitionists to the east in Illinois and to the north in Iowa, Missouri could not survive being surrounded by "abolitionists" on its western side.^[76] Sheriff Samuel Jones of Westport, Mo., who sympathized with the slave owners, in recruiting to fight white labor in Kansas 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."^[77] 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 militancy of the reformers. Lincoln commented, "The people of these United States are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts."^[78]

            Despite considerable bloodshed and even because of it, by 1857 some 5,000 laboring migrants had won the battle for Kansas, merely by outnumbering the slave forces 4 to 1.^[79] 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."^[80]

            Once Kansas was secure, the fight turned towards "Africa" itself, as Missouri and the other slave states were called.^[81] Paul Nagel in his history of Missouri described the Kansas Jayhawk raider aspect of the 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.^[82]

            Even more dangerous for the existing order than the Kansas Jayhawks were the reform 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.^[83] Migrants were diverted to Iowa. The Baileys with their origins in Kentucky, spoke "Southern" and, like many others, evaded the authorities.

            Missouri had been a slave state since 1820. By 1840 the 15 most fertile counties, most of which bordered the Missouri River, were dominated by slave owners who had moved there from the South. This became known as Little Dixie.^[84] Their landlords were only 2% of the population, but they controlled the Missouri Democratic Party.^[85] The small number of slave owners 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 Thomas Goodrich 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."^[86]

            If the prospects for the Missouri slave forces in the years before the war were declining, those of the reformers were on the rise. The first year following their move to Missouri, the oldest Bailey boy, 24-year old, William T., married and started his own farm near Urich, not far from the paternal parents.^[87] A year later the Baileys celebrated at their homestead the marriage of another child, their 21-year old son, John W.^[88] At Lucas the farmers averaged 40 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.^[89] The farm which the Baileys pioneered, was already valued at $1,000 by 1860.^[90] The children helped with the farming but they also went to school. In 1860 3 of them were in school.^[91]

            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 17, married George W. Craig on Sept. 27, 1847. Family and neighborhood friends attended the ceremony, which was performed by James Flack, who was both a justice of the peace and a Methodist Episcopal minister. He had come to Dudley in the western part of Edgar County from Kentucky in 1830. The first Methodist church was at his house.^[92] According to one of his granddaughters, George Craig did not drink and smoked only a little. Abstinence from alcohol and tobacco was part of their religion.^[93]

            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.^[94] It was less expensive that way. Their church made little distinction between clergy and laity. Blacks and women preached, exhorted and disciplined.^[95] In turn they were baited by racists, "Would you have your daughters marry blacks?"^[96] But in their view, slavery was a system of prostitution. "Race bleaching and amalgamation" had always been part of it.

            For many church people, religion was both about the hereafter and about the consequences that flowed in a capitalist-influenced economy from doctrines such as being your neighbor's keeper and the commandments against greed, envy, theft and killing. A consequence was their tendency to maximize subsistence farming and minimize the market economy and what they felt were its evils. A student of such 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.^[97]

            The widespread anti-wealth sentiments of Edgar county's subsistence farmers were condemned by the circuit judge there, 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."^[98] Unlike Judge Davis, the locals did not tend to equate God with money or encourage a reverence for the dignity of wealth or a belief in the existence of a wise overlordship of the affluent. To the contrary, they were more apt to raise doubt that under the kindly guidance of the magnets' intelligent government, justice, mercy and peace would bless their class.^[99]

            Minimizing market involvement did not mean being lazy or limiting productive work, as Judge Davis believed, it only involved giving second place to profit-oriented activity. Nor did it mean political quietism. Activism against slavery as on the Missouri border in the summer of 1857 was part of the Methodist religion. One authority remarked that the "keystone of Southern Methodist antislavery efforts was the Golden Rule," as set forth in Mt. 7:12 and Lk. 6:31.^[100] John Wesley had denounced slave owners because they robbed slaves "of all their labor" in order to live in luxury.^[101] This condemnation, as historian Cynthia Lyerly put it, "Fit squarely within Methodist opposition to conspicuous consumption and wealth."^[102] Methodist emancipationist Francis Asbury (1745-1816) preached the story of Moses, the flight from Egyptian slavery, jubilee (Lev. 25), and the labor theory of value. As St. Paul (1Th 3:10) put it to the Thessalonians, those that did not work, meaning the slave owners, should not eat.^[103] In 1845 the Methodist church split between North and South on the issue of slavery.^[104]

            In their successive communities, the Baileys found support from like-minded reformers at church. The churches propagandized about slave labor reducing the value of white labor and resulting in the monopolization of the best land by the slave owners. Reformers complained that in a reverse form of carpetbagism, the profits from slavery along with those from Northern capitalism, 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 the whole country was enslaved.^[105] Because of these sentiments, the Missouri magnates attacked the Methodist church and its members.^[106]

            Reform and the Civil War. Reform-minded believers had long been battling against the established order 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, Mo. Democratic machine and its counterparts throughout the South, desperate to secede from and barricade themselves against further invasion by working people. Illustrative of the Henry County Democratic fears had been the resolutions adopted at their convention in the county seat at Clinton on Jan. 9, 1860, the same day the Baileys were celebrating the marriage of their son John about 10 miles distant:

            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.^[107]

            Election day, November 6, 1860, did not go well for those who opposed reform. In Missouri the Republicans got only 10% of the vote.^[108] This matched the vote for the secessionist candidate. Seventy percent of the Missouri vote went to the Douglas Democrats and Bell's Constitutional Union movement.^[109] Despite his small support in Missouri, much of which was in St. Louis, Lincoln was elected. The Henry County Democrats then held another meeting at the Clinton courthouse on Nov. 20, 1860. They still controlled the local government, but with Republican appointments expected to the land office, post office, federal courts, marshall's office military and other positions, their power would be diminished. They feared the Republicans would "clean the slaves out of Southern Missouri."^[110] Led by the large landlords and Democratic office holders like Daniel Ashby, who would soon be an officer in the Confederate army, and John Williams, the federal district judge in Kansas, who had been run out of the territory by the reformers, they adopted a resolution to establish a militia under their control and to move toward armed-struggle.^[111] The militia 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, Ala., Governor Jackson and the Missouri magnates 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 slave-owners and wanted nothing to do with the magnates. When the state convention met starting on Feb. 28, 1861, it ruled against secession and then recessed, but did not disband.^[112] When Jackson and the magnates 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.^[113]

            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 reform.^[114] They helped form Company "D" of the Cass County Regiment Home Guard, Cavalry Battalion.^[115] Their regiment, which was also known as the 1st Missouri Home Guard, fought the slave owners in their own backyard.^[116] The Bailey's farm at Lucas was two miles from the Cass County border and 30 miles east of the Kansas border.^[117] 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.^[118] 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 were continually in and around Henry County, which was divided in sentiments.^[119] Typically, on July 7, 1861 Union Brigadier General Lyon's 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."^[120]

            Some maintain that the "federal doom of the Confederacy was written in the West rather than in the East," because the Confederates were not able to win Missouri, Kentucky and Tennessee.^[121] But if these were not won by the Confederacy, it was not for want of trying. William Sherman was famous for the devastation his troops caused in the South toward the end of the war. However, death, sickness and destruction were common on the Missouri border both before and throughout the war. In 1861 alone, the Baileys' Co. "D" of the Cass County Home Guard did battles or skirmishes at:

Parkersville, Mo. [Parkerville, Platte Co.?], (July 17-19, 1861)

Harrisonville in Cass County (July 27, 1861)

Jonesborough [Jonesburgh, Warren Co.?] (Aug. 21-22, 1861)

Old Randolph (Lexington?) (Sept. 14, 1861)

Bush Ridge Road (Oct. 14, 1861)

Butler in Cass County (Nov. 20, 1861)

Grand River in Bates County (Nov 30, 1861)

Dayton in Cass County (Dec. 23, 1861)

Wadesburg in Cass County (3 miles west of Lucas, Dec. 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 Aug. 10, 1861. The Federals, who were outnumbered 5 to 1, were attempting to protect southwestern Missouri from a force that had been brought up from Arkansas.^[122] 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 (1834-1902) of neighboring Deepwater Township on Sept. 8, 1861 at their Lucas farm. Officiating at the marriage was justice of the peace, John van Story.^[123] The marriage was not recorded because the certificate along with the justice of the peace were captured on the way to the courthouse. The certificate was destroyed. Among those present at the marriage was the Baileys' youngest son, George, Jr. and Samuel Paxton's 16-year-old sister, Nancy Paxton (Miles).^[124] Amanda and Samuel eventually had 3 children.

            A number of the Baileys had their lives taken in the struggle. The first of the Baileys to die were 57-year-old George and his 18-year-old son, James. They were shot around December 1861 in front of their home by "Southern guerrillas." Among the witnesses was George's grandson and namesake, George Holston (1857-1937), who was 4 years-old.^[125] Another witness was Bailey's youngest son, George Jr., who was 11 at the time. He gave a brief account of the incident 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.^[126]

George and James were buried on a farm south of Urich that in the 20th century belonged to Emmett Doll (1899-1997) and Ethel May Long Doll (d. 1980). This was probably the Baileys' homestead in the 1860s.^[127]

            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 and worked for the overthrow of the established order. Most importantly, the older Bailey boys and two son-in-laws were under arms against the local magnates. The fighting on the Missouri western border was not random. George's wife and young children were not hurt. The practice of swift "justice" was characteristic of border warfare.

            One of John Bailey's comrades in the Home Guard, orderly sergeant Woodson Wade from Creighton, commented on the Baileys' activism in the Guard:

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.^[128]

Actually, the Baileys' adult sons, William T. and John W. had been active in the Guard for 6 months prior to the death of their father and brother. If they were like their neighbors, they had also been involved in militia activity since coming into Missouri.

            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 replacement, Co. "G" of the 7th Regiment Missouri State Militia Cavalry (SMC).^[129] They were in all the major and many of the minor Missouri battles.^[130] In all, 1,162 battles or skirmishes were fought in Missouri, 11 percent of those fought in the nation and more than occurred in any other state except Virginia and Tennessee.^[131] About 27,000 Missouri citizens 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 Dec. 13, 1861 she was thrown from a horse and died of the injury. William Bailey was among those who attended the funeral. Even before her death, one of her two babies had died. John, in the Home Guards, was left a widower with one child. Blueford Jones, one of John's comrades in the Guards had his father take care of John's remaining baby for a while.^[132] Later the child died.

            After the 1861 deaths, Judy Bailey and her children initially 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 grave of George and James in the evening. Because she always wore a white bonnet, the children who saw her at the grave thought she was a ghost.^[133] She soon had another grave to visit.

            Six months after the death of George and James, Frances Ann Holston, age 25, died on June 5, 1862 at the home of her brother, 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.^[134] Frances Ann's two children, George Henry and Laura Holston, aged 5 and 2, went to live with their newly married aunt, Amanda (Bailey) Paxton. Several years later Thomas Holston would be killed in battle.^[135] But in the midst of death came a new life. Amanda was pregnant with her first child. He was born on Sept. 12, 1862 and named after his recently deceased grandfather, George Bailey Paxton.

            By mid-1863 the Confederacy was on the retreat in the West. Union forces under U.S. Grant had beaten the slave owners at Fort Donelson in Tennessee on Feb. 6, 1862 and Vicksburg on July 4, 1863.^[136] Some 12,000 Confederate troops surrendered at Fort Donelson and 30,000 at Vicksburg. Nevertheless, on a smaller scale the war on the Missouri border raged onward. As a result, the Baileys and many of their neighbors retreated from Henry County because of safety considerations.

            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 70 miles northwest of Lucas. They burned 185 buildings, and killed about 150 inhabitants. The violence was nothing new but to curb such 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 15 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 3 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 50 miles northeast to Cooper County, Missouri.^[137] 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. Despite their displacement, the Baileys celebrated several marriages, including John Bailey's remarriage.^[138] In the spring of 1864 Judy and her children moved again; this time to a farm in Morgan County, which was 40 miles east of their White Oak homestead. They farmed there for a year until the spring of 1865.^[139] They then located on a farm southwest of Warrensburg in Johnson County, Missouri, which was 30 miles north of their White Oak farm. They moved each time to stay close to relatives in the union military forces.^[140]

            In Oct. 1865 John Bailey's family, which had been living close to Judy Bailey's family in Johnson County, got smallpox. Both his boys, one age 3 and the other a few months old, died. John got it too and had to convalesce. His face had scars afterwards. A neighbor, Andrew Mack, who had already had smallpox and so could not get it, helped them.^[141] At the time, with the war just 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.^[142] A number of the Baileys who survived the war 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. He raised several of his wife's sister's children plus three of his own. He was a laborer and in time, his war-related disabilities made it impossible for him to earn a living. He and his wife Amanda had to live with one of their children. Samuel echoed a common reformer complaint about the 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."^[143]

            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 Bailey family in their migration, labor, politics, beliefs and armed struggle contended against the established order and what they felt was its unnecessary wealth and its debauching of politicians, media and clergy. They paid a price for their contention, which was not unusual. Their reward was their productive labor, their children, crops, neighbors and their reforms.

            Lincoln called the conflict between free and slave labor irrepressible; but for the Baileys, it was reform that was irrepressible. The Civil War was not the beginning of the struggle but a continuation. Laboring people did not choose it, but they made the best of it. At the national level, the first fruits were in 1862 with the passage of the Homestead Act, the Emancipation Proclamation and the establishment of the Department of Agriculture.^[144] To obtain labor's help in fighting the war, the government had to make concessions.^[145]

            At the local level too, there was progress, especially in Missouri and the other slave states. The Missouri Republican Party increased in size after Lincoln's election and split into factions.^[146] Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 applied only to states that were in rebellion. Missouri was not in rebellion and slavery continued.^[147] 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 reformers got control of the party with 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 Missouri, the reform constitution which was put in force on July 4, 1865, gave generous aid to public schools. Missouri landlords had always opposed this.^[148] 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.^[149] 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 old magnates 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.^[150]

            The Baileys' reformism was not a religion that equated God with country or doctrines of "freedom" "constitutionalism" and "union" that failed to mention freedom, constitutionalism and union for whom and for what. They conceded no "freedom" for the monopolization of land and labor. Preservation of the union was not obtained in order for capitalism to enslave.^[151] The odds against their success, at the time, seemed impossible. And the price, even now, seems to have been too high. But they were reformers because that was in their nature, their way of life. This was characteristic of many laboring people.