Soldiers and civilians exchanging gun fire on May 10, 1861, near Fifth and Walnut streets in St. Louis as the prisoners from Camp Jackson are marched to the Federal Arsenal (From the New York Illustrated News).
In the spring of 1861, St. Louis was seething.
Seven slave states had seceded by the time Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as president on March 4, 1861, but Missouri and seven others hadn’t decided whether to stay in the Union or join the nascent Confederate States of America.
Missouri sympathizers to the Southern cause of preserving slavery organized companies of “Minute Men.” The large and recently arrived German population of the city — many with military experience in European conscript armies or the revolutionary forces of 1848 — was stridently abolitionist, organized as “Wide Awakes” and drilling for possible action at Turnverein halls.
In this installment of Rudi ’splains it, I hope to help readers understand how Missouri became the only state with a major metropolitan police department under the direction of a board appointed by the governor.
That’s Kansas City.
But the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners — four members appointed by the governor plus the mayor — wasn’t Missouri’s first. And if Republicans running the General Assembly have their way, it won’t be the only one.
Legislation awaiting a final House vote and a signature from Gov. Mike Kehoe would put the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department under a similar board, as it was from 1861 to 2012.
Kansas City’s police force was originally put under a state-run board in 1874, and lawmakers at that time modeled it on the St. Louis police board.
For the 1861 law, the model, but not the motive, came from Maryland, where it was used in Baltimore to overcome political violence directed by anti-Catholic Know-Nothing politicians.
The motive in Missouri — in 1861 and 1874 — was raw political power. Both cities had recently elected Republican city leadership while the state legislature and executive was firmly in the hands of Democrats.
Democrats lost control of St. Louis City Hall in the 1858 election. In Kansas City, a reform ticket swept Democrats out of office in 1873.
Securing St. Louis for the Union
The potential dissolution of the Union in the spring of 1861 added a new layer of tension to the competition between the Democratic Party and the growing Republican Party. And secession-minded Democratic Gov. Claiborne Fox Jackson didn’t want the only organized group legally empowered to use force to fall into hostile hands.
Not only were the new German-born citizens the most reliably pro-Union population, they were also responsible for giving Lincoln a plurality of the votes in the state’s largest county and more than half of the votes the Republican received statewide as he ran fourth among major candidates.
Their votes were also essential to the 1858 election of Oliver Filley as the first Republican St. Louis mayor.
Jackson’s other plans to push Missouri into the Confederacy weren’t going well.
Delegate elections on Feb. 18, 1861, to a state convention to consider secession hadn’t gone as expected, with a majority of Unionists, even if most also supported continuance of slavery. When delegates convened on Feb. 28, they voted to move to St. Louis rather than remain in Jefferson City, where Jackson and secessionist lawmakers could pressure members.
So with uncertain municipal elections approaching, the bill establishing a state-run Board of Police Commissioners was introduced in the state Senate on Feb. 26, 1861, and passed on March 2, 1861. The Missouri House approved the bill on March 25, 1861.
The Missouri Democrat newspaper, the Republican Party organ in St. Louis, denounced the bill and made sure opponents were well represented in its reporting.
“This bill is, in my opinion, nothing else but an odious and pernicious crusade against the rights and the true welfare of the city of St. Louis — a city that pays more than two-fifths of the whole revenue of the State….,” state Rep. Randolph Doehn of St. Louis said. “Pretending to be friends of both, they poison, in reality, the good feelings of the state against the city.”
The main purpose of the bill, Doehn said, “is submission and coercion of the Union-loving citizens of St. Louis….it deprives the people of St. Louis the sacred rights that are presumed to be the fundamental franchises of freemen, by rendering the control over their municipal rights into the hands of individuals who have never obtained a position by the free will and fair choice of the independent voters themselves.”
The Daily Missouri Republican, the major St. Louis newspaper supporting the Democratic Party, wrote an editorial that rhapsodized gleefully over the political advantage lost to Republicans.
“The Black Republicans are in agony — they have a cold sweat upon them — some of them rave as if afflicted with delirium tremens,” the paper’s editorial began. “The passage of the Police Bill through the House yesterday, and the certainty of it becoming law, has completely paralyzed them. The lopping off of so large a share of the patronage of the Mayor, and the putting of it in the hands where it cannot be used for political purposes, is a death-blow to their plans for a perpetuation of Black Republicanism forever.”
“Black Republican” was a political insult intended to keep the anti-slavery position of the party foremost in the minds of voters.
The police bill victory was short-lived, for Jackson at least.
On March 19, 1861, the State Convention voted 89-1 that there was “no adequate cause” for Missouri to secede. It adjourned on March 22, 1861, empowering a committee to call it back into session if circumstances changed.
The war came on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces opened fire on Fort Sumter, the island fortress in the Charleston, South Carolina, harbor. Lincoln issued a call on states to supply 75,000 men.
“Your requisition, in my judgment, is illegal, unconstitutional, and revolutionary in its object, inhuman and diabolical, and cannot be complied with,” Jackson wrote to Lincoln in response to the requisition for Missouri soldiers. “Not one man will the State of Missouri furnish to carry on any such unholy crusade.”
At the same time, Jackson was writing to Jefferson Davis, president of the rebellious states, for siege guns and mortars “to batter down” the “walls, and drive out our enemies” from “the Arsenal at St. Louis, now under the command of an Abolition officer…”
In his letter to Davis, Jackson apologized because “Missouri has been exceedingly slow and tardy in movements hereto, but I am not without hope that she will promptly take her stand with her Southern sister States.”
Jackson organized a state army called the Missouri State Guard and named Sterling Price, a former governor and Mexican war hero, as commander. The siege guns he requested arrived in St. Louis on May 8, 1861, and were moved under cover of darkness to “Camp Jackson” at Lindell’s Grove on the western outskirts of the city.
About 900 members of the Missouri State Guard were gathered at the site now home to St. Louis University.
In a pre-emptive strike, Capt. Nathaniel Lyon had marched 6,500 to 7,000 troops — regular Army units augmented by mainly German volunteers organized into regiments — six miles from the Federal Arsenal to Camp Jackson, surrounded the camp and took 689 men prisoner.
But as the federal troops were escorting captured Missouri militiamen away from Camp Jackson, a shot was heard and the troops opened fire on unarmed civilians, killing 28 and wounding 50 to 75 more.
Former army officer William Tecumseh Sherman, president of the St. Louis street railway company, witnessed the surrender and subsequent firing on civilians.
“I heard the balls cutting the leaves above our heads, and saw several men and women running in all directions, some of whom were wounded,” Sherman wrote. “Of course, there was a general stampede.”
The Camp Jackson Affair, as it came to be known, ended any chance of Jackson securing St. Louis for the Confederacy. By mid-June, Jackson had abandoned Jefferson City to federal troops and in July, the State Convention, sitting in Jefferson City under federal protection, voted to remove Jackson and the entire General Assembly from office.
Control of St. Louis had a strategic advantage the Union would exploit throughout the war. By August 1861, James B. Eads had a contract to build the ironclad warships that proved essential to wresting control of the Mississippi River valley from the rebellious states.
The removal of officers elected in 1860 put Missouri under Republican control until the election of 1872. It also put the St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners under Republican control, leaving no motivation to change the law.
Kansas City after the war
The 1872 election was the first to occur after the General Assembly restored the voting rights of former Confederates, who had been disenfranchised by the state Constitution of 1865.
Their votes helped Democrats regain control in Jefferson City, overwhelming the votes from men formerly held in slavery who backed Republicans. Black votes, however, helped the reform ticket, endorsed by the Republican Party, gain control of Kansas City’s government in 1873.
On Feb. 4, 1874, Democratic state Rep. James McDaniels of Jackson County introduced the bill creating the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners. The Kansas City Journal, the city’s Republican newspaper, denounced the measure.
“In the first place the people of this city are not aware of having committed any crime for which the right to govern themselves should be taken away,” the Journal stated.
The law-and-order problems facing Kansas City revolved around the violence and prostitution associated with gambling, saloons and vagrancy. As the April 1874 election approached, Democrats were trying to blame the crime on the Republican city leadership.
The main purpose of the bill, the newspaper stated, was to put Democrats back on the city payroll. But the pay mandated by the bill, ostensibly to allow cuts of as much as 25% to the police budget, were inadequate.
“Men working on the salaries proposed must steal or starve, and as men will be found venal enough to take the positions, with the prospect of perquisites, our police force will become an institution more to be dreaded than the thieves themselves,” the Journal wrote.
The bill passed the Missouri House with only 10 votes in opposition and no votes against it in the state Senate.
Voters returned Democrats to power in Kansas City in the 1874 election, but only by 73 votes in the mayor’s race and, by the Journal’s account, only by supplying copious amounts of liquor to working class voters, both Black and white. The Journal also accused Democrats of bribing voters to support their ticket.
With the close vote, there was no incentive to repeal the law giving the state control of the local police. And except for a brief period in the 1930s, Kansas City police have been directed by the state-controlled board ever since.
As the 1874 bill was being finalized, the Journal warned its supporters that they would be blamed if crime wasn’t brought under control by taking away local responsibility.
“We would call the attention of the law and order party to the fact that a metropolitan police bill has passed the house and is now pending in the senate, and will undoubtedly pass that body and become a law,” the Journal stated. “This will wipe out the issue they are making in the present city contest; the reform they seek will then rest entirely with the police commissioners.”
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