Missouri's Big Day!

 

by Pa Rock

Missourian

Missouri, my home, formally achieved statehood two hundred years ago today.  It was a Friday.

The United States had acquired the territory that included Missouri in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, an agreement in which the administration of Thomas Jefferson paid the government of France $15 million for 828,000 square miles of land extending from New Orleans up to the Canadian border.  The deal amounted to around $18 per square mile. 

By 1820 when the young territory of Missouri was preparing to seek admission to the country as a bonafide state, the expansion of slavery was a major political issue.  Missouri, which had been largely populated by settlers from the slave states of Kentucky and Tennessee, was seeking admission as a slave state.

Henry Clay, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, drafted a temporary solution that became known as the Missouri Compromise of 1820.  In that agreement, Missouri would be allowed to join the nation as a slave state, and to keep a balance between slave and free states in Congress, Maine would be separated from its parent state of Massachusetts and granted statehood as a free state.  Clay's compromise was later amended to prohibit any part of the Louisiana Purchase north of a line running along Missouri's southern border from ever joining the United States as a slave state.

And thus it was done.  Maine became the twenty-third state on March 15th, 1820, and Missouri was added as the twenty-fourth on August 10th, 1821.

One of the first two U.S. Senators from Missouri was Thomas Hart Benton.  He served for thirty years in the senate and was known as one of the major proponents of "Manifest Destiny," the notion that God intended the country to expand ever-westward until it reached the pristine beaches of the Pacific Ocean.  Senator Benton is also remembered because of a great-grandnephew who was named after him.  Thomas Hart Benton, the world renowned painter, was born in 1889 in the small southwestern Missouri community of Neosho, the same town where this tired old blogger also happened to be born in 1948.

In addition to Thomas Hart Benton, the painter, numerous other famous people were born in Missouri.  A partial list would include singer Josephine Baker, military generals John J. Pershing and Omar N. Bradley, scientist George Washington Carver, poets Langston Hughes and Eugene Field, businessman J.C. Penney, baseball great Yogi Berra, the clown Emmett Kelly, the outlaws Jesse and Frank James, cartooning pioneer Walt Disney, President Harry S. Truman, and, of course, literary giant Mark Twain, the man who turned Hannibal, Missouri, into America's ideal boyhood home.

The Missouri State Genealogical Association has a program which it calls "Missouri's First Families."  That program offers special certificates of recognition to family researchers who can document connections to ancestors who lived in Missouri at various times.  

• "Territorial Certificates" are available to persons who can prove to have at least one ancestor who was residing in the Missouri prior to statehood o August 10th, 1821;   
• "Pioneer Certificates" may be obtained by people who can prove that they had an ancestor residing in Missouri between August 11th, 1821, and December 31st, 1860;  and, 
• "Civil War Service Certificates" are available to people who can show that they had an ancestor who served in a Missouri unit during the Civil War, or those whose ancestor served in other units but saw service in Missouri, or those whose ancestor was a Civil War veteran who died or was buried in Missouri.

(I can qualify for  several different "Pioneer" and "Civil War Service" certificates, but cannot find any ancestral lines going back to Missouri's "Territory" days.  So far the longest line that I can document is that of two of my g-g-g-g-grandparents, Abraham and Mouring (BIGGS) MARTIN who arrived in Newton County, Missouri (where Neosho is located) in the early 1840's.  That makes me a 7th generation Missourian - but alas no "territorial" cigar.  Boone, my twenty-two-year-old grandson, if he is reading this, can claim the honor of being a 9th generation Missourian!)

(Mark Twain would have also been unable to claim "Territorial" status.  His family migrated from Jamestown, Tennessee, to the hamlet of Florida, Missouri, in 1835 shortly before the birth of their famous son later that same year.)

Today over six million people call Missouri their home.  Some of us have been here longer than others, and some have family lineages in the state stretching back to the time of Daniel Boone and beyond, but we are all Missourians - and this is our big day.   So break out the cake and start lighting the candles because Missouri is celebrating 200 years of statehood today!

Happy bicentennial, Missouri!