[Ads-l] scrapnel

[James A. Landau]

1.  How did Marshall TX get to become the capital of Missouri?

At the beginning of the Civil War, Missouri Governor Claiborne Jackson and much of the Missouri legislature were pro-secession.  However, the Unionist leaders in St. Louis, Frank Blair (whose brother Montgomery had been Dred Scott's attorney) and Nathaniel Lyon, struck back in a campaign that had skullduggery and lethal gunfire.  Eventually Blair and Lyon (who was killed in battle during the campaign) chased Jackson and the Missouri legislature out of Missouri.  

Why the government-in-exile settled in Marshall, Texas, I do not know, but it may have been because Marshall offered good communications:  steamboats, railroads, and Texas's first telegraph line.  

2.  What did a certain female impersonation in St. Louis have to do with the preceding?

The secessionists set up an encampment, "Camp Jackson", outside St. Louis filled with armed men.  Lyon decided to personally reconnoiter.  He disguised himself as Mrs. Alexander, that being Frank Blair's elderly mother.  Mrs. Alexander lent Lyon her clothes, and he made a carriage tour of Camp Jackson without being spotted.  Using the results of that reconnaissance and other intelligence, he led an attack which wiped out Camp Jackson and was one of the events that caused the Missouri government to leave the state. 

3.  Why did the Union army, in the Red River expedition of 1864, try to invade Harrison County?

To set up a formaidable Union presence in Texas for the purpose of convincing Napoleon the Little to remove French troops from Mexico.  Yes, Harrison County almost played a part n the history of the Monroe Doctrince.

4.  Why were there as many as 8,746 slaves in Harrison County?

This had nothing to do with any virtue, or lack of it, on the part of the white population, but rather was a matter of geography.  Harrison County offered steamboats on the Red and Sabine Rivers (plus a little later railroads) which encouraged the white planters to cash-crop, that is, grow commodities for export outside the county rather than food for local consumption.  In ante-bellum Texas, cash-cropping meant cotton, which meant slaves.  Since Harrison County was the leading cotton-producing area in Texas, it is no surprise that it had the largest slave population in the state (according to the 1860 Census, 8,746)   

5.  What did the city of Shreveport, Louisiana, have to do with the size of the slave population in Harrison County?

Sorry, a badly worded question.  I ws thinking that Harrison County cotton was sent by wagon to Shreveport for loading on steamboats, but it is quite possible that steamboats loaded cotton from landings on the Red and Sabine Rivers within Harrison County.

6.  The anti-Reconstruction whites managed to take control of Harrison County in 1880 on what "technicality"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_County,_Texas  "In 1880, the Citizen's Party of Harrison County, amid charges of fraud and coercion, gained control of elected positions in the county government after winning on a technicality, which involved hiding a key ballot box.[1] They retained such control of the county into the 1950s, aided by the state's disenfranchisement of blacks at the turn of the century."

7.  What distinction does the Marshall US Post Office have?

It is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Now for something that is NOT in the history books.  The Industrial Revolution began when steam-powered machinery started to be used for spinning and weaving of *cotton* cloth.  In the first half of the 19th Century, 7/8 of all cotton in the world was grown in the Southern US.  That is, the Industrial Revolution was powered not just by steam but also by slavery in the United States.  Think about it.

- Jim Landau


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End of ADS-L Digest - 2 Sep 2019 to 3 Sep 2019 (#2019-229)
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Netscape.  Just the Net You Need.

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org