Marshall, Texas,
Capital of Missouri

Strange things happen in wars. People and governments are displaced and new alliances are formed. Greyhairs will recall that during World War II most of the governments of Europe moved their operations to London because Adolph Hitler's Whermacht had chased them from their usual capitals. In England they pretended to be the official government of their country even though the reality was otherwise.

That gives a pretty good idea about how Marshall, Texas, the seat of government for Harrison County, also came to be the capital of Missouri during the American Civil War.

Missouri became a state in 1820, and its act of admission was one of the wedges of separation that produced secession and civil war forty years later. Missouri Territory, located in the Louisiana Purchase, was mostly settled by Southerners who wanted their state to have legalized slavery. Abolitionists opposed the admission of any new state that permitted slavery and particularly did not want to set a precedent for the rest of the Louisiana Territory.

The result was the Missouri Compromise: Missouri entered the Union as a slave state and Maine was separated from Massachusetts and admitted as a free state, maintaining the balance in the Senate between slave and free states, and slavery was prohibited elsewhere in the Purchase north of 36 degrees, 30 minutes, north latitude.

When the election of 1860 helped produce secession, eleven states organized the Confederacy and the Civil War began. Governor Claiborne F. Jackson and Lt. Gov. Thomas Reynolds wanted to add Missouri to the Confederacy but Union troops prevented the legislature from enacting the ordinance of secession.

Jackson, Reynolds, and other Confederate sympathizers fled to the southwestern part of Missouri and claimed that they remained the only elected government of the state despite the installation of a government that favored the Union in the old state capital.

Military reverses for the Confederates forced Jackson and Reynolds to move on to Arkansas, where they headquartered their version of Missouri's state government in Camden and then in Arkadelphia. Jackson died in Little Rock in 1863, and Reynolds claimed that he was now governor. Reynolds fled Arkansas just before the fall of Little Rock. He made his way to Marshall and occupied the home of Texas Supreme Court Justice Asa Willie and another building located across the street for an office. Since Reynolds had the official state seal of Missouri with him, he stamped official documents for his state in Marshall until Texas also surrendered to those "overwhelming numbers and resources" that brought all the states of the Confederacy back into the Federal Union. As long as we are pretending, did you know that Nacogdoches was once the capital of Mexico?