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It had been impossible to decide the slavery question when the Territory of Missouri was created, as was done for the land north of the Ohio, because it extended over so many degrees of latitude, covering land both favourable and hostile by climate to the system. It was thought that about one-fifth of the population was composed of slaves in 1820; but they were mostly in Arkansas Territory.
This division had been formed in 1866, with a view to controlling the Indians west of the Missouri River, they having become very restless and troublesome because of the building of the Pacific railroads through their hunting-grounds, and the encroachments of pioneers, who began settling in middle and western Kansas and eastern Colorado immediately after the war.
In the autumn the Seventh Kansas was again ordered to the front, and at the request of its officers Will was detailed for duty with his old regiment. General Smith's orders were that he should go to Nashville. Rosecrans was then in command of the Union forces in Missouri.
He says: "To do so will break down the Democratic party at the North, and seriously endanger the interests and peace of Missouri and Kansas, if not of the whole Union." Judge Tutt, of St. Joseph, Mo., had said to the South Carolinians: "I was born in Virginia, and have lived forty years in Missouri.
Indiana, with two hundred and seventy-nine posts, and thirty thousand membership, had become utterly disorganized; Iowa, with one hundred and forty-four posts, had ceased to have a recognized existence; the thirty posts in Kansas had dwindled to nine; Minnesota had shrunk from twenty-five to two posts; the one hundred and twenty-nine posts in Missouri had no department existence; in Wisconsin, of seventy-nine, less than a dozen were left, and in Pennsylvania, one hundred and forty-three out of two hundred and twenty-four had been disbanded.
The outraged reply of her governor went back, never would she furnish troops to invade her sister states. Little did Governor Jackson foresee that Missouri was to stand fifth of all the Union in the number of men she was to give. To her was credited in the end even more men than stanch Massachusetts. The noise of preparation was in the city in the land.
From Batesville to the southern Missouri border, the road continues for a hundred miles through a dreary solitude of rocky mountains and pine forests, full of snakes and a variety of game, but without the smallest vestige of civilization. There is not a single blade of grass to be found, except in the hollows, and these are too swampy for a horse to venture upon.
At the Battle of Nashville it was General Smith, with the right wing of the Sixteenth Corps, and the troops of the Department of the Missouri, that turned the left flank of Hood's Army, and was practically in his rear when stopped; and I have heard many officers who were there say that if he had been let alone he would have captured or destroyed that wing of the Army.
It traversed in a fair line the vast land of Texas, curled over the Indian Nations, over Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Montana, and bent in wide overlapping circles as far west as Utah and Nevada; as far east as Missouri, Iowa, even Illinois; and as far north as the British possessions.
In this lower bed there are found rude implements of stone, ornaments made of gold, and bits of broken pottery. Again, if we turn to the northern part of the continent we find remains of the same kind, chipped implements of stone and broken fragments of quartz buried in the drift of the Mississippi and Missouri valleys.
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