Illustration by Daniel Elchert
If you don’t believe that the issue of local control of the St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners is a contentious one, take another look at what some of our local representatives have had to say in Jefferson City.
Rep. George Moore of St. Louis argued that it was “a monstrous act of tyranny and despotism” to have the governor of Missouri control the police board.
Dr. Randolph Doehn, a representative from St. Louis, said it “was nothing else but an odious and pernicious crusade against the rights and the welfare of the city of St. Louis.”
Gen. Sterling Price of Cole called state control of the police board “the most iniquitous and damning [measure] ever imposed on a free people.”
Rep. John Stevenson of St. Louis called it “an attempt to inflict an outrage of the most gross character” and “to persecute people for their political opinions.”
And Rep. V. Randolph of St. Charles told the House that state control of the police board was “an effort to disenfranchise and oppress the people of St. Louis because they were not sound on the Negro question.”
Say what?
This is but a sampling of the local outrage expressed in Jefferson City on March 25, 1861, as one angry man after another rose in opposition to the very first “Metropolitan Police Bill,” which established the system of state control of the local police department that has been inflicted upon St. Louis for some 149 years now and counting.
The quotations above, reported “by telegraph” in the Missouri Daily Democrat—forerunner to the late Globe-Democrat—offer the following fascinating insight: It turns out that one of the burning local issues of 2010 was a burning local issue of 1861.
It’s an argument that just won’t die.
Those who defend having the governor name four of the five members of the police board (the mayor being the fifth) have long maintained—with little or no public contradiction—that the reason for this structure was to insulate the police department from local politics. History disagrees.
This Civil War–era legislation was all about the Civil War.
“I think a lot of people don’t realize that St. Louis was generally a pro-Union city in the midst of a state that was Southern in its sympathies,” says Robert Archibald, president of the Missouri History Museum. “The St. Louis police department constituted the largest quasi-military organization in the state, and [the police bill] was a Civil War measure passed by people who wanted to control it as part of the Civil War.”
Archibald notes that Missouri Gov. Claiborne Jackson and the legislature were clearly supporters of the Confederacy and that they needed at the very least to neutralize the potential military power of the St. Louis police force. The Metropolitan Police Bill was all about state control of police and armaments, he says.
Jackson was elected governor in 1860, the same year Abraham Lincoln became president (without carrying Missouri, despite having carried St. Louis). The new governor had not publicly supported Secession during his campaign, but his inaugural address left little doubt as to where he stood:
“Missouri will not be found to shrink from the duty which her position upon the border imposes, her honor, her interests, and her sympathies point alike in one direction, and determine her to stand by the South,” Jackson said. The quote can be found in Good Order and Safety: A History of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, written by Allen E. Wagner, associate professor emeritus of criminology at the University of Missouri–St. Louis.
One of Jackson’s appointees to the first police board, Basil Wilson Duke, would later say “the Police Bill was in reality a war measure, adopted to enable our people to control St. Louis… I knew the meaning of the measure…and tried to carry it into action.” (This quote also is contained in Wagner’s book.)
It’s no wonder then that the issue aroused such fury in St. Louis, where the St. Louis City Council had voted to oppose state control of local police. But it was left to an outraged St. Louis delegation to capture the emotions of the day by going fairly berserk in Jefferson City.
This is how the Daily Democrat described the words of Rep. Stevenson, who had offered a number of amendments to the bill—almost all rejected—including one that would have let St. Louis voters choose the Police Board:
“It was one of the most infamous pieces of legislation ever attempted to be inflicted. Our revolutionary fathers threw off the yoke of Great Britain on the very grounds now pursued by this legislature toward St. Louis, which attempts to deprive the people of their right to representation—to appoint foreign officers to preside over them—to take away from them their rights to franchise, to pension hirelings as officers upon them, and to impose taxes to support them without that consent. This Legislature [will] yet see whether the spirit of American freemen has yet died out in the breasts of the citizens of St. Louis.”
Perhaps Mayor Francis Slay should adopt these remarks as he fights for local control of the police—likely with the same result—these 149 years later in Jefferson City. It wouldn’t hurt to have a little more “Take Your Boot Off My Head or I’ll Blast You With My Musket” in the genteel St. Louis message to outstate legislators.
Even some less-progressive representatives of 1861 took offense at the bodacious power-grab by Jackson and fellow Confederate sympathizers. For example, the man who had cited St. Louis not being “sound on the Negro question,” Rep. Randolph of St. Charles, hastened to point out that “he for one would never be a Republican, could not be one, but he viewed this bill as infringing on and usurping the rights of the people, as an act of persecution for opinion’s sake.”
Translation for the puzzled: Being a Republican in those days meant supporting the party of Lincoln, which meant—in today’s parlance—being something of a leftist on race relations. St. Charles was a little town in the country, not a suburb of St. Louis, and thus Randolph—no friend of the Negro, he—essentially gave great credibility to the notion that this was above all else an act of tyranny.
Yes, it was tyranny, not some wise plan by policy wonks to assure that politics not overrun the St. Louis police force. No, the legislature of 1861 wasn’t so inane that it thought having a politician hand-select a board would be the best way to keep it apolitical.
Instead, the legislature was actually so inane—and inhuman—that it wanted to keep an entire race of human beings in bondage (among other causes of the Confederacy). That’s why today, 149 years hence, Jefferson City politicians continue to stock the St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners.
This is a history lesson.
Possessing a cooler head, Archibald takes no public position today on the question of local control of the police board, and he cautions that neither side “should appeal to historical precedent as a way of justifying their opinion” on the subject.
“This was absolutely about the Civil War, and nothing more,” he says. “No state was as divided as Missouri in the war, and no state had bloodier conflicts. It was very personal here.”
I think it still is. But as one burdened neither with Archibald’s intellectual wattage nor his lack of bias, I think the history lesson from 1861 speaks volumes about the need for local control, not only of the Police Department, but of all St. Louis institutions. (The school board and cultural institutions come to mind.)
The wonderfully direct gentlemen of the era had it right: St. Louis was punished for its failure to be Southern enough for the rest of the state. In this particular case, that meant our hometown committed the sin of opposing slavery (albeit not unanimously).
Today, the issues are different, but not always less racial. And over and over again, St. Louis is scorned by outstate citizens and their representatives for lacking “real” American, down-home, country, rural, and otherwise backwoods values.
Archibald did offer one profound observation that deserves special consideration today.
“There continues to be a split between St. Louis and the rest of the state, and in historical terms, I suspect it has its roots in the Civil War,” Archibald says. “I think the lack of a close relationship stems more from the war than from the typical urban-rural split that you see in other states.”
The Civil War past is distant in Missouri, but not dead.
Against this historical backdrop, it’s really nothing less than amazing that Claiborne Jackson’s Confederacy-loving, slave-hating, power-seizing attack on St. Louis has withstood a century and a half of local resentment and crazily bad governance of the police department.
It’s amazing, but not just amazing.
It’s historic.
SLM co-owner Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
