Here's a lesson I'm sure you don't know

Posted on: January 5, 2018 at 16:29:00 CT

At the start of the Civil War, our governor wanted to secede, and called up the militia (pro-confederate). Everything pointed to Missouri seceding.

But how do you fight a war? You need money.

With the events unfolding, slave holding plantation in Missouri literally bet the farm. Mortgaging the property, with the belief the new pro-confederate government would pay it back.

Feds moved in and setup another governor and Missouri didn't secede.

At the end of the war, the confederate economy was crushed. The banks had worthless money and collapsed. That turned out to be good for southern plantation owners. They were able to keep the land and setup sharecropping.

Totally different story in Missouri. Those banks continued to use Union currency and never went out of business. And they wanted their money from all those plantations.

Missouri had the largest land foreclosures of any state. Missouri's slave population was mainly rural, but with the plantations going belly up, they all headed to the cities and no sharecropping.

Remember the John Wayne and Rock Hudson movie, "The Undefeated"? That actually did occur. Confederates moving to Mexico. Most of them were from Missouri. They had no homes to go back to.