Tuesday, September 29, 2015

MISSOURI MUSINGS

I find it strange that Missouri is not classified as s "Southern" state by the author of an "Opelousas Louisiana Massacre" (posted yesterday) article given its bloody history! Not only did it lynch Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois and burn down his abolitionist newspaper in 1837, and outlaw black preachers and black literacy in 1847, and reject the bid for freedom of Dred and Harriet Scott, which produced the dreadful 1857, U.S. Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision written by Chief Justice Roger Taney that "blacks whether slave or free, had no rights that whites were bound to respect." But, there is more: Missouri, more famously, fought a Missouri -Kansas Border War which actually sparked the Civil War, with such freedom fighters as John Brown, James Montgomery, U.S. Senator James Lane, and others, over whether the status of Kansas! Would it be slave--like Missouri--or free!