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Did you know that Confederate Missourians actually moved to Shreveport and then Marshall, Texas, to establish the Confederate Capital of Missouri?
In Marshall, Texas, a historic marker on Boliver Street offers an explanation.
“On this site, a one-story frame house served as headquarters of the Civil War state government of Missouri in Exile.”
“In the midst of all these discordant and disagreeable elements, Shelby and his staff and escort arrived in Marshall, the town in which resided Governor Reynolds, and in which were arsenals, military manufactories, and large depots of supplies and ammunition…” we read in John Newman Edwards’ 1867 book Shelby and His Men: The War in the West.
Thomas Caute Reynolds, a native of South Carolina, became the lieutenant governor of Missouri before the Civil War. He was so dead-set on Missouri becoming a Confederate state that he ignored the fact that Missouri had sided with the Union.
After a failed attempt to get Missouri to secede from the Union, the Confederacy recognized Lt. Gov. Reynolds as the Confederate Governor of Missouri. But because Missouri was officially a Union state, Reynolds removed himself to Marshall, Texas. He was also a frequent visitor to Shreveport.
“T. C. Reynolds, confidential agent of the government in the trans Mississippi States, sends copy of a circular letter from Lieut. General Kirby Smith to the “representative men’ of Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, to meet him in convention, 15th August, at Marshall, Texas. Mr. Reynolds says he and others will exert themselves to prevent the meeting from taking a dangerous political direction,” wrote John Beauchamp Jones, a Clerk in the War Department of the Confederate States Government, in his 1866 memoir called A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary, published by J. B. Lippincott & Company.
Reynolds marched with Confederate Major General Sterling Price from Arkansas to Missouri in October of 1864. They intended to use military force to turn Missouri into a Confederate state, and Reynolds was along for a reason:
“When Shelby attacked the Iron Mountain Railroad, he had almost to force Governor Reynolds from the field, for the peril was imminent and near. Everyone counted surely on taking Jefferson City, and not to have a Governor convenient to inaugurate would certainly have been unfortunate,” wrote John N. Edwards in Shelby and His Men: The War in the West, printed by Miami Printing and Publishing Company in 1867.
The Confederates from Missouri who attacked Union-aligned Missouri failed in their objective to take control of Missouri. Reynolds was not inaugurated as Confederate officials had planned. And within a few months, squabbles erupted from within Confederate leadership.
Confederate Missouri Governor Thomas C. Reynolds wrote the following from Marshall, Texas on Dec. 17, 1864:
“Hearing of reports industriously circulated, charging Generals Marmaduke and Cabbell with drunkenness in the battles last October, near Independence and the Osage river, and putting on them the responsibility for disgraces and disasters which the almost unanimous opinion of the army at the time justly attributed to the glaring mismanagement and distressing mental and physical military incapacity of Major General Sterling Price, I deem it merely my duty, as executive of the State to which those captive officers have rendered important services, and of which the first named is a native, publicly and officially to brand those charges as base and baseless.”
Reynolds’ writing infuriated Price. In Dec. of 1864, Price’s response was published in the Texas Republican:
“In the Texas Republican, of the 23d of Dec, 1864, there appears a communication over the signature of one Thos. C. Reynolds, who pretends to be, and styles himself in it, the Governor of the State of Missouri. The communication purports to defend two gallant and distinguished officers against charges alleged to have to been made against them, but which I had never heard made by either officer of soldier. In reality, it was intended to be a violent and malignant attack upon myself, as the officer in command of the late expedition to Missouri. So far as the communication pays tribute to the gallantry displayed by the officers and soldiers engaged in that expedition, I heartily concur in it. So far as it related to myself, however, I pronounce it to be a tissue of falsehoods. //signed// Sterling Price”
On January 12, 1865, “Governor” Reynolds fired back at General Price from Marshall, Texas.
“General Price describes me as one who “pretends to be Governor of the State of Missouri.” The Federals takethe same view of my position; but he has the distinction of being the first man in our lines to publish his concurrence with them in it. As the Missouri executive recognized by the Confederate Government I have deemed it both my right and my duty officially to publish, in reference to the late campaign in that State, a statement of facts which are admitted to have shocked the public conscience. I reaffirm it. To the Confederate authorities it belongs to determine whether a truculent denial by the accused is, in their system, an acquittal, or whether they will take any action on it.”
When Price wrote his letter, he had not yet learned about General Sherman’s success in Georgia.
“The Trans-Missisispi Department is so separated from the States on the eastern side of the Mississippi that communication is suspended. Since the evacuation of Richmond the seat of Governor of the Confederate States has not been fixed, and it may be transferred to the western side of the Mississippi,” wrote Confederate General E. Kirby Smith from Shreveport, Louisiana, on May. 9, 1865.
Four days later, on May 13, two Confederate governors—Henry W. Allen of Louisiana and H. Flanagan of Arkansas—wrote a letter advising General E. Kirby Smith, commanding the Trans-Mississippi Department, to surrender so that peace may be restored to the country.
“At last all was over. The terms of surrender were published, and the troops from all quarters who had remained organized to the end marched toward Shreveport for the final dissolution,” we read in Edwards’ book Shelby and His Men.
Reynolds, Kirby Smith, Sterling Price, and hundreds of other Confederates from the Trans-Mississippi Department fled to Mexico after the Civil War ended with a Union victory. Reynolds later returned to the United States, and in 1887 he killed himself by jumping down an elevator shaft at the U.S. Customs House and Post Office in St. Louis, Missouri.
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