Historic St. Louis: 250 Years Exploring New Frontiers

An 1820 Bank of Missouri $10 Note, signed
by president Auguste Chouteau. It portrays
Thomas Jefferson as a Roman emperor,
but with French St. Louis’s symbols of
commerce, rather than the president’s
preference for agriculture.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR’S COLLECTION.
18 percent of the delegates, including: David
Barton (who presided over the convention),
Virginian Edward Bates (the future first attorney
general), fur traders Pierre Chouteau, Jr.,
and Bernard Pratte, Alexander McNair
(the state’s first governor), General William
Rector (U.S. army surveyor), banker Thomas
Riddick, and John C. Sullivan (a justice of
the county court).
Eighteen years after the Louisiana Purchase,
Missouri entered the Union as the twentyfourth
state on August 10, 1821—the first
one located entirely west of the Mississippi
and also have a bilingual constitution in
French and English. The new state had a
population of 56,000 whites, mostly from
Virginia and Kentucky, and 10,000 black
slaves, representing 19 percent of the state’s
population and 15 percent of St. Louis’s.
Missouri would be the northernmost slave
state in the West—as mandated by the
Missouri Compromise of 1820—sharing a
southern border with Virginia and Kentucky
at a latitude of 36 degrees, 30 minutes, as
predicted by the Mitchell map of 1755.
But Virginians had compromised the
Bourbon culture of St. Louis long before
statehood, making an Indian-friendly city
into the capital of a white-dominated state
cleared of Native Americans. That cultural
victory was apparent when Missouri’s new
state capital and St. Louis’s latest army base
were both named for Jefferson in 1826, the
year he died. By mid-century, St. Louisans
universally praised the once-contentious
Louisiana Purchase, regarding it as a “Happy
Annexation,” without which, their city
“would be in everything at least a quarter
century behind where we are now.” Most of
the old French families were reconciled with
Americanization, widely praising Jefferson,
whose “pen gave freedom to the eastern half
of our republic, and his diplomacy united it
to the other half.” Today, Missouri has more
monuments honoring Jefferson, including his
original tombstone on the Mizzou campus,
than any state except Virginia.
The past of Virginia had become the future
of Missouri because, despite their different
religions, languages, laws, and cultures, the
French founders and American administrators
shared two traditional socioeconomic
goals: perpetuating race-based black slavery
and profiting from all natural resources in the
West. From 1804 to 1816, Virginians represented
the largest group of Anglo-Americans
H I S T O R I C S T . L O U I S
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