John S. Marmaduke

John Sappington Marmaduke (March 14, 1833 – December 28, 1887) was an American politician and soldier. He was the 25th governor of Missouri from 1885 until his death in 1887. During the American Civil War, he was a senior officer of the Confederate States Army who commanded cavalry in the Trans-Mississippi Theater.

On September 6, 1863, Marmaduke killed a Confederate brigadier general, Lucius M. Walker, in a duel. Confederate Major General Sterling Price ordered Marmaduke's arrest but suspended the order because of the impending U.S. advance on Little Rock, Arkansas. Marmaduke never faced a court martial for the duel.

Early life and education

Marmaduke was born on March 14, 1833, in Saline County, Missouri, the second son of ten children born to Lavinia ( Sappington) and Meredith Miles Marmaduke (1791–1864). His father was the 8th governor of Missouri, succeeding to the office after the suicide of his predecessor. A successful planter, he held numerous enslaved African Americans as workers on the plantation. The family was quite political, and Marmaduke's great-grandfather, John Breathitt, had been the governor of Kentucky from 1832 to 1834, dying in office.

Marmaduke attended Chapel Hill Academy in Lafayette County, Missouri, and Masonic College in Lexington, Missouri, before attending Yale University for two years and then Harvard University for another year. He was a second lieutenant in the 1st United States Mounted Riflemen, before being transferred to the 2nd United States Cavalry under Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston. Marmaduke later served in the Utah War and was posted to Camp Floyd, Utah, in 1858–1860. Marmaduke was wounded in action at the Battle of Shiloh as colonel of the 3rd Confederate Regiment, incapacitating him for several months.

In November 1862, the C.S. War Department confirmed Marmaduke's promotion to brigadier-general. His first battle as a brigade commander was at the Battle of Prairie Grove. In April 1863, he left Arkansas with 5,000 men and ten artillery pieces and entered U.S.-held Missouri. However, he was repulsed at the Battle of Cape Girardeau and forced to return to Helena, Arkansas. Controversy soon followed. In September 1863, he accused his immediate superior officer, Brigadier-General Lucius M. Walker, of cowardice in action for not being present with his men on the battlefield. Walker, slighted by the insult, challenged Marmaduke to a duel, which resulted in Walker's death on September 6, 1863. Marmaduke decided to enter politics but lost the 1880 Democratic nomination for governor to the former U.S. general Thomas Theodore Crittenden, who had strong support and financial backing from the railroads. Undeterred, he ran again for governor four years later, when public opinion had changed, and railroad reform and regulation became more in vogue. Marmaduke conducted a campaign that highlighted his Confederate service, emphasized abuses of Missourians by U.S. soldiers during the Civil War, celebrated the activities of pro-Confederate "partisan guerrillas" such as William Clarke Quantrill, and claimed that the Republican Party in Missouri was a tool of "carpetbaggers" to oppress "native" Missourians. He was elected on a platform officially focused on cooperation between former Unionists and Confederates, promising an agenda to produce a "New Missouri". He settled potentially crippling railroad strikes in 1885 and 1886. The following year, Marmaduke pushed laws through the state legislature that finally began regulating the state's railway industry. He also dramatically boosted the state's funding of public schools, with nearly a third of the annual budget allocated to education.

Marmaduke never married, and his two nieces were hostesses at the governor's mansion. Like his great-grandfather, he died while governor. He contracted pneumonia late in 1887 and died in Jefferson City, Missouri, where he was buried in Woodland Cemetery.