A while back, I saw a woman I know giving money to a girl to go get lunch for both of them.
As she handed over some cash, the woman said, “I don’t care where you go, just make sure to get some tea.”
The younger one then asked, “sweet or unsweet?”
I couldn’t help but take notice of the woman’s answer: “Sweet, honey, you’re in the South.”
Prior to setting up camp here in Texas County in late 2006, my wife and I lived for about seven years in the small town of Cleveland in the Northeast Georgia mountains, a place that’s definitely 100-percent Southern. Tea sweetness notwithstanding, I’m not at all sure people there would consider Missouri to be in “the South.”
To be sure, the Show-Me State is north of most Southern states and west of a couple. But then again, the Missouri Compromise of 1820 gave the then proposed state pro-slavery status in the young United States.
For the record, while the Mason-Dixon Line is widely recognized as a North-South boundary, it’s really only a line between Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and West Virginia that surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon created in the 1760s to settle a boundary dispute between British colonies.
So just what is Missouri, Northern or Southern?
Several years ago, a man came into the Herald office to take care of some business, and he proceeded to talk about a large Union fort that during Civil War days was located where Houston now sits as a means of protecting a railhead in the Rolla area from Confederate advances. The man, who obviously knew what he was talking about, said as many as 6,000 soldiers and close to 2,000 horses once lived at the installation.
He also described how he possessed several pieces of physical evidence of the fort’s existence (such as tools and eating utensils), and was sure of the location of sleeping quarters, stables and other portions of the facility based on where he had found particular objects.
But that fort, and others like it, by no means designated Missouri as an entirely Union state during the war. History bears out that it was a rather unique “border state” that provided men and supplies to both sides. So divided was the state’s populace, that it literally had separate governments representing each side, and endured an unprecedented intrastate war within the larger national war, as neighbors fought neighbors, and even brothers fought brothers.
Having been originally settled by slave-holding Southerners coming up the Mississippi River, Missouri even entered the U.S. as a slave state in 1821. But well before the Civil War began, the state’s population became weighted in a more non-slave-holding direction, as Northerners and European immigrants poured in.
So basically, what began one way swung the other way due to popular demand.
I’d say it could be argued that the question of whether Missouri is a Northern or Southern state has no definitive answer, and examples of its unique dual identity persist to this day. One of the more interesting examples is the fact that University of Missouri sports teams compete in the Southeastern Conference – a league laden with Deep South institutions – after the school left what was then the more Midwest-oriented Big 12 in 2012.
Yep, as a place with plenty of both Southern and Northern roots and heritage, I’m not so sure it even makes sense to slap a label on Missouri. We who live here might as well decide for ourselves whether we want to be affiliated with the North or South – or east or west, for that matter.
Anyway, here’s a possible answer to the big question: Missouri is just Missouri. It’s a place with influence from everywhere, but is similar to nowhere. It’s the Gateway to the West, and not that many years ago harbored the geographical “center” of the United States’ population.
I feel like it’s safe to say that Missouri simply is what it is. And I, for one, think that’s pretty cool.