Missouri Germans Consortium

Arnold Krekel was born in Germany in 1815, and came to Missouri in 1832. On January 11, 1865, he would serve as President of Missouri’s Constitutional Convention (often referred to as Drake’s Convention) which abolished it in Missouri forever. Germans had been fighting to end slavery since their arrival in 1830s. They were radical abolitionists, served as Officers in the U.S. Colored Troops and were often involved in the Underground Railroad.

Arnold Krekel had emigrated with his family, as a young seventeen year old, where his family settled at Dutzow, Missouri. Near the border of St. Charles and Warren County,  and the farm of Gottfried Duden. The young man worked to save his money, and moved to the town of St. Charles where he attended the  St. Charles College and studied law. He worked as a surveyor and became a Justice of the Peace as well. By 1844 he had graduated the law bar and opened his own office. He soon became the St. Charles County and city attorney from 1846 to 1850. Elected to the Missouri House of Representatives in 1852, he was editor of the St. Charles German newspaper, Der Demokrat. This would serve as his voice as one of the many German Abolitionists from 1850 until 1864, when the Civil War began. Krekel served in the Union Army, as a Lt. Colonel in a regiment of Missouri volunteers.

When the Civil War began, Missouri’s plans for gradual emancipation infuriated the Radical Republicans, who wanted slavery abolished immediately. They took their grievances to Lincoln, who refused at that time, to take sides in Missouri’s politics, which infuriated them even more. Missouri had begun as a slave state in 1821. Provisional Governor Hamilton R. Gamble offered to resign, but the First Constitutional Convention would not accept it. Gamble died in office on 31 January 1864. Missouri’s radicals arranged for elections and for a new Constitutional Convention in November 1864, when they elected Thomas C. Fletcher Missouri governor.

Constitutional Convention of 1865

Arnold Krekel, was elected President of the new Constitutional Convention that met in the Mercantile Library in St. Louis on January 6, 1865. On January 11, 1865 the convention, by a 60 to 4 vote, abolished slavery in the state with no compensation for slave owners. A month later the convention also adopted the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution to abolish slavery throughout the U.S..

On March 6, 1865, Krekel was nominated by President Lincoln to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri, and confirmed on March 9, 1865. Krekel later taught law at the University of Missouri Law School in Columbia from 1872 to 1875, and continued to as a Judge for the Court until his retirement on June 9, 1888.

Missouri’s Abolition Day – January 11, 1865

For more of Arnold Krekel’s life see Arnold Krekel, German Abolitionist