Marmaduke was born on March 14, 1833, in Saline County, Missouri, the second son of ten children.[1] His father, Meredith Miles Marmaduke (1791–1864), 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.[2] 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.[3]
Marmaduke was on duty in the New Mexico Territory in the spring of 1861 when he received news that several southern states had declared secession from the United States (Union). He returned home to Missouri to meet with his father, a strong Unionist. Afterward, Marmaduke resigned from the United States Army, effective April 1861. Pro-secession Missouri Governor Claiborne Fox Jackson, Marmaduke's uncle, soon appointed him as the colonel of the 1st Regiment of Rifles, a unit from Saline County, Missouri, in the Missouri State Guard.[4]
Governor Jackson left Jefferson City, Missouri, in June, along with State Guard commander Major-General Sterling Price, to recruit more troops. Marmaduke and his regiment met them at Boonville, Missouri. Within a short time, Price and Jackson left, leaving Marmaduke in charge of a small force of militia. Marmaduke's troops were not adequately prepared for combat, but Governor Jackson ordered him to stand against U.S. forces who had entered the state. U.S. Brigadier-GeneralNathaniel Lyon's 1,700 well-trained and equipped soldiers easily routed Marmaduke's untrained and poorly armed force at the Battle of Boonville on June 17, 1861. The skirmish was mockingly dubbed "the Boonville Races" by Unionists because Marmaduke's forces broke and ran after 20 minutes of battle.[3]
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.[7] 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.[8] 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.[8]
Marmaduke later commanded a cavalry division in the Trans-Mississippi Department, participating in the Red River Campaign. While commanding a mixed force of Confederate troops, including Native-American soldiers of the 1st, and 2nd Choctaw Regiments, he defeated a U.S. foraging detachment at the Battle of Poison Spring, Arkansas, on April 18, 1864. He was hailed in the Confederate press for what was publicized as a significant Confederate victory.
Marmaduke commanded a division in Major-General Sterling Price's Raid in September–October 1864 into Missouri, where Marmaduke was captured at the Battle of Mine Creek in Kansas (by Private James Dunlavy of the 3rd Iowa Cavalry).[8] While still a prisoner of war at Johnson's Island in Ohio, Marmaduke was promoted to major-general in March 1865. He was released after the war ended.[7] His younger brother, Henry Hungerford Marmaduke, who was in the Confederate States Navy, was captured and imprisoned on Johnson's Island. He later served the U.S. government in negotiations with South American nations. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Two other Marmaduke brothers died in the American Civil War.[9]
Later life and death
Marmaduke returned home to Missouri and settled in Carondelet, St. Louis. He worked briefly for an insurance company, whose ethics he found contrary to his own. He then edited an agricultural journal and publicly accused the railroads of discriminatory pricing against local farmers. The governor soon appointed Marmaduke to the state's first Rail Commission.[9] 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.[10] 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.[10]
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