Appalachian Figures
From a Knox County river farm to the governor’s chair
On paper, Silas Woodson looks like a Midwestern politician. He practiced law in St Joseph, Missouri, served as a Union militia officer during the Civil War, and in 1873 became the first Democrat elected governor of Missouri after the war.
Look a little closer and the story runs straight through the hills of southeastern Kentucky.
Archival finding aids and genealogical accounts agree that Woodson was born in Knox County on 18 May 1819, near Barbourville, to Wade Netherland Woodson and Alice Chick. Local history of the upper Cumberland places him along the river above the mouth of Greasy Creek, on land associated with the McRobert family. A Bell County historian, writing about early settlers on that stretch of the Cumberland, notes that Silas Woodson farmed there, married Mary Jane McRobert, and later “emigrated to Missouri and became Governor of Missouri.”
Those scattered references, tucked into county histories and archival inventories, are the Appalachian starting point for a man who would help reshape law and politics hundreds of miles to the west.
Barbourville’s young lawyer
By the late 1830s Woodson had turned from farm work to the law. Missouri reference works and his son’s later biographical sketch agree that he read law in Kentucky, was admitted to the bar around 1840, and quickly built a reputation as a trial lawyer.
Barbourville in those years was a small but important courthouse town along the Wilderness Road. Later scholarship on Supreme Court justice Samuel F. Miller reconstructs its legal community and notes that Miller and Woodson practiced together there in the 1840s. Their partnership linked two Knox County lawyers who would both eventually serve as state level figures, Miller on the United States Supreme Court and Woodson in Missouri politics.
Kentucky records summarized in modern biographical sketches show that Woodson entered public life early. He won election to the Kentucky General Assembly at just twenty three. He also served as circuit attorney in the 1840s, prosecuting cases on the old mountain circuits where road conditions and local feuds often shaped what justice looked like on the ground.
Family histories add quieter details. The Woodson genealogy compiled by Henry Morton Woodson traces Silas’s parentage, his 1842 marriage to Mary Jane McRobert, and the death of that first wife in 1845, when she was still a teenager. Those entries, though written decades later, preserve the memory of a young Barbourville lawyer whose personal life was marked early by loss.
The lone emancipation voice in the 1849 Kentucky convention
If Silas Woodson had done nothing more than serve in Kentucky’s 1849 constitutional convention, he would still matter in Appalachian history.
The published Debates and Proceedings of the Convention for the Revision of the Constitution of Kentucky record Woodson as a delegate from Knox County. There he took positions that set him apart from nearly all of his colleagues. Legal historian M. J. Ellis, in a close reading of the convention, notes that Woodson pressed for elected county attorneys as part of a broader effort to make local prosecutors answerable to voters rather than to entrenched courthouse elites.
Even more striking was his stance on slavery. Victor B. Howard’s study of emancipation politics in Kentucky identifies Woodson as “the most outspoken opponent of slavery” in the convention, the one delegate who pressed for a plan of gradual emancipation. In the convention debates themselves he argued that continued reliance on slave labor harmed Kentucky’s reputation, slowed economic development, and violated principles of natural right that he believed should guide a Christian commonwealth.
He did not win. The 1850 constitution that emerged from the convention entrenched slavery more firmly instead of weakening it. Howard and later scholars point out that Knox County’s decision to send a pro emancipation delegate was unusual in a slave state and suggests that antislavery sentiment in parts of the Appalachian uplands was stronger than the convention vote tally would make it appear.
For Woodson personally, the experience marked a turning point. After another term in the legislature in the early 1850s, his political prospects in proslavery Kentucky were limited. Within a few years he headed west.
Leaving the Cumberland for the Missouri River
In 1854, Woodson moved to St Joseph, Missouri, a river town at the edge of the Great Plains. The Missouri Office of Administration’s biographical sketch describes him arriving with solid credentials as both lawyer and politician and quickly establishing a law firm in a community transformed by the Hannibal and St Joseph Railroad and by land speculation tied to western migration.
St Joseph was not as culturally distant from Knox County as a map might suggest. Many migrants to northwest Missouri came from Kentucky and other border states. Local St Joseph histories note that Woodson formed partnerships with lawyers who, like him, had roots in the hill country.
Once in Missouri he resumed public service. By 1860 he had been elected judge of the Twelfth Judicial Circuit based in St Joseph. When the Civil War came, he sided firmly with the Union. According to the Hall of Governors biography, he reached the rank of colonel in the Missouri State Militia and served as inspector general.
In 1863 he took on a more controversial assignment as assistant provost marshal charged with helping enlist Black Missourians under General Order 135. That role placed a former emancipation advocate from the Kentucky mountains in the middle of a frontier state’s experiment with recruiting formerly enslaved men into the Union ranks.
President Abraham Lincoln even nominated him as chief justice of the Idaho Territorial Supreme Court in 1864. Senate records and Lincoln’s collected papers show that the nomination stalled, and Woodson ultimately declined the appointment. Instead he remained in Missouri, where law and politics were becoming increasingly entangled in the wake of war.
First postwar Democratic governor of Missouri
By the early 1870s Missouri politics were in flux. Radical Republican control had weakened, Liberal Republicans split from the party, and Democrats saw a chance to return to statewide power.
The Hall of Governors account describes a joint convention in Jefferson City in 1872 where Democrats and Liberal Republicans met in parallel sessions. As balloting deadlocked among several candidates, Woodson, serving as presiding officer, urged compromise. A Jasper County delegate then placed his name into nomination. Delegates, impressed by his plea for unity and his statewide reputation as a trial lawyer and judge, chose him as the fusion candidate for governor.
In the general election he defeated Republican Senator John B. Henderson and, in January 1873, took office as the twenty first governor of Missouri. It was the first time since before the war that a Democrat held the governor’s chair.
Schools, Black higher education, and a new constitution
One way to hear Woodson’s voice directly is through his official messages. The multi volume series Messages and Proclamations of the Governors of the State of Missouri reprints his inaugural address and annual communications to the legislature, along with a short biographical essay by his son C. R. Woodson.
In those messages he pushed three consistent themes.
First, he treated public education as central to the state’s future. In his inaugural address he defended the Democratic position on common schools and argued that public education was essential to the “perpetuity of our free institutions,” tying support for schools to the survival of republican government itself.
Second, he backed the expansion of higher education. The University of Missouri’s 1873 catalogue includes a Board of Visitors report addressed “To His Excellency Governor Silas Woodson,” describing the condition of the university in Columbia and recommending improvements. That report reflects a system in which the governor was expected to oversee and champion higher learning for white Missourians.
At the same time, Woodson sat on the governing board of Lincoln Institute in Jefferson City, the Black college founded by Black Civil War veterans. A history of Lincoln University notes that “Governor Silas Woodson” served on the board alongside other prominent Missourians and quotes President Allen’s description of Lincoln as Missouri’s effort to provide for the education of Black citizens as the University of Missouri did for whites.
Woodson’s messages do not read like radical manifestos for racial equality. They do, however, place him within a Reconstruction generation of border state leaders who accepted, at least in principle, the idea that the state had obligations to educate Black residents, even as segregated and unequal Black institutions received fewer resources.
Third, Woodson pressed for fiscal reform and constitutional revision. According to the Civil War resources guide at the Missouri State Archives, his gubernatorial papers include correspondence on state debt, pardons, and the 1875 state constitution. He helped shepherd the enabling legislation that allowed voters to call a new constitutional convention. The result was the conservative 1875 constitution, which, among other changes, lengthened the governor’s term to four years and restructured the balance of power among branches of government.
The Pacific Railroad fight
The most dramatic controversy of Woodson’s administration centered on railroads and debt.
In the 1850s Missouri had lent its credit to the Pacific Railroad and other lines, issuing state bonds to help finance construction. After the Civil War the Pacific Railroad struggled with payments and argued that wartime devastation excused its failure to meet obligations.
As governor, Woodson took a harder line. Acting under state statutes that treated the bonds as secured by a lien on the railroad’s property, he prepared to advertise and sell the Pacific Railroad at public auction for nonpayment. Trustees for the bondholders, led by Uriel A. Murdock and Luther C. Clark, sought an injunction in federal court to stop the sale.
The case eventually reached the United States Supreme Court as Woodson v. Murdock, 89 U.S. 351 (1874). The Court’s opinion recounted the state’s original aid acts and the railroad’s subsequent financial troubles, then held that the particular sale Woodson proposed was not authorized in the way he claimed, effectively siding with the bondholders and the company.
A printed pamphlet of Judge John Dillon’s circuit court opinion in the related case of Murdock and Clark v. Woodson, Governor, and others, preserved today in the Huntington Library, provides more detail on the legal arguments and the governor’s attempt to enforce the lien.
For Appalachian readers, the Pacific Railroad fight illustrates how a lawyer from Barbourville brought his courthouse experience with debt, land, and local politics into a much larger struggle over railroad capitalism and state finance on the western border.
Courts, family losses, and a grave at Mount Mora
Woodson served only a single two year term. The 1865 Missouri constitution limited governors to one term of that length, and by the time the 1875 constitution returned the office to a four year term, he was out of office.
He did not retire quietly. In 1880 he was elected to a four year term as a circuit judge and later to the bench of the Buchanan County Criminal Court, where he drew on decades of trial work.
His personal life, meanwhile, was marked by both repeated grief and religious searching. The Hall of Governors biography notes that his first wife died young, his son Miller died in 1865 at twenty one, and his second wife died shortly afterward. In 1866 he married Virginia Juliet Lard, daughter of Disciples of Christ leader Moses E. Lard, and together they had three children.
In 1895 Woodson suffered a cerebral hemorrhage that ended his active career. That summer he converted to Catholicism. He died on 9 October 1896 and was buried in Mount Mora Cemetery in St Joseph, where his grave marker records his name, years of birth and death, and his service as governor.
For a man born on a Knox County river farm, it was a long road to an ornate nineteenth century cemetery in a Missouri railroad town.
Why Silas Woodson’s story matters in Appalachia
Silas Woodson rarely appears in survey histories of Appalachia. To most Missouri readers he is a Reconstruction era governor sandwiched between more famous figures, remembered for cutting state debt and for failing to stop the James brothers’ robberies.
From an Appalachian perspective, his story looks very different.
First, Woodson reminds us that southeastern Kentucky produced some of the most vocal antislavery voices in the border South. As a Knox County delegate in 1849 he stood nearly alone in arguing for gradual emancipation in a proslavery convention. That stance helps explain why emancipation debates in Kentucky and the mountain South cannot be reduced to a simple free state versus slave state binary.
Second, his life illustrates how mountain born professionals carried regional values and conflicts into other states. When he left the Cumberland for the Missouri River, he took with him experience as a courthouse lawyer, a county prosecutor, and a critic of slavery. Those experiences shaped his work recruiting Black soldiers, overseeing public schools, and challenging railroad corporations as governor.
Third, Woodson’s role in Black higher education links Appalachian Kentucky to the history of Lincoln University, the historically Black institution in Jefferson City founded by Civil War veterans. As a member of its governing board, he participated in shaping what one president called Missouri’s effort to provide for Black education inside the state rather than sending students elsewhere.
Finally, his story offers local historians and genealogists in eastern Kentucky a bridge to collections far from home. The Missouri State Archives’ finding aid for the Office of Governor Silas B. Woodson, the multi volume Messages and Proclamations, and the papers of Lincoln University together preserve traces of an Appalachian lawyer who left Knox County but never entirely left behind the questions about law, slavery, and public schooling that he first wrestled with in a Barbourville courtroom.
For AppalachianHistorian.org, following Woodson from the banks of the Cumberland to Mount Mora Cemetery is a reminder that mountain stories do not stop at the ridge line. They run along rivers, railroads, and court transcripts wherever people from the hills have carried them.
Sources and further reading
Office of Governor Silas B. Woodson, 1873 to 1875, Record Group 3.21, Missouri State Archives, Jefferson City, finding aid with biographical sketch, record descriptions, and references to genealogical works on the Woodson family.Missouri Secretary of State
Guide to Civil War Resources at the Missouri State Archives, Office of the Governor section, entry on Governor Silas Woodson outlining his term, gubernatorial correspondence, and references to African Americans and the 1875 Missouri constitution.Missouri Secretary of State
The Messages and Proclamations of the Governors of the State of Missouri, Volume V, State Historical Society of Missouri, 1924, containing Governor Silas Woodson’s inaugural address, annual messages, proclamations, and C. R. Woodson’s biographical essay.Missouri Secretary of State+1
“MU Catalogue, 1873,” University of Missouri, including the Board of Visitors report addressed to Governor Silas Woodson on the condition and needs of the university in Columbia.mospace.umsystem.edu
Richard Baxter Foster and others, The History of Lincoln University (Lincoln Institute), with passages noting “Governor Silas Woodson” as a member of the governing board and describing Lincoln as Missouri’s provision for Black higher education alongside the University of Missouri.Internet Archive+1
Woodson v. Murdock, 89 U.S. 351 (1874), United States Supreme Court Reports, opinion recounting Missouri’s bond aid to the Pacific Railroad and Governor Woodson’s attempt to sell the road under a state lien.Justia Law+1
John F. Dillon, State of Missouri vs. Pacific Railroad: Opinion by Judge Dillon in the case of Uriel A. Murdock and Luther C. Clark vs. Silas Woodson, Governor, H. Clay Ewing, Attorney General, et al., nineteenth century pamphlet preserved in the Huntington Library’s rare book collection.The Huntington+1
Victor B. Howard, Black Liberation in Kentucky: Emancipation and Freedom, 1862 to 1884, University Press of Kentucky, especially the chapter identifying Silas Woodson as the most outspoken opponent of slavery at the 1849 Kentucky constitutional convention.Missouri Office of Administration
M. J. Ellis, “The Origins of the Elected Prosecutor,” Yale Law Journal 121 (2012), using the Kentucky 1849 convention debates and Woodson’s statements as a case study of local democratic control over prosecutors.Missouri Secretary of State
Michael A. Ross, “Hill Country Doctor: The Early Life and Career of Samuel F. Miller in Kentucky, 1816 to 1849,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 71 (1973), reconstructing the Barbourville legal community and noting the law partnership between Miller and Silas Woodson.Wikipedia
H. H. Fuson, History of Bell County, Kentucky, Volume I, entries on the McRobert farm on the Cumberland River and the note that “Silas Woodson, who later became Governor of Missouri,” farmed there and married Mary Jane McRobert.Bell County Public Library District
Floyd C. Shoemaker, Missouri and Missourians, Volume II, and Switzler’s Illustrated History of Missouri, providing narrative accounts of Woodson’s election, administration, and role in Missouri’s postwar political realignment.Internet Archive+1
Missouri Office of Administration, “Silas Woodson (D),” Hall of Governors online entry, summarizing his Kentucky birth, relocation to St Joseph, Civil War service, governorship, later judicial career, family life, and death.Missouri Office of Administration
“Silas Woodson,” National Governors Association biographical entry and related reference works on American governors, giving a concise overview of his life, term dates, and major policies.Wikipedia