Governor Parson is making a new place in Missouri history for himself with each appointment of someone to an otherwise elective office at the top level of state government.   By the time he appoints a new state treasurer, he will have appointed three of the remaining top five state government officials and four of the top six jobs will be filled with people who were  not chosen by a public vote to fill those offices: governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, treasurer.

But this is not the first time most top state offices have been filled by people not elected to those positions. But the only other time involved war/

As Missouri was being sucked into the Civil War, pro-South Governor Claiborne F. Jackson called a convention of 99 men to decide if Missouri should join the confederacy.  He was shocked to find that not a single secessionist was elected.  When he fled the capitol in the face of advancing Union troops in June, 1861, twenty members of the convention went with him.

The executive committee of the Convention of 99 met in Jefferson City in late July and called for remaining members of the convention to reassemble.  On July 30 the remaining convention members declared all existing state offices vacant.  It then installed former Missouri Supreme Court Judge Hamilton Gamble as the provisional governor and appointed other Union loyalists to other state offices.  All seats in the legislature were declared vacant and the convention members became the acting government.  The constitutional propriety of all of these actions has been a matter of speculation from that time to this but as historian Duane Meyer, the author of the standard Missouri history book used for decades has noted, when the U. S. Army is present to make sure the actions of the governing group are carried out, the niceties of the law or the constitution are secondary. Meyer wrote that the state convention

obviously …had no authority to take such actions (as vacating offices), since Governor Jackson was the popularly-elected chief of state. However, in the time of war, legality is frequently supplanted by expediency, and in so acting, these Missouri politicians established an illegal provisional government to fill the breach left by the secessionist exiles…In retrospect, we must admit that the actions of the state convention were unprecedented, brash, and illegal. However, since federal troops in Missouri upheld the actions of the convention, no one could argue.

Former Congressman Willard P. Hall of St. Joseph was appointed Lt. Governor and succeeded Gamble when he died at the end of 1864.  The office, incidentally, remained vacant until Lt. Governor George Smith was elected in the election of 1865.  Former Congressman Mordecai Oliver of Richmond became Secretary of State until ‘65’s elections.  When Treasurer Alfred W. Morrison refused to take a loyalty oath after being caught by federal troops while he was fleeing with thousands of state dollars in his pockets, he was replaced by artist George Caleb Bingham.  When Attorney General J. Proctor Knott refused to take the loyalty oath he was replaced by Aikman Welch of Johnson County.

William S. Moseley of New Madrid County took the loyalty oath and remained as state auditor.

So during the Civil War when the remains of the Convention of 99 replaced the legislature, FIVE  of  our six state officers were not elected by the people to their positions.

We’re waiting for the Missouri Supreme Court to rule on whether Mike Kehoe can continue to occupy the Lt. Governor’s office and Eric Schmitt won’t be the new Attorney General until January.  But it appears Governor Parson will be remembered as the governor who appointed three top state leaders and this will be a time when four state leaders are serving in offices they were not elected to fill.

The nice thing about the current situation is that it hasn’t taken a war to create it.