Politics
A Jacksonian Democrat as well as a friend and supporter of Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Meredith Marmaduke served as Saline County surveyor and county judge before being elected Lieutenant Governor of Missouri in 1840. His time in that role was relatively uneventful until the morning of February 9, 1844. It was on that day Governor Thomas Reynolds committed suicide. Assuming office in largely a caretaker for the final ten months remaining in the Governors term, nonetheless Marmaduke set the stage for major changes in the treatment of the mentally ill. In one of his final messages to the state legislature he strongly urged them to establish, in the vernacular of the time, a lunatic asylum for the housing and treatment of those with mental illness. One of his other acts as Governor likely cost him a chance to win election to the office in his own right. Marmaduke, himself a slaveholder, refused to pardon three abolitionists who had helped escaped slaves. Angered by is refusal, Missouri Democratic Party leaders bypassed Marmaduke as their candidate in the 1844 election and instead chose the eventual winner, John C. Edwards.
Though out of office, Marmaduke kept his hand in state affairs the next year, serving as Saline County delegate to the Missouri Constitutional Convention. He would make an unsuccessful bid for Governor again in 1848. In 1854, became president of the State Agricultural Society and of the district fair association, originator the first State Fair in Missouri.
Read more about this topic: Meredith Miles Marmaduke
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