Blair, Jr., Francis P.

Born: 1821-02-19 Lexington, Kentucky

Died: 1875-07-09 Saint Louis, Missouri

Francis (Frank) P. Blair, Jr., attorney and public official, was born into the prestigious political Blair family. The family moved to Washington, DC when Blair was a child, and he studied at private school there, later attending and being expelled from multiple institutions of learning, including several academies, Yale College, and the University of North Carolina. He completed his education at the College of New Jersey (Princeton) in 1841 but was delayed a year in receiving his degree due to a behavioral issue. Blair then studied law at Transylvania University and was admitted to the bar in Lexington in 1842. He moved to St. Louis, Missouri to join his brother, Montgomery, and worked in Thomas Hart Benton’s law office for three years. He traveled west just before the Mexican War and enlisted following the outbreak of hostilities. When Stephen W. Kearny seized what would later be the New Mexico Territory, he appointed Blair attorney general for the region.

Following the war, Blair settled again in St. Louis, where he continued to practice law and engaged with politics. At the time of the 1850 census, Blair owned three enslaved people, and ten years later he owned one enslaved woman. Despite being a slaveholder, Blair opposed the extension of slavery into the territories, and advocated this position in his short-lived newspaper, The Barnburner. He established the Free Soil Party in Missouri in 1848 and was the target of a failed assassination attempt by a pro-slavery advocate the following year. Blair was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives in 1852, and served for four years before being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he would serve intermittently until 1864. As sectionalism increased, Blair drifted away from his position as a free soil Democrat, and ultimately ran for reelection to the U.S. Congress as a Republican in 1860. That same year Blair attended the Republican National Convention and became a supporter of Abraham Lincoln. Blair continued to resist slavery’s expansion and also became a leading supporter of African colonization.

Following the secession crisis, Blair took measures to secure St. Louis’s place in the Union and began raising troops. He championed the radical Nathaniel Lyon as commander of federal forces in Missouri and commanded a brigade under Lyon for a time. Blair subsequently recommended John C. Fremont for command of the Western Department but was also integral in arranging Fremont’s removal from that position. Although still technically a sitting Congressman, Blair was appointed a brigadier general of volunteers in August of 1862 and, was promoted major general in November of that year. He returned to Congress briefly during the war but retained his command throughout and was present at Joseph E. Johnston’s surrender. Blair married Appoline Alexander in 1847, and the pair had eight children.

Christopher Phillips, “Blair, Francis Preston, Jr.,” American National Biography, ed. by John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 2:911-13; William E. Parrish, Frank Blair: Lincoln’s Conservative (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1998); William Ernest Smith, The Francis Preston Blair Family in Politics (New York: MacMillan, 1933); Kentucky, U.S., County Marriage Records, 1783-1965, 9 September 1847, Woodford County, (Lehi, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, 2016); U.S. Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States (1850), Ward 3, St. Louis, St. Louis County, MO, 386; U.S. Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States (1850), Slave Schedule, Ward 3, St. Louis, St. Louis County, MO, 529; U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census of the United States (1860), Ward 6, St. Louis, St. Louis County, MO, 140; U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census of the United States (1860), Slave Schedule, Ward 6, St. Louis, St. Louis County, MO, 2; Francis B. Heitman, Historical Register and Dictionary of the United States Army (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1903), 1:222; St. Louis Globe-Democrat (MO), 10 July 1875, 1:3-4; Gravestone, Bellefontaine Cemetery, St. Louis, MO.