The notion of St. Louis as the new capital got another life in July 1869, when Chicago Tribune editor Joseph Medill published an editorial supporting the idea. Although the two cities were rivals in some respects, Medill believed that shifting the nation’s center of gravity west would benefit Chicago, too.
“Instead of the Potomac, the capital would overlook the Mississippi, so appropriately expressive of the broader tide, the deeper flow, the longer current, and the resistless force our national development has attained since that early day when the tabernacle of the government was set up amidst the solitudes of the Potomac," he wrote.
Local St. Louis-boosters promoted the idea enough to prompt land speculation around the Jefferson Barracks area, a former U.S. Army training post south of the central city, which was considered the most likely site for the federal buildings. Former congressman Henry T. Blow even offered to donate 500 acres of land for the Capitol grounds, as long as he could also build housing for federal employees nearby.
Beyond local advocacy, moving the capital rode a wave of interest among Republicans uninterested in their political allies’ embrace of the Radical Reconstruction vision of a multiracial democracy. These politicians, Arenson says, “said enough has been done for ex-slaves and wanted the country to get back to promoting the interests of white Americans.” These included Joseph Pulitzer, who, before starting his career as a newspaper publisher, served as a Missouri state representative, and German immigrant Carl Schurz, who became a U.S. senator in 1869.
Schurtz went on to become secretary of the Interior, promoting the elimination of Native American nations and the integration of Indigenous peoples into the U.S. mainstream. Johnson says that’s one indication of the way the effort to move the capital was tied to a broader imperial project. Many St. Louis boosters hoped to channel the nation’s energies into the settlement of, and extraction of resources from, the West.
“In a way it’s in the West that the North and South—the white North and the white South—are reconciled after the war,” he says. “At the expense of African Americans and Native Americans.”
In October of 1869, Reavis, Blow and other supporters of the capital removal cause hosted a national convention. Per History Net, delegates arrived from 17 states and territories. They declared their opposition to federal spending on improvements in Washington and declared that “the convenient, natural and inevitable place for the capital of the republic is in the heart of the valley, where, the center of population, wealth and power is inevitably gravitating…”