Sterling Price; portrait of a Southerner by Robert E. Shalhope

Whether that was lucky for the state is for others to decide, although I certainly have my own opinion.īut also I confess that my conception of the basic structure of the novel is shifting, too. When he was lucky his fortunes, and those of the state of Missouri, rose when his luck ran out he fell, heedless of, and disavowing any responsibility for, the ruination that littered his wake.

Sterling Price was all about Sterling Price and no one else. But on closer inspection in the present, as in the 1860s, we discover occasionally that presumed philanthropic impulse is sometimes simply absent.

I see lingering bits of him in the present, peering out gluttonously from behind the pig-eyes of the privileged occupying positions of power, they whose only allegiance is to advancing their own status at the expense of all the subordinates and underlings who are depending on them for a certain minimum degree of wisdom and guidance. However, the more I’ve read and learned about him, and the deeper I’ve read between the lines, the more I’ve come to despise Price. Although Price fought for the rebels and Old Tom for the Federals, I’d long hoped to learn to admire Price. Louis, Mo., Septeminterment in Bellefontaine Cemetery.Price figures prominently in the Missouri Civil War saga, and in a few decades preceding, and a synchronism entangles his life and times with those of one of the characters of Memphis Blues Again, Old Tom, as well as his distant descendant, Max Bainbridge as such, coming to terms with Price is relevant to the novel’s conception and construction. member of the State house of representatives 1840-1844 and served as speaker elected as a Democrat to the Twenty-ninth Congress and served from March 4, 1845, to August 12, 1846, when he resigned to participate in the Mexican War appointed colonel of the Second Regiment, Missouri Infantry, Augpromoted to brigadier general of Volunteers July 20, 1847, and was honorably discharged Novemreturned to Missouri and engaged in agricultural pursuits on the Bowling Green prairie Governor of Missouri 1853-1857 State bank commissioner 1857-1861 elected presiding officer, Missouri State convention, Februduring the Civil War served in the Confederate Army as a major general after the war went to Mexico but later returned to Missouri died in St. PRICE, Sterling, a Representative from Missouri was born near Farmville, Prince Edward County, Va., on Septemcompleted preparatory studies and attended Hampden-Sidney College, Virginia studied law was admitted to the bar and practiced moved to Fayette and later to Keytesville, Mo.

Sterling Price; portrait of a Southerner by Robert E. Shalhope