M. M. Marmaduke (1791-1864)
Governor in 1844, he was a member of the Sappington family and father of another Missouri Governor.
Meredith Miles Marmaduke was born in Westmoreland County, Virginia, educated in public schools, and as very young man commissioned as colonel of a regiment in the War of 1812. After the war he was appointed United States marshal and later elected clerk of the circuit court. He moved to Missouri in 1821, settling near Arrow Rock, where he became a successful farmer and married Lavinia Sappington, Dr. John Sappington's daughter. [Sappington-Marmaduke Family Papers, Missouri Historical Society Archives]
Marmaduke was a merchant and traded on the Santa Fe route. His party of 81 men, 25 wagons and 156 horses and mules set out from Old Franklin, Missouri on May 15, 1824. Marmaduke kept a journal of the expedition, remarking that at Cimarron Creek on the Fourth of July that the water was bad and the only food wild game. [Dolbee, The Fourth of July in Early Kansas,119]
Marmaduke served as Saline County surveyor, laying out the town of New Philadelphia which later became Arrow Rock. [Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery, 11] He was elected county (administrative) judge, and in 1840, lieutenant governor of Missouri . He became governor when Governor Thomas Reynolds committed suicide in 1844. Marmaduke was a member of the 1845 Missouri Constitutional Convention and in 1854, became president of the State Agricultural Society. He was an important member of the "Central Clique" and a "hard money" Democrat. [McCandless, History of Missouri, 236]
During the Civil War Marmaduke was a Union supporter, though two sons fought for the confederacy. His son, Confederate General John Sappington Marmaduke, was later Governor of Missouri.
