Blow, Henry Taylor

Blow took an early interest in the emerging Free Soil movement in the late 1840s. Dred Scott was raised in the Blow family home as a child, and in 1846 Blow and other members of his family helped finance Scott's initial suit for freedom in the Missouri courts. Blow was elected as a Whig to the Missouri Senate in 1854. In the legislature he joined with Frank Blair (1821-1875) and B. Gratz Brown to promote the idea of compensated emancipation of Missouri's slaves and their colonization elsewhere to remove them as competition for free white labor. These three played a leading role in the formation of the Republican party in Missouri.

Blow served as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Chicago in 1860, initially favoring, with the rest of the Missouri delegation, the candidacy of favorite son Edward Bates. The following year President Abraham Lincoln appointed him minister to Venezuela, but he returned in 1862 to run successfully for Congress as a "Charcoal" Republican, that is one who favored immediate and uncompensated emancipation. The following year Blow joined Charles D. Drake, who had married another of his sisters, and others to establish the Radical Union party of Missouri with a platform of immediate emancipation for Missouri's slaves and the enlistment of free blacks into the armed forces. In 1864 he served as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Baltimore, where the Missouri delegation, dominated by Radicals, cast their ballots for Ulysses S. Grant, the only votes against Lincoln's renomination.