Three buildings, remnants of a college campus, still stand in Mexico. One of them is a monument to the failure of the college, but the institution’s name is a monument to the success of a man who was virtually a noncitizen for a number of years, then came back to be governor. Charles Henry Hardin survived the bitterness of the post-Civil War period in Missouri during which he was disqualified as a voter because of alleged southern sympathies during the conflict. This happened to many people in those harsh and punitive times. Some of them had fought for or openly supported the South. Others were penalized on an arbitrary basis, sometimes not because they supported the South, but because they hadn’t fought for the North.
