April 2021 Meeting

At our Round Table meeting held on April 27, 2021, Round Table member Tom A. Rafiner of Columbia MO gave a program about his latest book titled: R.L. Y Peyton, An American Journey, 1824-1863. R. L.Y. Peyton was bom in Virginia, but ended up in Missouri, where he practiced law for 10 years. During the bleeding Kansas era he was a significant player in the politics of the day as a Missouri state senator. He advocated Missouri's withdrawal from the Union and served in the Confederate Congress.

R.L.Y. Peyton's journey from obscurity to the national stage and then to oblivion, is as unlikely as it is incredible. Bom into the cavalier Virginia gentry, Lud's family migrated to Oxford, Ohio. He attended Miami University before getting a law degree at the University of Virginia. For 10 years he practiced frontier law in Harrisonville MO. Suddenly in 1854, inflamed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Lud exploded onto the political stage. He represented western Missouri in the state senate, helped trigger secession and then served in the C.S.A. Senate. He died from malaria in Alabama in 1863. Peyton's journey is uniquely American, his life narrating Missouri's, and the country's, ante-bellum history.