CHAPTER XV
EXTRAORDINARY ACTS

We should first of all carefully note the fact that although General Lyon in desperate battle laid down his life, he had accomplished his purpose. He had sustained by arms the decision of the Convention in March against secession, and, in spite of all who were disloyally striving to reverse that decision, had held Missouri true in her allegiance to the Union. By his military movements he had put to flight the secession Governor, Lieutenant-Governor and legislature, so that the State had now no governing body except her sovereign Convention. That had adjourned in March to meet in December, unless, on account of some exigency, it should be called together earlier. That exigency was at hand. If the processes of civil government were not to be wholly abandoned, there must be some duly appointed officers of the State, through whom its authority might find legitimate expression. So while Lyon and his devoted soldiers kept the disloyal at bay in the southwestern part of the State, the committee which had been previously appointed by the Convention for that purpose, on the 6th of July, summoned the members of that sovereign body to meet at the capital of the State, on the 26th of that month.

In response to this call, it met at the appointed time and place. On the 30th of July, it declared vacant the offices of Governor, Lieutenant-Governor and Secretary of State; also the seats of the members of the General Assembly. Moreover, it provided for the reorganization of the Supreme Court, giving to the Governor, whom they should choose, authority to appoint four new justices in addition to the three which then comprised the court.[71] The Convention also repealed the radical and mischievous war measures enacted in May in secret session, by the now scattered and defunct legislature. On the 31st, it chose as provisional State officers, Judge Hamilton R. Gamble, Governor; Willard P. Hall, Lieutenant-Governor; and Mordecai Oliver, Secretary of State. These provisional officers were inaugurated on the next day, August 1st, making short, sensible, patriotic addresses, in which they showed their keen appreciation of the difficulties that attended them in the anomalous position into which they had been thrust against their will.[72]

But radical as these acts of the Convention were, it did not forget the sacred rights of the people. It decreed that its measures should be submitted to them for ratification or rejection, and that on the first Monday in November they should elect by ballot State officers, although on account of the stress and confusion of war, the date was subsequently changed to November, 1862. It also in a carefully prepared paper explained to the people of the State the imperative necessity that called them together, and that justified their revolutionary action.

On August 3d, the new provisional Governor by proclamation set forth the lawless, turbulent condition of the State, and appealed to all within the commonwealth to put forth their utmost endeavor to secure, as speedily as possible, a reign of law and order, and commanded all State troops called out by his predecessor, Governor Jackson, to lay down their arms and return to their homes, promising them protection.[73] But a few days later[74] he found it necessary, in order to suppress marauding and violence, to call for forty-two thousand volunteers, infantry and cavalry. The Governor, while conservative in character, and an ardent lover of peace, was forced for the public good to put down anarchy by the strong hand of the armed militia of the State.

But there was another series of interesting events running parallel with the foregoing. During the month of July, our fleeing Governor and Lieutenant-Governor were among their political friends in the Southern Confederacy. They visited Richmond and took counsel with Jefferson Davis. The Lieutenant-Governor having returned to New Madrid, on the 31st of July, while the Convention in session at Jefferson City was choosing provisional State officers, issued a proclamation as “acting Governor of Missouri, in the temporary absence of Governor Jackson,” eulogizing the President of the Southern Confederacy, welcoming to the State the Confederate General Pillow with his rebel army, declaring that in view of the rebellion in St. Louis against Missouri, and the war of the United States upon her, “she is, and of right ought to be, a sovereign, free, and independent State.” He also called upon Brigadier-General Thompson, commanding the Missouri State Guards of the district that included New Madrid, to join hands with General Pillow in his beneficent work of protecting “the lives and property of the citizens.” That he referred only to citizens in full sympathy with secession was made clear by Thompson’s proclamation on the following day. This proclamation, which, in bombast, stands without a peer among all written manifestoes of military commanders, was issued on the same day of the inauguration at the State capital of the provisional Governor and Lieutenant-Governor, and of Fremont’s river campaign to Cairo and New Madrid. Thus strange and stirring events overlapped each other. Antagonistic proclamations from men of diametrically opposite views met and clashed. To those uncertain of their ground the din was bewildering. But amid the confusion of these discordant appeals, Thompson’s turgid screed greatly amused all in whom there was even the smallest grain of humor. I remember how companies of men in our city, irrespective of their political sympathies, casually thrown together, read it to each other amid peals of laughter. A single extract from it cannot fail to amuse those of this generation and justify our comment upon it.

“Come now, strike while the iron is hot! Our enemies are whipped in Virginia. They have been whipped in Missouri. General Hardee advances in the centre, General Pillow on the right, and General McCulloch on the left, with twenty thousand brave Southern hearts to our aid. So leave your plows in the furrow, and your oxen in the yoke, and rush like a tornado upon our invaders and foes, to sweep them from the face of the earth, or force them from the soil of our State! Brave sons of the Ninth District, come and join us! We have plenty of ammunition and the cattle on ten thousand hills are ours. We have forty thousand Belgian muskets coming; but bring your guns and muskets with you, if you have them; if not come without them. We will strike our foes like a Southern thunderbolt, and soon our camp-fires will illuminate the Meramec and Missouri. Come, turn out![75]

“Jeff. Thompson,
“Brigadier-General Commanding.”

But the itinerant Governor, whose office had been declared vacant by our sovereign Convention while he was engaged in earnest consultation with the rebel authorities at Richmond, soon after returned, and, on August 5th, inflicted upon a distracted commonwealth another proclamation, in which he supplemented and confirmed that issued by the defunct Lieutenant-Governor on the 31st of July. He declared Missouri independent of the government of the United States, and that all relations hitherto existing between the two governments were dissolved.[76] He did this of course without a shred of authority. He was no longer Governor; but even if there had been a reasonable doubt that the Convention had the power to declare his office vacant, as Governor he had no constitutional power to dissolve the relations existing between the Federal government and the State over which he was called to preside; especially since the sovereign Convention, which he and his legislature called into existence, had voted down all propositions for the secession of Missouri; and even his subservient legislature, whose seats, in July, had been declared vacant by the same Convention, did not adopt an ordinance of secession until November 2d, almost three months after the peripatetic Governor had proclaimed at New Madrid that the secession of the State was an accomplished fact. And this belated ordinance of secession was passed at Neosho, a small mining town in the extreme southwestern part of the State, near the border of Arkansas, where the defunct legislature, that assumed such extraordinary powers, found itself without a quorum, and secured one only by arbitrarily padding out its number by proxies. So in August, Missouri was declared by an officeless Governor to be out of the Union; then as late as November an unseated legislature, without a quorum, voted the secession of the State from the Union. What was already out, according to the defunct Governor, was solemnly voted out by his defunct legislature. The secession State government manifestly died hard. Even its expiring spasms were comical. Its proclamations and legislative acts were wild and futile. Rather than to have committed such folly it would have been better “to be a dog, and bay the moon.” And all the loyal of Missouri looked on and laughed.

But the action of our officeless Governor flowed out of his agreement with the Confederate authorities at Richmond. Three days after Jackson declared the sovereign independence of Missouri, the Confederate Congress authorized Jefferson Davis to raise troops in Missouri for the Southern army, and to establish recruiting stations to facilitate this work; and on the 19th of August voted to admit Missouri into the Southern Confederacy, when, by her legally constituted authority,—the authority being the overturned State government,—she shall have ratified the constitution of the Confederate States.[77] This act of the Confederate Congress was duly approved by President Davis.[78]

This hostile legislation at Richmond was followed by a proclamation of General Price at Springfield, on the 21st, declaring all Missouri Home Guards enemies of the Southern Confederacy, and that they would be treated as such. What the general proclaimed was unquestionably true, what he threatened was expected. However, all that transpired at Richmond we did not at that time know fully. We got some inkling of it; just enough to stimulate our imaginations, and to spur us to greater vigilance and to unremitting effort to keep Missouri true to the general government. We well knew that the seceded States would do their utmost to secure her for the Confederacy; that St. Louis was the key of the situation; that it was the objective point of every movement of the State Guards,[79] and of every invading army from the South, and that our position would not be secure until the battle for the Union had been fought to a finish. Hence all military movements within our borders, all armed conflicts great and small, all secret plottings of the disloyal, all acts of the Convention or of the defunct legislature, all proclamations, hostile or friendly, demanded and received our unremitting, earnest attention. By midsummer of 1861, all loyal citizens of St. Louis had fully made up their minds that adhesion to the Union, and security in it, were to be purchased only by the price of eternal vigilance.