CHAPTER I. A SALIENT BASTION FOR THE SLAVERY EMPIRE._The Struggle for Missouri

Produced by David Widger

THE STRUGGLE FOR MISSOURI

BY JOHN McELROY

States are not great except as men may make them,

Men are not great, except they do and dare.

--Eugene F. Ware.

WASHINGTON, D. C:

THE NATIONAL TRIBUNE CO.

1909

DEDICATED

TO THE UNION MEN OF MISSOURI

THE STRUGGLE FOR MISSOURI.

[Illustration: 003-The Struggle for Missouri.]

CHAPTER I. A SALIENT BASTION FOR THE SLAVERY EMPIRE.

WHATEVER else may be said of Southern statesmen, of the elder school,

they certainly had an imperial breadth of view. They took in the whole

continent in a way that their Northern colleagues were slow in doing.

It cannot be said just when they began to plan for a separate Government

which would have Slavery as its cornerstone, would dominate the

Continent and ultimately absorb Cuba, Mexico and Central America as far

as the Isthmus of Panama.

Undoubtedly it was in the minds of a large number of them from the

organization of the Government, which they regarded as merely a

temporary expedient--an alliance with the Northern States until the

South was strong enough to "assume among the Powers of the Earth the

separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and of Nature's

God entitle them."

They achieved a great strategic victory when in 1818 they drew the

boundaries of the State of Missouri.

The Ordinance of 1787 dedicated to Freedom all of the immense territory

which became the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and

Wisconsin. The wonderful growth of these in population, wealth and

political influence alarmed the Slave Power--keenly sensitive, as bad

causes always are, to anything which may possibly threaten,--and it

proceeded to erect in the State of Missouri a strong barrier to the

forward march of the Free Soil idea.

When the time for the separation came, the Northern fragment of the

Republic would find itself almost cut in two by the northward projection

of Virginia to within 100 miles of Lake Erie. It would be again nearly

cut in two by the projection of the northeast corner of Missouri to

within 200 miles of Lake Michigan.

In those days substantially all travel and commerce was along the lines

of the rivers. For the country between the Alleghany Mountains and

the Mississippi the Ohio River was the great artery. Into it empty the

Alleghany, Monongahela, Muskingum, the Kanawhas, Big Sandy, Scioto,

the Miamis, Licking, Kentucky, Green, Wabash, Cumberland and Tennessee

Rivers, each draining great valleys, and bringing with its volume of

waters a proportionate quota of travel and commerce. The Illinois River

also entered the Mississippi from the east with the commerce of a great

and fruitful region.

West of the Mississippi the mighty Missouri was the almost sole highway

for thousands of miles.

The State was made unusually large--68,735 square miles, where the

previous rule for States had been about 40,000 square miles--stretching

it so as to cover the mouths of the Ohio and the Illinois, and to lie on

both sides of the great Missouri for 200 miles. A glance at the map will

show how complete this maneuver seemed to be. Iowa and Minnesota were

then unbroken and unvisited stretches of prairie and forest, railroads

were only dreamed of by mechanical visionaries, and no man in Ohio,

Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky or Tennessee could send a load of produce

to market without Missouri's permission; he could make no considerable

journey without traversing her highways, while all of the imperial

area west of the Mississippi was made, it seemed, forever distinctly

tributary to her.

New Orleans was then the sole mart of the West, for the Erie Canal had

not been dug to convert the Great, Lakes into a colossal commercial

highway.

Out of a country possessing the unusual combination of surpassing

agricultural fertility with the most extraordinary mineral wealth they

carved a State larger in area than England and Wales and more than

one-fourth the size of France or Germany.

All ordinary calculations as to the development of such a favored region

would make of it a barrier which would effectively stay the propulsive

waves of Free Soilism.

So far as man's schemes could go there would never be an acre of free

soil west of Illinois.

The Anti-Slavery men were keenly alive to this strategic advantage of

their opponents. Though the opposition to Slavery might be said to be

yet in the gristle, the men hostile to the institution were found in all

parties, and were beginning to divide from its more ardent supporters.

Under the ban of public opinion Slavery was either dead or legally dying

in all the older States north of Mason and Dixon's line. In the kingly

stretch of territory lying north of the Ohio and between the Alleghanies

and the Mississippi there was no taint of the foot of a slave, and the

settlers there wanted to "set the bounds of Freedom wider yet."

The Anti-Slavery men everywhere, and at that time there were very many

in the Southern States, protested vigorously against the admission

of Missouri into the Union as a Slave State, and the controversy soon

became so violent as to convulse the Nation. In 1818, when the bill

for the admission of Missouri was being considered by the House of

Representatives, Gen. James Tallmadge, of New York, introduced the

following amendment:

And provided, That the introduction of slavery, or involuntary

servitude, be prohibited, except for the punishment of crimes, whereof

the party has been duly convicted; and that all children born within

the said State, after the admission thereof into the Union, shall be

declared free at the age of 25 years.

This was adopted by practically all the votes from the Free States, with

a few from the Border States, which constituted a majority in the House.

But the Senate, in which the Slave States had a majority, rejected the

amendment, and the struggle began which was only ended two years

later by the adoption of the famous Missouri Compromise of 1820, which

admitted Missouri as a Slave State, but prohibited for the future any

"Slavery or involuntary servitude" outside the limits of that State

north of 36 degrees 30 minutes.

As in all compromises, this was unsatisfactory to the earnest men on

both sides of the dispute.

The Anti-Slavery men, who claimed that Freedom was National and Slavery

local, were incensed that such an enormous area as that south of 36

degrees 30 minutes had been taken from Freedom by the implication that

it was reserved for Slavery.

The Pro-Slavery men, on the other hand, who had shrewdly made Slavery

extension appear one of the fundamental and cherished rights of the

South, set up the clamorous protest, which never ceased till Appomattox,

that the denial of the privilege of taking property in Slaves to any

part of the National domain won by the arms or purchased by the money

of the whole country, was a violation of the compact entered into at

the formation of the Government, guaranteeing to the citizens of all the

States the same rights and privileges.

They also complained that under this arrangement the Free-Soilers gained

control of 1,238,025 square miles of the Nation's territory, while

Slavery only had 609,023 square miles, or less than half so much. This

complaint, which seemed so forceful to the Pro-Slaveryites, appeared as

rank impudence to their opponents, since it placed Slavery on the same

plane with Freedom.

The great State, however, did not flourish in accordance with the

expectations based upon its climate, natural resources and central

position. The tide of immigration paused before her borders, or swept

around under colder skies to Iowa and Minnesota, or to the remote

prairies of Kansas and Nebraska. Careless as the average home-seeker

might seem as to moral and social questions so long as he found fertile

land at cheap prices, yet he appeared reluctant to raise his humble

cabin on soil that had the least taint of Slavery. In spite of her long

frontage on the two greatest rivers of the continent, and which were

its main highways; in spite of skies and soils and rippling streams

unsurpassed on earth; in spite of having within her borders the great

and growing city of St. Louis, the Metropolis of the Mississippi Valley,

Missouri in 1860, after 40 years of Statehood, had only 1,182,012

people, against 1,711,951 in Illinois, 1,350,428 in Indiana, 674,913

in Iowa, 172,023 in Minnesota, 2,329,511 in Ohio, 749,113 in Michigan,

775,881 in Wisconsin, with nearly 150,000 in Kansas and Nebraska.

More than a million settlers who had crossed the Mississippi within

a few years had shunned her contaminated borders for the free air of

otherwise less attractive localities.

Nor had the Slaveholders gone into the country in the numbers that were

expected. Less than 20,000 had settled there, which was a small showing

against nearly 40,000 in Kentucky and 55,000 in Virginia. All these had

conspicuously small holdings. Nearly one-third of them owned but one

slave, and considerably more than one-half had less than five. Only one

man had taken as many as 200 slaves into the State.

The Census of 1860 showed Missouri to rank eleventh among the Slave

States, according to the following table of the number of slaves in

each:

1. Virginia.........490,865 10. Texas..........182,566

2. Georgia.........462,198 11. Missouri.......114,931

3. Mississippi.....436,631 12. Arkansas.......111,114

4. Alabama.........435,080 13. Maryland....... 87,189

5. South Carolina..402,406 14. Florida.........61,745

6. Louisiana.......331,726 15. Delaware....... 1,798

7. North Carolina...331,059 16. New Jersey...... 18

8. Tennessee.......275,719 17. Nebraska....... 15

9. Kentucky........225,483 18. Kansas......... 2

There were 3,185 slaves in the District of Columbia and 29 in the

Territory of Utah, with all the rest of the country absolutely free.

The immigrant Slaveowners promptly planted themselves where they could

command the great highway of the Missouri River, taking up broad tracts

of the fertile lands on both sides of the stream. The Census of 1860

showed that of the 114,965 slaves held in the State, 50,280 were in the

12 Counties along the Missouri:

Boone........... ....5,034 Jackson..............3,944

Calloway.............4,257 Lafayette............6,357

Chariton.............2,837 Pike.................4,056

Clay.................3,456 Platte...............3,313

Cooper...............3,800 St. Charles..........2,181

Howard...............5,889 Saline...............4,876

Two-thirds of all the slaves in the State were held within 20 miles of

the Missouri River.

As everywhere, the Slaveowners exerted an influence immeasurably

disproportionate to their numbers, intelligence and wealth.

A very large proportion of the immigration had not been of a character

to give much promise as to the future.

The new State had been the Adullam's Cave for the South, where "every

one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt and every one

that was discontented gathered themselves." Next to Slavery, the South

had been cursed by the importation of paupers and criminals who had been

transported from England for England's good, in the early history of the

Colonies, to work the new lands. The negro proving the better worker in

servitude than this class, they had been driven off the plantations to

squat on unoccupied lands, where they bred like the beasts of the field,

getting a precarious living from hunting the forest, and the bolder

eking out this by depredations upon their thriftier neighbors. Their

forebears had been paupers and criminals when sent from England, and the

descendants continued to be paupers and criminals in the new country,

forming a clearly marked social class, so distinct as to warrant the

surmise that they belonged to a different race. As the eastern part of

the South and the administration of the laws improved, this element

was to some extent forced out, and spread in a noisome trail over

Mississippi, Arkansas and Missouri. While other immigrants went into the

unbroken forest with a few rude tools and in the course of several years

built up comfortable homes, their's never rose above abject squalor. The

crudest of cabins sufficed them for shelter, beds of beech leaves were

all the couches they required; they had more guns in their huts than

agricultural or mechanical implements; they scarcely pretended to raise

anything more than a scanty patch of corn; and when they could not put

on their tables the flesh of the almost wild razor-back hog which roamed

the woods, they made meat of woodchucks, raccoons, opossums or any other

"varmint" their guns could bring down. They did not scorn hawks or owls

if hunger demanded and no better meat could be found.

It was this "White Trash" which added so much to the horrors of the war,

especially in Missouri, and so little to its real prosecution. Wolf-like

in ferocity, when the advantages were on their side, they were wolf-like

in cowardice when the terms were at all equal. They were the Croats,

Cossacks, Tolpatches, Pandours of the Confederacy--of little value in

battle, but terrible as guerrillas and bushwhackers. From this "White

Trash" came the gangs of murderers and robbers, like those led by the

Youngers, Jameses, Quantrils and scores of other names of criminal

memory.

As has been the case in all times and countries, these dregs of society

became the willing tools of the Slaveholding aristocrats. With dog-like

fidelity they followed and served the class which despised and overrode

them. Somehow, by inherited habits likely, they seemed to avoid the

more fertile parts of the State. They thus became "Bald Knobbers"

and "Ozarkers" in Missouri, as they had been "Clay Eaters" in South

Carolina, or "Sang Diggers" in Virginia.

With these immigrants from the South came also large numbers of a far

better element even than the arrogant Slaveowners or the abject "White

Trash."

The Middle Class in the South was made up of much the same stock as

the bulk of the Northerners--that is of Scotch, Scotch-Irish and North

English--Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists and Dissenters

generally--who had been forced out of Great Britain by the intolerant

Episcopalians when the latter gained complete power after the

suppression of the Rebellion of 1745. With these were also the

descendants of the sturdy German Protestants who had been driven

from Europe during the religious wars when the Catholics gained the

ascendency in their particular country. These were the backbone of the

South, and had largely settled along the foothills of the Alleghanies

and in the fruitful valleys between the mountains, while the "White

Trash" lived either on the barren parts of the lowlands or the bare and

untillable highlands.

It is a grave mistake to confound these two classes of Non-Slaveholding

whites in the South. They were as absolutely unlike as two distinct

races, and an illustration of the habits of the two in migrating will

suffice to show this. It was the custom in the Middle Classes when a boy

attained majority that he chose for his wife a girl of the same class

who was just ripening into vigorous womanhood. Both boy and girl had

been brought up to labor with their own hands and to work constantly

toward a definite purpose. They had been given a little rudimentary

education, could read their Bibles and almanacs, "cipher" a little,

write their names and a letter which could be read. When quite a lad the

boy's father had given him a colt, which he took care of until it became

a horse. To this, his first property, was added a suit of stout homespun

cloth, which, with a rifle, an ax and some few other necessary tools,

constituted his sole equipment for married life. The girl had been given

a calf, which she had raised to a heifer; she had also a feather bed and

some blankets of her own making and a little stock of the most obvious

housekeeping utensils. With this simple outfit the young couple were

married, and either went in debt for a little spot of land near home or

pushed out into the new country. There they built a rude log cabin to

shelter them from the storm, and by the time their children had reached

the age they were when they married they had built up an unpretentious

but very comfortable home, with their land well cleared and fenced, and

stocked with cattle, pigs, sheep and poultry sufficient to maintain them

in comfort. From this class came always the best and strongest men in

the South. Comparatively few of them became Slaveowners, and then but

rarely owned more than one or two negroes. A very large proportion found

homes in the great free States north of the Ohio River.

On the other hand, none of this accession to comparative wealth seemed

possible to the "White Trash." The boys and girls mated, squatted on

any ground they could find unoccupied, raised there the merest shelter,

which never by any chance improved, no matter how long they lived there,

and proceeded to breed with amazing prolificacy others like themselves,

destined for the same lives of ignorance and squalor. The hut of the

"Clay Eater" in South Carolina, the "Sand Hiller" in Georgia, the "Sang

Digger" in Virginia was the same as that his grandfather had lived in.

It was the same that his sons and grandsons to the third and fourth

generations built on the bleak knobs of the Ozarks or the malarious

banks of the Mississippi. The Census of 1850 showed that about 70,000

of the population of Missouri had come from Kentucky, 45,000 from

Tennessee, 41,000 from Virginia, 17,000 from North Carolina and 15,000

from the other Southern States. Nearly 40,000 had gone from Ohio,

Indiana and Illinois, but a very large proportion of this number was the

same element which had streamed across the southern parts of those

States on its way to Missouri. Only 13,000 had entered from the great

States of New York and Pennsylvania, and but 1,100 from New England.

Nearly 15,000 Irishmen, mostly employed along the rivers, had settled

in the State.

While the Slaveowners and their "White Trash" myrmidons were Pro-Slavery

Democrats, the Middle Class were inclined to be Whigs, or if Democrats,

belonging to that wing of the party less subservient to Slavery which in

later years was led by Stephen A. Douglas.

Upon these three distinct strata in society, which little mingled

but were all native Americans, was projected an element of startling

differences in birth, thought, speech and manners. The so-called

Revolution of 1848 in Germany was a movement by the educated,

enthusiastic, idealistic youth of the Fatherland to sweep away the horde

of petty despots, and unite their pigmy Principalities and Duchies into

a glorious and wide-ruling Germany. They were a generation too soon,

however, and when the movement was crushed under the heavy hand of

military power, hundreds of thousands of these energetic young men

thought it safest and best to make new homes in the young Republic

beyond the seas. The United States therefore received a migration of the

highest character and of inestimable benefit to the country.

Somewhere near 150,000 of these went to Missouri. They had none of the

antipathy of Northern Americans to a Slave State. They were like their

Gothic forebears, to whom it was sufficient to know that the land was

good. Other matters could be settled by their strong right arms. The

climate and fertility of Missouri pleased them; they saw the State's

possibilities and flocked thither. Possibly one-half settled in the

pleasant valleys and on the sunny prairies, following the trail of good

land in the Southwest clear down to the Arkansas line. The other half

settled mostly in St. Louis, and through them the city experienced

another of its wonderful transformations. Beginning as a trading post

of the French with the Indians, it had only as residents merchant

adventurers from sunny France, officers and soldiers of the royal army

and the half-breed voyageurs and trappers who served the fur companies.

Next the Americans had swarmed in, and made the trading post a great

market for the exchange of the grain and meat of the North, for the

cotton and sugar of the South. Its merchants and people took their tone

and complexion from the plantations of the Mississippi Valley.

Now came these Germans, intent upon reproducing there the

characteristics of the old world cities beyond the Rhine. They brought

with them lager beer, to which the Americans took very readily, and a

decided taste for music, painting and literature, to which the Americans

were not so much inclined. German signs, with their quaint Gothic

lettering and grotesque names, blossomed out on the buildings, military

bands in German uniforms paraded the streets, especially on Sundays.

German theaters also open on Sunday represented by astonishingly good

companies the popular plays of the Fatherland, and newsboys cried the

German newspapers on the streets. Those who went into the country

were excellent farmers, shrewd in buying and selling, and industrious

workers. They dreamed of covering the low hills of the western part of

the State with the vineyards that were so profitable on the Rhine and

of rivaling the products of Johannesburg and the Moselle on the banks of

the Gasconade and the Maramec.

The newcomers were skilled men in their departments of civilized

activities--far above the average of the Americans. They were good

physicians, fine musicians, finished painters, excellent actors and

skillful mechanics, and each began the intelligent exercise of his

vocation, to the great advantage of the community, which was, however,

shocked at many of the ways of the newcomers, particularly their

devoting Sunday to all manner of merrymaking. Still more shocking was

their attitude toward the Slavery question. Even those Americans who

were opposed to Slavery had a respect approaching awe of the "Sacred

Institution." It had always been in the country; it was protected by a

network of laws, and so feared that it could only be discussed with

the greatest formality and circumspection. The radical Germans had

absolutely none of this feeling. In their scheme of humanity all

Slavery was so horrible that there could be no reason for its longer

continuance, and it ought to be put to an end in the most summary

manner. The epithet "Abolitionists," from which most Americans shrank

as from an insult, had no terrors for them. It frankly described their

mental attitude, and they gloried in it as they did in being Free

Thinkers. They had not rebelled against timeworn traditions and

superstitions in Germany to become slaves to something worse in this.

Vigorous growths as they were, they readily took root in the new soil,

became naturalized as fast as they could, and entered into the life

of the country which they had elected for their homes. They joined the

Republican Party from admiration of its Free Soil principles, and in the

election of 1860 cast 17,028 votes for Abraham Lincoln.

Such were the strangely differing elements which were fermenting

together in the formation of the great Commonwealth during those

turbulent days from 1850 to 1860, and which were to be fused into

unexpected combinations in the fierce heat of civil war. The same

fermentation--minus the modifying influences of the radical Germans--was

going on in all the States of the South except South Carolina, where the

Middle Class hardly existed. Everywhere the Middle Class was strongly

attached to the Union, and averse to Secession. Everywhere the

Slaveowners, a small minority, but of extraordinary ability and

influence, were actively preaching dissatisfaction with the Union,

bitterly complaining of wrongs suffered at the hands of the North, and

untiring in their machinations to win over or crush the leaders of those

favorable to the Union. Everywhere they had the "White Trash" solidly

behind them to vote as they wished, and to harry and persecute the Union

men. As machinery for malevolence the "White Trash" myrmidons could

not be surpassed. Criminal instincts inherited from their villain

forefathers made them ready and capable of anything from maiming a Union

man's stock and burning his stacks to shooting him down from

ambush. They had personal feeling to animate them in this, for their

depredations upon the hogs and crops of their thriftier neighbors had

brought them into lifelong collisions with the Middle Class, while they

had but little opportunity for resentment against the owners of the

large plantations. In every State in the South the story was the same,

of the Middle Class Union men being harassed at the command of the

Slaveowners by the "White Trash" hounds. They had been sent into Kansas

to drive out the Free State immigrants there and secure the territory

for Slavery, but though backed up by the power of the Administration,

they had been signally defeated by the numerically inferior but bolder

and hardier immigrants from the North.

Force rules this world; it always has; it always will. Not merely

physical force, but that incomparably higher type--intellectual

force--Power of Will. It seemed that in nearly all the States of the

South the Slaveowners by sheer audacity and force of will succeeded in

dominating the great majority which favored the Union, and by one device

or another committing them hopelessly to the rebellion. This was notably

the case in Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia, where the

majority repeatedly expressed itself in favor of the Union, but was

dragooned into Secession.

In Missouri, however, the Secessionists encountered leaders with will

and courage superior to their own. Many of these were Slaveowners

themselves, and nearly all of them were of Southern birth. Head and

shoulders above these, standing up among them like Saul among the

Sons of Israel, was Frank P. Blair, then in the full powers of perfect

manhood. He was 42 years old, tall and sinewy in body, blue-eyed and

sandy-haired. He came of the best Virginia and Kentucky stock, and had

long been a resident and slaveowner in Missouri. As a boy he had served

in the ranks in the Mexican War, had an adventurous career on the

Pacific Coast, had gone back to Missouri to achieve prominence at the

bar, and as early as 1848 had come to the front as the unflinching

advocate of Emancipation and the conversion of Missouri into a Free

State. Against his perfect panoply of courage and resource all the

lances of the Slaveowners were hurled in vain. Their violence recoiled

before him, their orators were no match for him upon the stump, and

their leaders not his equal in party management. In 1852 he was elected

to the Missouri Legislature as a Free Soiler, was re-elected in 1854,

and in 1856 to Congress. His value to the Union was immeasurable, for

he was a leader around whom the Union men could rally with the utmost

confidence that he would never weaken, never resort to devious ways, and

never blunder. As a Southerner of the best ancestry, he was not open to

the charge of being a "Yankee Abolitionist," which had so much effect

upon the Southern people of his State.

[Illustration: 056-General Francis P Blair]

A very dangerous element was composed of a number of leaders who

belonged to the Pro-Slavery wing, but desiring to be elected to offices,

masked their designs under the cover of the Douglas Democracy. The most

important of these was Claiborne F. Jackson, a politician of moderate

abilities and only tolerable courage, but of great partisan activity. He

professed to be a Douglas Democrat, and as such was elected Governor at

the State election. Born in Kentucky 54 years before, he had resided in

Missouri since 1822. A Captain in the Black Hawk War, his service had

been as uneventful and brief as that of Abraham Lincoln, who was two

years his junior, and he was one of the Pro-Slavery clique who had

hounded the great Thomas H. Benton out of politics on account of his

mild Free Soilism. In person he was tall, erect, with something of

dignity in his bearing. He essayed to be an orator, had much reputation

as such, but his speeches developed little depth of thought or anything

beyond the customary phrases which were the stock in trade of all the

orators of his class south of Mason and Dixon's line.

The fermentation period culminated in the Presidential campaign of 1860,

the hottest political battle this country had ever known.

The intensity of the interest felt in Missouri was shown by the bigness

of the vote, which aggregated 165,618. As the population was but

1,182,012, of which 114,965 were slaves, it will be seen that

substantially every white man went to the polls.

The newly-formed Republican Party, mostly confined to the radical

Germans of St. Louis, cast 17,028 votes for Abraham Lincoln.

The Slaveowners and their henchmen--"Southern Rights Democrats"--cast

31,317 votes for John C. Breckinridge.

The "Regular Democrats" polled 58,801 votes for Stephen A. Douglas and

"Squatter Sovereignty."

The remains of the "Old Line Whigs," and a host of other men who did not

want to be Democrats and would not be Republicans, cast 58,372 votes for

John Bell, the "Constitutional Union" candidate.

Thus it will be seen that out of every 165 men who went to the polls 17

were quite positive that the extension of Slavery must cease; 31 were

equally positive that Slavery should be extended or the Union dissolved;

59 favored "Squatter Sovereignty," or local option in the Territories in

regard to Slavery; 58 thought that "all this fuss about the nigger

was absurd, criminal, and dangerous. It ought to be stopped at once by

suppressing, if necessary, by hanging, the extremists on both sides, and

letting things go on just as they have been."

Thus so great a proportion as 117 out of the total of 165--nearly

five-sevenths of the whole--professed strong hostility to the views of

the "extremists, both North and South."

The time was at hand, however, when they must make their election as to

which of these opposite poles of thought and action they would drift.

They could no longer hold aloof, suggesting mild political placeboes,

lamenting alike the wickedness of the Northern Abolitionists and the

madness of the Southern Nullifiers, and expressing a patriotic desire to

hang selected crowds of each on the same trees.

South Carolina had promptly responded to the election of Abraham Lincoln

as President of the United States by passing an Ordinance of Secession,

and seizing all the United States forts, arsenals and other places,

except Fort Sumter, within her limits.

The rest of the Cotton States were hastening to follow her example.

To the 117 "Middle-of-the-Road" voters out of every total of 165 it

was therefore necessary to choose whether they would approve of the

withdrawal of States and seizures of forts, and become Secessionists,

or whether they would disapprove of this and ally themselves with the

much-contemned Black Republicans.

It was the old, old vital question, asked so many times of neutrals with

the sword at their throats:

"Under which King, Bezonian? Speak, or die."

[Illustration: 023-The War Clouds Gather]