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three which then comprised the court.[71] The Convention also repealed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.