In Missouri many were kept from voting because they could not take the prescribed oath of allegiance. On that account the result of the election was not the real expression of the judgment of the whole people; but it gave the most intense satisfaction to all radical Union men of our city and State. The President received over forty thousand majority; the unconditional Union candidate for Governor, Thomas C. Fletcher, received a still heavier vote. The people, by more than thirty-seven thousand majority, declared themselves in favor of another Convention and at the same time elected the members of it, more than three fourths of whom were Charcoals. The entire radical ticket for State officers was chosen, and the legislature was heavily radical in both its branches. Eight of the nine candidates elected to Congress were radicals. In eighty of the one hundred and fourteen counties of the State the radical ticket prevailed. The loyal of our city celebrated this triumph of unconditional Unionism with unbounded joy. They rang the bells; kindled bonfires; marched with torches to martial music; sang patriotic songs; and almost split their throats and the welkin with their huzzas. Well they might do all this. Every plot against the Union had been thwarted; they held at last firmly within their grasp the prize for which they had so long and patiently struggled. The darkness had fled; the light shone.
CHAPTER XXVI
RADICALS IN CONVENTION[[113]]
The radicals for many months had been deeply dissatisfied with the conservatism of the old Convention. While recognizing its inestimable service in keeping Missouri in the Union, they were strongly opposed to its policy of gradual, compensated emancipation. They clamored for a new Convention to which this, and other vitally important questions, should be submitted. So many in the State adopted and advocated their views that the legislature in February, 1864, passed an act creating and calling a new Convention to meet in St. Louis on January 6th, 1865, “to consider, first, such amendments to the Constitution of the State as may be by them deemed necessary for the emancipation of slaves; second, such amendments to the Constitution of the State as may be by them deemed necessary to preserve in purity the elective franchise to loyal citizens; and such other amendments as may be by them deemed essential to the promotion of the public good.”
At the election in November, the people, as we have already noted, by a decisive majority, declared for a new Convention and elected delegates to it most of whom were radicals. The Charcoals were at last in the saddle. The conservatives were dispirited; and even the more moderate radicals held their breath in fear of measures too extreme and impracticable. But, whatever drawbacks there were, on the whole the radical triumph was a healthful onward movement.
On January 6th, 1865, the Convention met in the small Mercantile Library Hall. There were sixty-nine delegates. More than half of them had been born and bred in slave States. Twenty-three were natives of the free States, while ten were immigrants from Europe, chiefly from Germany. Some of those who were natives of the South had recently been converted from their pro-slavery notions and were intent on magnifying their new faith. They were uncompromising radicals.
Unlike the old Convention, there were in this more farmers than lawyers, while the medical profession was as numerously represented as the legal; almost one-fifth of the Convention were physicians. There were also twelve merchants, mostly from small towns whose business had never been large. Editors, clerks, a mechanic, a railroad agent, a law student, a nurseryman, a surveyor, a schoolmaster, and a major of Missouri volunteers made up the rest.
In the main the delegates were young. More than a third of them were under forty, and more than two-thirds under fifty; none of them were enfeebled by age. But a single glance at them convinced any intelligent beholder that, taken as a whole, they were in capacity mediocre; and most of them by their occupations had not been fitted to grapple with questions that pertained to the fundamental law of the State. The people who chose them had evidently not kept clearly in view the delicate and difficult work that they would be called upon to perform. To a large extent passion and prejudice born of the hour had controlled the voters in their choice of delegates. In their anxiety to elect men who were uncompromisingly in favor of immediate emancipation, they had not been sufficiently careful in demanding that they should also be men qualified to do their part intelligently in reconstructing the organic law of the commonwealth.
Moreover, the Convention did not fairly represent the whole body of loyal men in the State. Ruling out all downright rebels as justly debarred from voting, the conservative anti-slavery element secured at the best but a very small representation in this deliberative assembly. The stringent oath of allegiance, framed by the old Convention and rigidly required of every voter, kept many from making any attempt to deposit their ballots; not because they were not, even under such a severe test, legal voters, but because they shrank from the catechizing to which they would be subjected at the polls by men who looked with suspicion upon any one with conservative views.
Now when the Convention made up mainly of men holding ultra notions came together and organized for work, choosing, at its second session, for president, Arnold Krekel of St. Charles, a native of Prussia, an able lawyer, but an extremist of the most pronounced type, all St. Louis was agog. This first important act of the Convention unmistakably revealed its radical drift, and showed how potent in it were the ultra political notions of our German fellow-citizens. It proceeded at once to the paramount business for which it had been created and called together, the emancipation of the slaves of Missouri. On the fifth day after its organization it passed, with only four votes in the negative, the following ordinance:
“Be it ordained by the People of the State of Missouri, in Convention assembled: