If civil revolutions attest the wisdom of this remark of the great military chieftain, much more the moral and religious phases which revolutions assume under given conditions.
The foreign element, with its rationalism, anti-Sabbatarianism and abused Romanism; the irreligious element, with its Spiritualism, Universalism, Free-lovism and open and disguised infidelity—these furnish to the reflecting “moral combinations” sufficient to produce, or at least to control and direct, the great moral agencies that were so efficient during the civil revolution in burning churches, breaking up religious associations, hunting down and dragging ministers of the gospel “to prison and to death,” and adding to the horrors of civil war, this, that the comforting ministrations of Christianity are proscribed, or altogether prohibited, under the penalty of imprisonment or death, or both imprisonment and death, to the man of God whose enlightened conscience teaches him to fear God rather than man.
CHAPTER III.
Characteristics of the Population—All Nationalities and all Social Peculiarities Fused into a Common Mass—Missourian—First Settlers of the State—Where From, and their Type of Domestic and Social Life—The “Kansas-Nebraska Bill”—Its Effect upon the Population of Missouri—“Emigration Aid Societies”—Extremes Brought Together in Missouri—Reflex Tides of Population—Rapid Increase—Unique Social Formation—Social Peculiarities Fuse—Religious Characteristics Become more Distinct—Religious Thought and Feeling, Doctrines and Dogmas, Sharply Defined and Fearfully Distinct in Missouri—Sects and their Peculiarities—Sectarian Strife Uncompromising—Why—Religious Controversy—Published Debates—Their Effect—Sectarian Bigotry and Intolerance—Differences, Essential and Non-essential—History Repeating Itself—Persecution the Same in Every Age—Early Martyrs and the Missouri Martyrs—“The Altar, the Wood and the Lamb for a Burnt Offering.”
The population of Missouri differs in some respects from that of any other State. There is a greater variety of nationalities blended, of blood mingled, and of national, political, social, domestic and religious characteristics crossed and intermixed than can be found in any other State.
Other States may have more nationalities represented in their population, and the political, social and ecclesiastical characteristics may be more sharply defined; but that fact only confirms the position taken—that in Missouri these characteristics lose their identity, to a greater or less extent, and become fused in the common mass. Nearly all the nationalities of Europe, and many of Asia, are represented in Missouri, but only a few years’ residence is sufficient to either destroy or modify their national characteristics.
The social and domestic peculiarities of every State in the Union, with many foreign states, are exotics here; while many of them die out altogether and are abandoned, others compromise and intermingle, until the type of social and domestic life is somewhat of a hybrid, and is peculiarly Missourian.
The bulk of the old population of the State was from Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Tennessee and Ohio, with a respectable number from Indiana, Illinois and New York. Up to 1855 and ’56 the types of social life existing in these several States were scarcely disturbed in Missouri. After the passage by Congress of the somewhat notorious “Kansas-Nebraska bill,” in 1854, and the organization of these Territories, the population of Missouri increased rapidly and became of a more general character.
“Emigration aid societies” in New England and the Eastern States threw into these newly-formed Territories thousands of families who represented in their social and religious lives the extreme of New England ideas and New England faith.
Emigration from the Southern Atlantic and Gulf States, whether by aid societies or otherwise, rushed to these Territories, bringing the extremest types of Southern life. The middle and Mississippi Valley States furnished their share, until the swelling population of Kansas presented a scene of contrasts and conflicts turbulent and exciting beyond anything before known in the history of territorial settlement.