It was a time of wide-spread iniquity with almost all classes. Crime, in every conceivable form, reveled without shame, and hesitated at no atrocity. The officers of law and the courts were alike powerless to punish crime and protect innocence; “and because iniquity did abound the love of many waxed cold,” and the man of God who could be faithful to the souls of men without fear or favor had nerve, courage, faith.
His home was at the mercy of lawless bands whose nameless crimes his last sermon rebuked, and his head was a target for the assassin’s bullet whose cowardly heart felt the sting of conscious guilt under the searchings of God’s truth—a guilt, too, of which the minister was wholly ignorant. More than one faithful watchman, during those “times that tried men’s souls,” went from his pulpit to find his home in ashes, his wife and children shelterless in the storm, and breadless and friendless in the world; and more than one, who did not know that they had an enemy in the world, were called from their beds at midnight to be shot down like dogs, or butchered like hogs in the very presence of their families, without warning, without any known provocation, and without knowing their murderers.
Some of the brightest and purest lights of the Church went out at midnight—suddenly, appallingly—and their “souls were under the altar” many long, weary hours before the news of their murder could pass beyond the family threshold, and often days before it could even reach the family itself. Many of these murders are wholly unaccountable upon any other hypothesis than that intimated above, as the victims hereafter to be named had kept themselves from strife, and had pursued, with “singleness of heart as unto the Lord,” their one calling; they had taken neither part nor lot in the war, one way or the other, and, indeed, were not all of one political faith; their sympathies were—some for the Union and some for the South.
The men who stood faithful amid the faithless were not rash and reckless, but prudent and cautious, as it well becomes those who stand up for the truth in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation. Some ministers, by a prudent, consistent course, ministering to all alike, and keeping their political views and sympathies to themselves, conquered, in a measure, the respect and confidence of the leading men of both parties, after so long a time, and they were henceforth pretty secure. But many had to abandon the ministry for the time being and seek a support in other pursuits.
For some reason, no part of the minister’s public exercises were looked to with more interest or scrutinized more closely than his extemporaneous prayers. Military officers, partisan leaders, and all men of strong sympathies either way, watched with more vigilance than devotion the objects, the subjects, the language and the sentiment of the extemporaneous prayers of the pulpit. They were supposed to show the drift of the minister’s sympathies and reflect his political sentiments, and many people felt much more interested in that than in any supplications he might make for the pardon of guilt and the salvation of the soul. Post Commanders and Provost-Marshals would not unfrequently send written orders to the officiating minister whose sympathies were suspected, commanding him to pray for Mr. Lincoln, for the flag, for the success of the army in crushing out the rebellion, or for the destruction of all traitors, or something else of the sort as a test of loyalty. And often a minister’s bread, his home, his liberty or his life were suspended upon and determined by the shade of meaning given to a word or phrase in his prayer. The effort was made to force the conscience at the point of the bayonet, and convert the prayer into blasphemy, or get from it a pretext for executing a malicious purpose already formed, and for which there existed neither cause nor occasion.
CHAPTER VIII.
ANOMALOUS CONDITION OF THE STATE—GREAT EXCITEMENT.
Border Slave State—Missouri State Convention—The Last Hope—Virginia Convention—Missouri would not Secede—Rights in the Union—Disappointment—Anomalous Position—Governor Jackson and General Price—Great Excitement—Ministers Embarrassed—One False Step Fatal—The Sword vs. Sympathy—Why the Innocent and Helpless Suffered more in Missouri than Elsewhere—Constructive Sympathy—Predatory Bands—Hon. Luther J. Glenn Commissioner from Georgia—The Effect of the Fall of Fort Sumter and President Lincoln’s Proclamation—The State Officers, Legislature and Militia Adhere South—Assemble at Neosho, Pass an Act of Secession, Elect Delegates to the Confederate Congress, etc., etc.—Preparations for War—Union vs. Price’s Army—State Convention Meets Again—Its Acts and Doings—Two State Governments—Sympathy, Property and Plunder—Ministers Again—Their Course—Days of Fasting and Prayer—Conferences—Meeting in St. Charles—Resolutions—Prudence and Prayer—The Press—Anti-Christ Abroad—Central Christian Advocate and a few Facts—Rev. Mr. Gardner—“Men and Brethren Help”—State Convention again in October—The First Oath for Ministers.
The people of Missouri contemplated the possibilities of civil war with the peculiar interests of a border State, fearing that when it came the border slaveholding States would be the main theatre of strife. They looked with the deepest solicitude to every plan for the peaceful adjustment of the troubles, and not until the failure of the “Crittenden Compromise” did they consider the result inevitable. The much talked of “Border States Convention” inspired hope in the less informed, but when nothing came of it the last hope perished.
The Missouri Legislature, by an act, “approved January 21, 1861,” called a State convention “to consider the then existing relations between the Government of the United States and the people and Government of the several States and the Government and people of Missouri, and to adopt such measures for vindicating the sovereignty of the State and the protection of its institutions as shall appear to them to be demanded.”
This convention assembled in Jefferson City February 28, 1861, and organized and proceeded to the work for which it was called.