Martyrdom in Missouri, Volume 1 (of 2)

by W. M. Leftwich

By the time of its session no less than seven of the Southern States had, by their conventions, adopted ordinances of secession, declaring themselves separated from the Government of the United States, and organized for themselves a distinct national confederation. Other States were in a greatly disturbed condition, had called State conventions, and would inevitably follow their sister Southern States. War was imminent and preparations for it were active—alarming.

Many still clung to the delusion that the national difficulties would be settled without bloodshed, and that the very preparations for war would prevent it.

Virginia, “the mother of Presidents,” had a State convention then either in session or about to assemble, and the deepest anxiety was felt throughout the whole country as to the course that sturdy old State would take. It was believed that the action of Missouri and Virginia would either prevent or precipitate war, by determining the true position of all the border slave States; consequently, every act of these conventions, and every sentiment uttered in them, was watched and weighed with an interest and eagerness never before known in the history of the country.

In Missouri the liveliest interest was taken by all the people in the debate on the report of the committee on Federal Relations, and not until it became an ordinance of the Convention could the majority of the people in the rural districts believe that the State would not secede from the Federal Union and unite her fortunes with the Southern Confederacy. The simple fact that Missouri was a slaveholding State was sufficient in the minds of many to determine her Federal relations, or at least the policy of secession. Rights in the Union were considered possible by the few; rights out of the Union were considered the only hope by the many.

The fact that the State officers and Legislature, elected just the fall before, were so nearly unanimous in their Southern sympathies that they could, and did, secede in a body without disorganization, and without taking the State with them, shows how strong must have been the Southern feeling at the time of their election. Sectional issues were as clearly and distinctly made in the State as in the Presidential election, and with a unanimity rare in the history of elections the people endorsed the pro-slavery party.

The action of the State convention in February, 1861, put the State in an anomalous condition. The effect was to detach the State government from the State and vacate the several departments of the State government without a vacating ordinance. The representatives in the State Legislature found themselves without a Constitution and the people without representatives. It was soon evident that neither Governor C. F. Jackson and his cabinet nor the majority of the General Assembly were in sympathy with the action of the Convention. The President of the Convention, Hon. Sterling Price, and a respectable minority dissented in their feelings from the action of a majority, and conscientiously believed that the true interest of the State was in political and commercial alliance with the Southern Confederacy.

Notwithstanding the majority of the people were loyal to the Federal Government when the delegates to the State Convention were elected, in January, 1861, yet the course pursued by Governor Jackson, General Price, and those high in authority who were associated with them, very greatly unsettled the people of the State in their political faith, and produced such general excitement amongst all classes, that the greatest fears were entertained from the first of an intensity and bitterness of strife in Missouri to which other States would not be subjected.

No one not then residing in the State can fully appreciate the condition of things which this complication of public policy developed. Ministers of the gospel and other non-combatants wore not prepared to meet the novel exigencies arising out of such an anomalous state of things, in consequence of which many of them were placed in very embarrassing circumstances, and not a few found themselves forced into positions which their cooler and better judgment afterward condemned. The pride of some kept them in positions where their indiscretion had placed them, and from which their sober judgment would fain extricate them; and in this way many non-combatants were made combatants, and many were forced from their families, their homes, their property and their country. The people were all unused to civil revolutions and inexperienced in the art of adjustment and adaptation. One false step in youth may be fatal to all the objects and aims of life, blast all its hopes and promises, and cause all its plans and purposes to miscarry—may be irretrievably disastrous. So in the first stages of civil revolutions, a mistake may be fatal; and fatal mistakes are common. Men who were not secessionists found themselves fighting for secession, and men who were not Union men were forced by a combination of circumstances to fight for the Union. A man’s sword often cut through his sympathies, and his sympathies often formed the scabbard for his sword; while the “aiding and abetting” was as often by constraint and coercion as by choice. Even the regimental colors of opposing armies did not always and faithfully reflect the true sentiment of field and staff, rank and file. Sympathy was too confused and policy too unsettled to admit of either infallible prescience in choice or fidelity in the execution in all cases. Hence many good men suffered for principles not their own, and sacrificed life and all for a cause with which they were not in sympathy.

Popular excitements are never favorable to deliberate prejudgment or right action, and in Missouri more than elsewhere the intensity of excitement at this time dethroned judgment and defeated action. It is believed that much suffering and many of the most shocking features of the war could have been prevented by the party leaders on both sides in Missouri.

It is confidently believed that when a true history of the war is written, it will appear that, in its recklessness of life and wantonness of destruction, and in all its most shameless, and revolting, and nameless crimes perpetrated upon the unoffending, the innocent and the helpless, the non-combatant population of Missouri has suffered more than any other class of people in any State. And much of the sufferings of this class of people is justly chargeable to those into whose hands the conduct of the war in this State was first placed. The just judgment of posterity and the just retributions of eternity will hold to a righteous accountability those who, under whatever pretense, made war upon ministers of the gospel, unoffending old men, and helpless women and children, dragging them to prison and to death, while the pretext for it was found only in the hasty expression of sympathy, or the constructive connection with one side or the other based upon church affiliations.