In
trying to take the State out of the Union with a show of legality, the
lawful Governor and his official associates made provision for a State
convention to be chosen by the people, which they expected to control,
but which, having a Unionist majority, played the boomerang on them by
sending them adrift and taking the affairs of the State into its own
hands. In this it had opposition. The most progressive men of the
State insisted that, after it had settled the question of Missouri's
relations to the Union, with reference to which it was specially
chosen, it was _functus officio_. They held that there should be a new
and up-to-date convention, especially as the old one, owing to the
desertion of many of its treasonably inclined members, including
General Sterling Price, of the Confederate Army, who was its first
president, had become "a rump," and so there were old-conventionists
and new-conventionists. The old-convention men, however, were in the
saddle. They had the governmental machinery, and were resolved to hold
on to it. In that spirit the convention proceeded to fill the vacant
offices. It was in sentiment strongly pro-slavery, as was shown by the
fact that a proposal looking to the very gradual extinguishment of
slavery was rejected by it in an almost unanimous vote, a circumstance
that led the leading pro-slavery journal of the State to boast that
the convention had killed emancipation "at the first pop.
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