ch 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." Very
naturally such a body selected pro-slavery officials. Hamilton R.
Gamble, whom it made Governor, was a bigoted supporter of "the
institution." He had not long before been mixed up in the proceedings
that compelled Elijah P. Lovejoy to leave Missouri for Alton,
Illinois, where he was murdered by a pro-slavery mob. Gamble was an
able and ambitious man.

The Conservatives, likewise, had the backing of the Federal
Administration--a statement that to a good many people nowadays will
be surprising. There were reasons why such should be the case. Judge
Bates, of Missouri, who was Attorney-General in Lincoln's Cabinet, had
long been Gamble's law partner and most intimate friend. He never was
more than nominally a Republican. Another member of the Cabinet was
Montgomery Blair, of Maryland, who had been a resident of Missouri,
and was a brother of General Francis P. Blair, Jr., of St. Louis.
General Blair had been the leader of the Missouri emancipationists,
but had turned against them. For his face-about there were, at least,
two intelligible reasons. One was that in the quarrel between him and
Fremont the most of his former followers had sided with Fremont. That
was enough to sour him against