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influence, and that action was awaited with anxiety.
The sympathies of the
Governor of the
State,
Beriah Magoffin, were with the
Southern people and their slave-system of labor; yet in his public acts, at this time, he opposed secession.
The people of his State were decidedly hostile to the revolutionary movements in the
Gulf region; yet, whenever the question was raised concerning the right and the duty of the
National Government to enforce the laws by its constitutional power, that enforcement was called, in the language of the disloyal sophists, “coercing a Sovereign State,” and therefore, they said, it must not be tolerated.
At a convention of Union and Douglas men of the State, held on the 8th of January,
it was resolved that the rights of
Kentucky should be maintained
in the Union. They were in favor of a convention of the Slave and Free-labor Border States, to decide upon some just compromise, and declared their willingness to support the
National Government, unless the incoming
President should attempt to “coerce a State or States.”
The Legislature, which assembled at about the same time, was asked by the
Governor to declare, by resolution, the “unconditional disapprobation” of the people of that State of the employment of force against “seceding States.”
Accordingly, on the 22d of January, the Legislature resolved that the Kentuckians, uniting with their brethren of the
South, would resist any invasion of the soil of that section, at all hazards and to
the last extremity.
This action was taken by the authorities of
Kentucky, because the Legislatures of several of the Free-labor States had offered troops for the use of the
Government, in enforcing the laws in “seceding States.”
The Legislature also decided against calling a convention, and appointed delegates to the Peace Congress to meet at
Washington City.
Such was the attitude of
Kentucky at the beginning.
A little later, its public authorities and other leading men endeavored to, give to it a position of absolute neutrality.
Missouri, lying west of the Mississippi River,. was another Border State of great importance.
Its population in 1860 was one million one hundred and eighty-two thousand three hundred and seventeen, of whom one hundred and fifteen thousand were slaves.
Its inhabitants had been agitated more or less by the troubles in Kansas, a State stretching along almost the whole of its western border, where the friends and enemies of the, Slave system of labor had quarreled and fought for several years previous to the year 1858.
In that school of experience, the Missourians had been pretty well instructed concerning the questions at issue in the now impending conflict; and when they were called upon to act, they did so intelligently.
They knew the value of the Union; and the great body of the people reprobated the teachings of the disloyal politicians, and determined to stand by the Union so, long as it seemed to them a blessing.
