[
471]
and
Major H. A. Conant held a four hours interview with
Governor Jackson,
General Price, and
Thomas L. Smead, the latter being the
Governor's private secretary.
Jackson demanded, as a vital condition of pacification, that throughout the
State the Home-Guards, composed of loyal citizens, should be disbanded, and that no National troops should be allowed to tread the soil of
Missouri.
Lyon peremptorily refused compliance, and
Jackson and his associates returned to
Jefferson City that night.
On the following day
the
Governor issued a proclamation, calling into active service fifty thousand of the
State militia, “for the purpose of repelling invasion, and for the
protection of the lives, liberty, and property of the citizens.”
In this proclamation he told the people, that while it was their duty to “obey all of the constitutional requirements of the
Federal Government,” it was equally his duty to advise them, that their “first allegiance was due to their own State, and that they were under no obligations whatever to obey the unconstitutional edicts of the military despotism which had enthroned itself at
Washington, nor to submit to the infamous and degrading sway of its minions in this State.”
At the same time two important railway bridges between
St. Louis and
Jefferson City were burnt, and the telegraph wires were cut, under the direction of a son of the
Governor.
So the disloyal
Chief Magistrate of
Missouri inaugurated civil war in that State; and those movements of troops within its borders immediately began, which continued during almost the entire period of the conflict, with the most disastrous results to the peace and prosperity of the
Commonwealth.
While the loyalists and disloyalists of Missouri were grappling in their first struggles for supremacy, the National Government was busy on the Southeastern borders of that Commonwealth, in making preparations for securing its capital city, St. Louis, from the armed occupation of the insurgents, and also from invasion of southern Illinois and Indiana, by the banded enemies of the Republic.
The possession of the mouth of the Ohio River, where it pours its tribute into the Mississippi, was of importance, as that point was the key to a vast extent of navigable waters, whose control would give great advantage to the party who should be allowed to exercise it. Both Governor Yates and the Government at Washington had been early informed of a conspiracy to seize Cairo, a small village in Illinois, on the low marshy point at the confluence of those two great rivers, and the lower portion of the Illinois Central Railway, that terminated there.
By this means they hoped to control the navigation of the Mississippi to St. Louis, and of the Ohio to Cincinnati and beyond; and also to cut off all communication with the interior of Illinois.
They further hoped that their permanent possession of that point, which gave them absolute control of the navigation of the Mississippi below, whose stream traversed a Slave-labor territory
