thousands of citizen soldiers, mostly Germans, could have been gathered, with arms in their hands, with the quickness of fire signals at night, at any point in the city.  The secessionists had preceded this armed movement of the Union men by the organization of a body known as ‘minute-men.’  But the promptness and superior skill that characterized Frank Blair’s movement subverted the secession scheme; and it was first repudiated, and then its existence denied.  The day of election came, and passed peacefully.  The unconditional Union ticket was elected by a sweeping majority of five thousand votes.  The result throughout the State was not less decisive and surprising.  Of the entire number of delegates composing the convention, not one was chosen who had dared to express secession sentiments before the people; and the aggregate majority of the Union candidates in the State amounted to about eighty thousand.  The shock of this defeat for the moment paralyzed the conspirators; but their evil inspirations soon put them to work again.  Their organs in Missouri assumed an unfriendly tone towards the convention, which was to meet in Jefferson City.  The legislature that had called the convention remained in session in the same place, but made no fit preparations for the assembling of the convention, or for the accommodation and pay of the members.  The debate in the legislature on the bill for appropriations for these purposes was insulting to the convention, the more ill-tempered and ill-bred secession members intimating that such a body of ‘submissionists’ were unworthy to represent Missouri, and undeserving of any pay.  The manifest ill feeling between the two bodies—­the legislature elected eighteen months previously, and without popular reference to the question of secession, and the convention chosen fresh from the people, to decide on the course of the State—­soon indicated the infelicity of the two remaining in session at the same time and in the same place.  Accordingly, within a few days after the organization of the convention, it adjourned its session to the city of St. Louis.  It did not meet a cordial reception there.  So insolent had the secession spirit already grown, that on the day of the assembling of the convention in that city, the members were insulted by taunts in the streets and by the ostentatious floating of the rebel flag from the Democratic head-quarters, hard by the building in which they assembled.

Being left in the undisputed occupancy of the seat of government, the governor, lieutenant-governor, and legislature gave themselves up to the enactment of flagrant and undisguised measures of hostility to the federal government.  Commissioners from States that had renounced the Constitution, and withdrawn, as they claimed, from the Union, arrived at Jefferson City as apostles of treason.  They were received as distinguished and honorable ambassadors.  A joint session of the legislature was called to hear their communications.  The lieutenant-governor,