Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 9.djvu/277



O understand correctly the popular feeling in Missouri at the beginning of the War between the States, it is necessary to look back more than a generation prior to that time. It may be said that the political contest between the North and the South began, or at least assumed definite form, with the application of Missouri for admission into the Union, and that the feeling of hostility in the North engendered by that contest, toward the State, has grown with the lapse of time to the present day. During the seventy odd years which have passed, the habit of misrepresenting the State and its people has become fixed and ineradicable.

In 1819 Missouri sought admission into the Union on terms entirely in accordance with the requirements of the Federal Constitution and the precedents established in the admission of other States—Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana and Mississippi in the South, and Vermont, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois in the North—with the difference that the former recognized the institution of domestic slavery, and the latter did not. But in each instance the people of the State seeking admission had decided the