At the outbreak of the Civil War Missouri was peculiarly situated. She was surrounded on three sides by free states. The great majority of her own people were for the Union, but her government, with Clairborne Jackson as the state executive, was in sympathy with the South. As the extreme Southern States one after another seceded from the Union, Missouri was confronted with the question: What position she ought to assume in the impending conflict. The question was referred to a state convention in which appeared no secessionists. Indeed, the people of Missouri in this election by a majority of eighty thousand decided against secession. The convention, in setting forth the attitude of the state on the subject, said that Missouri's position was, "Evidently that of a state whose interests are bound up in the maintenance of the Union, and whose kind feelings and strong sympathies are with the people of the Southern States, with whom we are connected by ties of friendship and blood. We want the peace and harmony of the country restored, and we want them with us. To go with them as they are now * * * * is to ruin ourselves without doing them any good." [59] While this doubtless voiced the sentiment of a great majority of {LXV} Missouri's people, the government of the state and many thousands of its inhabitants sympathized with the South. The general assembly of the state authorized the raising and equipment of large military forces held subject, of course, to the orders of the governor, under the pretense of being prepared to repel invasion from any quarter whatsoever, and enable the state to maintain a neutral attitude. The governor refused to raise Missouri's quota of four regiments under President Lincoln's first call for seventy-five thousand men to suppress the rebellion, on the ground that these regiments were intended to form "part of the President's army, to make war upon the people of the seceded states." This he declared to be illegal, unconstitutional, and therefore could not be complied with. This precipitated a conflict between the state and national forces that resulted in a civil war within the state since some of her citizens sided with the general government and some with the state. On the 20th of April, 1861, the state militia under the governor's orders captured the Federal arsenal at Liberty, Clay county, and in the nineteen months following that event "over three hundred battles and skirmishes were fought within the limits of the state," and it is assumed that in the last two years of the war, there were half as many more; "and it may be said of them," continues our historian, "that they were relatively more destructive of life, as by this time the contest had degenerated into a disgraceful internecine struggle." [60]