Time soon showed that this black man with his great, calm soul, and unswerving faith was right. Hon. R. M. Stewart was then governor of the state. He was a staunch Bourbon Democrat. He believed slavery to be right. He drank whiskey freely and said: “Cotton is not king, but corn and corn-whiskey are king.” He knew that. He spoke from abundant and sad experience. But he had been brought up in eastern New York. The doctrine that all men, irrespective of color, have an inalienable right to liberty had been breathed in with the air of his native hills, and had become part and parcel of his life-blood. As he looked at that infamous bill, passed almost unanimously, the teaching received in boyhood asserted itself. It was stronger than his pro-slavery Bourbonism, stronger than party ties; his soul was in revolt against this shameless iniquity. If, however, he should veto the bill, these legislators would quickly pass it over his head. So he took the only course by which it could be effectually defeated. The legislature was about to adjourn. It was his constitutional privilege to retain the bill instead of returning it with his signature or his veto. If he did not return it within twenty days, it failed to become a law. He pocketed it, and the free negroes were left in peace. And who can say that the praying, believing, black pastor did not know? But although this execrable legislation failed, it left its indelible mark on the public mind. Men were made by it sensitive and suspicious. They doubted, as never before, the possibility of maintaining a government which extended its ægis over forces so utterly antagonistic as freedom and slavery. In this portentous state of the public mind the presidential campaign of 1860 began. Throughout the Union the political conflict was fierce, but in Missouri, and in its great commercial city, St. Louis, it was unusually hot and acrimonious. African slavery was the distracting problem. None attempted to disguise it. Men on every hand spoke plainly and boldly. Most of the people of the slave states, and the citizens of Missouri among the rest, believed with all their hearts that if the Republican party should be successful at the polls, henceforth slavery would probably be excluded from the territories, and, at no distant day, would become extinct even in the states. They seemed to see on the wall the handwriting that foretold its doom. Their more fiery orators declared that if slavery were hemmed into the states, “like a scorpion girt by fire, it would sting itself to death.” This was a most unfortunate simile with which to characterize an institution that they stoutly contended was not only beneficent, but also divine.