“Come now, strike while the iron is hot! Our enemies are whipped in Virginia. They have been whipped in Missouri. General Hardee advances in the centre, General Pillow on the right, and General McCulloch on the left, with twenty thousand brave Southern hearts to our aid. So leave your plows in the furrow, and your oxen in the yoke, and rush like a tornado upon our invaders and foes, to sweep them from the face of the earth, or force them from the soil of our State! Brave sons of the Ninth District, come and join us! We have plenty of ammunition and the cattle on ten thousand hills are ours. We have forty thousand Belgian muskets coming; but bring your guns and muskets with you, if you have them; if not come without them. We will strike our foes like a Southern thunderbolt, and soon our camp-fires will illuminate the Meramec and Missouri. Come, turn out![75] “JEFF. THOMPSON, “_Brigadier-General Commanding_.” But the itinerant Governor, whose office had been declared vacant by our sovereign Convention while he was engaged in earnest consultation with the rebel authorities at Richmond, soon after returned, and, on August 5th, inflicted upon a distracted commonwealth another proclamation, in which he supplemented and confirmed that issued by the defunct Lieutenant-Governor on the 31st of July. He declared Missouri independent of the government of the United States, and that all relations hitherto existing between the two governments were dissolved.[76] He did this of course without a shred of authority. He was no longer Governor; but even if there had been a reasonable doubt that the Convention had the power to declare his office vacant, as Governor he had no constitutional power to dissolve the relations existing between the Federal government and the State over which he was called to preside; especially since the sovereign Convention, which he and his legislature called into existence, had voted down all propositions for the secession of Missouri; and even his subservient legislature, whose seats, in July, had been declared vacant by the same Convention, did not adopt an ordinance of secession until November 2d, almost three months after the peripatetic Governor had proclaimed at New Madrid that the secession of the State was an accomplished fact. And this belated ordinance of secession was passed at Neosho, a small mining town in the extreme southwestern part of the State, near the border of Arkansas, where the defunct legislature, that assumed such extraordinary powers, found itself without a quorum, and secured one only by arbitrarily padding out its number by proxies. So in August, Missouri was declared by an officeless Governor to be out of the Union; then as late as November an unseated legislature, without a quorum, voted the secession of the State from the Union. What was already out, according