First of all there were some loyal white refugees. While most of these were from the western and interior counties of our own State, a few came from States farther south. They fled from their homes, which had been made unsafe by rebel guerrillas and bushwhackers. So far as possible they had converted their property into money, which they brought with them. They came to stay. Some of them purchased residences in St. Louis. Many of them, by the stern logic of war, had become emancipationists, while they retained some of their old prejudices. The notion that everything vile lurked under the harmless word, abolitionist, had been woven into the very tissue of their being. They persistently believed that there were at least three devils in the North and East: an editorial devil, Horace Greeley; a clerical devil, Henry Ward Beecher; and a lecturing devil, Wendell Phillips. But war by its victories and defeats gradually illuminated their minds. The horns and hoofs of these imaginary devils slowly faded from their vision. And a few years after the surrender at Appomattox, many of these very men by tongue and ballot endeavored to make the editorial devil President of the United States. But there was a still larger number of rebel refugees. They were usually found in knots at boarding-houses kept by Southern sympathizers. They were always hilarious when the rebel army was victorious, and crestfallen when it suffered defeat. Most of them had sufficient means, snatched from the ravages of war, to sustain them in comfort. A few of them were rich. For the most part they were permitted to live in peace among us, securely shielded by the government that they sought to overthrow. Occasionally, they were found aiding those in arms against the United States, and a few of them, as we have already noted, were arrested and sent beyond the lines of the Federal army. But by far the most numerous class of refugees were poor and wretched beyond description. They entered St. Louis in rags, often hatless and shoeless, sallow, lean, half-starved, unkempt. Very many of them were women and children in pitiable plight, half naked, shivering, penniless, dispirited. Most of them professed to be loyal. Their husbands and fathers had been killed because they were Union men. Some of them were the wives and children of Union volunteer soldiers from Arkansas; on that account the rebels drove them from their homes. Moreover, the Confederates, to a considerable extent, recruited their armies from the poor whites, whose families they left to find their way into the Union lines. But many that came were dazed. They hardly knew why the war was being waged. Whether they were loyal or disloyal it would have puzzled the most astute to find out. Pinching want had driven them from their comfortless dwellings in the South. Their main quest was bread.