These hostile movements, coming before the inauguration of the President-elect, made all classes in St. Louis anxiously thoughtful. To be sure a few extreme pro-slavery men, who were pronounced secessionists, heartily approved of what the Cotton States had done, and were secretly rejoicing over it. From prudential motives they refrained from open and noisy support of the acts of the seceding States; but most of our fellow-citizens, who had formerly lived in States further south, regarded these early acts of secession as at least ill-timed and precipitate, as born of thoughtless, groundless hatred and blind passion. They were not at all prepared to join this open and violent revolt against the Federal government, and to engage in the unlawful seizure of its property. And in this conservative, pro-slavery class lay the hope of the unconditional Union men of St. Louis and Missouri. If its undivided influence, through any motives, however diverse, could be directed firmly against the secession of our State, we might remain in the Union. Very few in St. Louis had at all anticipated such early, radical, revolutionary action on the part of the Gulf States, and perhaps least of all was it foreseen by those who were unconditionally loyal. They had fondly hoped that threatened secession would expend itself simply in violent talk; that a second and sober thought would come to control the acts of the pro-slavery States; that the ill wind would blow over without doing any serious damage. They knew, to be sure, that a messenger from Alabama had, in December, visited our Governor and Governor-elect, urging them to join in a concerted secession movement of the slave States; that in that same month South Carolina had passed an ordinance of secession; but they could not believe that this madness would continue, that the slave States would generally be infected by it. To their minds abrupt and violent secession was so palpably foolish that it seemed to them impossible that it could be approved by any large number of men in the South. But when in January one State after another seceded, and these seceded States on the 4th of February assembled by their delegates at Montgomery, Alabama, formed a confederacy, adopted a provisional government, and elected a president and vice-president, they unmistakably heard in the distance the angry growl of the coming bloody conflict.[6]