The loyal men of St. Louis turned their eyes to Washington, hoping that they might discern something there which would quiet their baleful apprehensions. But instead of sunshine and hope, they saw there the same black war-cloud. The representatives and senators of the seceding States were shamelessly plotting the overthrow of the very government in whose legislative councils they still continued to sit. In the Cabinet of the President were some who were aiding and abetting secession. The Secretary of War, John Buchanan Floyd of Virginia, had sent large detachments of the standing army to distant and not easily accessible parts of the country, and had removed large quantities of arms and ammunition from Northern to Southern arsenals, that, at the beginning of the conflict, which he evidently believed to be close at hand, the South might be better prepared for battle than the North. In the midst of all this treachery the chief executive sat nerveless. In his last annual message, he declared that the general government had no power to coerce a State. He said: “After much serious reflection, I have arrived at the conclusion that no such power has been delegated to Congress, nor to any other department of the Federal government.” He again declared: “The power to make war against a State is at variance with the whole spirit and intent of the Constitution.” Moreover, he asserted: “Congress possesses many means of preserving it (the Union) by conciliation; but the sword was not placed in its hand to preserve it by force.” This message for a moment quite disheartened the loyal men of our city. The executive of a great nation, by his own public confession, stood powerless before those domestic foes that were tearing down the government bequeathed us by our fathers. In his message he assured them that with impunity they could complete their work of dismembering the Republic. So for a time the secessionists seemed to have the upper hand all around; at Montgomery they ruled over the seceded States; at Washington they subsidized to their own interests the Federal government; its President openly proclaiming that, do what they might, he had no constitutional power to lay upon them punitively even the weight of a finger. We had no Andrew Jackson in the presidential chair. In 1832, when South Carolina arrayed herself against the general government and proceeded to nullify its legislative acts, he said with an emphasis which showed that he was conscious of having the whole constitutional power of the nation behind him to make his words effective, “The Union, it must, and shall be, preserved;” and nullification in weakness and shame hid itself. If we had had such a President in December, 1860, when South Carolina seceded, we might have been saved from the awful conflict that, unchecked in its beginning, daily gathered to itself power until it was almost beyond control.