Missouri could not escape the dreaded, impending conflict. She carried the elements of it within her own bosom. Union and disunion forces angrily faced each other throughout all her borders. They jostled each other in the streets, marts and society of St. Louis. But amid these strong cross-currents of opinion, she remained securely anchored to the Union. She was, to be sure, somewhat battered and broken, but was surprisingly kept from the disaster of disunionism, that overtook most of her sister slave States. It is my object in this chapter to show that this great State, probably contrary to the expectation of a majority of her inhabitants, was early in 1861, through the very machinery devised to take her out of the Union, kept from that destructive folly. When a Southern State contemplated seceding from the Union, first of all, through an act of its legislature, it provided for the creation of a sovereign Convention. The delegates to this Convention were duly elected by the people. At the appointed time they assembled, organized for business, and took up the question of secession, which they had been chosen to examine and decide. If they passed an ordinance of secession, it was believed that by such action the relations of the State to the Union were utterly and irrevocably severed, unless the convention determined of its own motion, or was required by the legislative act that called it into being, to submit the ordinance to the people to be ratified or rejected by their suffrages. For example, in Texas and Virginia the secession ordinances were ratified by popular vote.