Beyond question the Convention was almost unanimously pro-slavery. Some of those born and educated in the North had become sweeping and positive in their advocacy of slavery. There were none in the Convention who did not denounce the Abolitionists, and very many of its members condemned with equal severity the Republican party. All of them, with possibly a very few exceptions, desired to protect and preserve the system of human bondage that had unhappily fastened itself upon the nation. But right here where there was so high a degree of unanimity, strange to say, the Convention divided. The vexed question with them was, “What will preserve slavery?” Some of them were in favor of going out of the Union to preserve it; others with at least equal emphasis and force urged that in order to preserve it Missouri must remain in the Union. These delegates pointed to the geographical position of their State; on three sides of her were free States. If she should secede, she would be confronted on the east, north and west by a foreign nation and by hostile territory, which would be an asylum for fugitive slaves. One speaker declared: “It will make a Canada of every Northern State, and the North will be a borne from which no slave traveller will return.” Such men vehemently urged that secession would be the inevitable destruction of slavery in Missouri. If the State should secede, it would not be long before she would present to the world the anomaly of a slave State without a slave. To be sure, the Cotton States withdrew from the Union in order to preserve slavery; but even if the citizens of Missouri believed that they had the constitutional right to secede, they could not follow the example of the Gulf States, for if they did, they would blot out forever the very institution that they were so earnestly striving to save. So many in Missouri, and not a few in this Convention, reasoned.