It cannot, then, be a matter of surprise to any--victors or vanquished--that these 16 States, with a pecuniary interest at stake reaching the enormous sum of $3,600,000,000 should be aroused and excited at the advent of such a party to power. Would it not rather be an instance of unprecedented blindness and fatuity, if the people and Governments of these 16 Slaveholding States were, under such circumstances, to manifest quiet indifference, and to make no effort to avoid the destruction which awaited them? The meeting of the Legislature naturally brought to the State Capital at Jefferson City all of the powerful coterie which was self-charged with the work of taking Missouri into the road whither South Carolina was leading the Cotton States. This coterie included the Judges of the Supreme Court and all the State officials, and the United States Senators and Representatives. Ever since the Anti-Benton faction had accomplished the great Senator's defeat, the shibboleth for admission into the higher circles of Missouri Democracy had been "Southern Rights." As the mass of the Middle Class Democrats favored Senator Douglas's plan of letting the settlers in each Territory decide for themselves whether they would have Slavery, it was highly politic for every candidate to claim that he was a Douglas Democrat. It must be known to the inner ring, however, that he was at heart fully in accord with the views of the extreme Pro-Slavery men, and ready at the word to join the Secessionists. So thorough was this preliminary organization, that while in Missouri tens of thousands of professed Union men went over to Secession when the stress came, there was no instance of an avowed Pro-Slavery man cleaving to the side of the Union. 27 Next to Gov. Jackson,--surpassing him in intellectual acuteness and fertile energy,--was Lieut.-Gov. Thos. C. Reynolds, then in his 40th year, a short, full-bodied man, with jet-black hair and eyes shaded by gold-rimmed glasses. He boasted of being born of Virginia parents in South Carolina, but some of the Germans claimed to know that his right name was Reinhold, and that he was a Jew born in Prague, the Capital of Bohemia, and brought to this country when a child. He was a man of more than ordinary ability, and had accomplishments quite unusual in that day.