Missouri shall be added to the constellation of the
Confederate States of America.

With best wishes, I am, very respectfully, yours,

JEFFERSON DAVIS.

This promise was at once made good by a letter to the Governor of
Louisiana to deliver the required war material from the stores in the
lately-captured arsenal at Baton Rouge. These, carefully disguised as
marble, ale, and other innocent stores, were shipped upon the steamboat
J. C. Swan, and consigned to a well-known Union firm in St. Louis, with
private marks to identify them to the Secessionists, who, on the watch
for them, had them at once loaded on drays and taken to Camp Jackson.
Their movements, however, were made known to Blair and the Committee of
Safety by their spies, and Capt. Lyon was urged to seize the stores
upon their arrival at the wharf, but he preferred to allow them to reach
their destination, where they would serve to fix the purpose of the camp
upon those commanding the garrison.

Lyon, who as a soldier had naturally chafed under the insulting presence
on the hills of a force hardly concealing its hostility under a thin
vail of professed loyalty, at once resolved upon the capture of the
camp. The more cautious of the Union men tried to restrain him. They
argued that the camp would expire by legal limitation within a few days.
To this Lyon opposed the probability that the Legislature would pass the
military bill in some form and make the camp a permanent one.

71

Then, those timorous ones insisted that the forms of the law should
be employed, and that the United States Marshal, armed with a writ of
replevin to recover United States property, should precede the attack
upon the camp. Lyon fretted under this; The writ of replevin was a
tiresome formality to men who talked of fighting and were ready to
fight; furthermore, if served and recognized, Frost might put off the
Marshal with some trumpery stuff of no value. Still further came the
news that Harney, with Gen. Scott's assistance, had reinstated himself
in favor at Washington, and would return the following Sunday. It was
now Wednesday, the 8th of May.

Above all, Lyon saw with a clearer insight than the strict law-abiders
the immense moral effect of his contemplated action. Heretofore all the
initiativeness, all the aggressiveness, all the audacity, had been on
the side of the Secessionists. They were everywhere taking daring steps
to the confusion and overthrow of t