hat all those not distinctly
favorable to Secession forfeited their property to those who were.

This seemed ample warrant to the Poor White Trash banditti for seizure
of the property of any man whose principles might not be of exactly the
right shade.

Experience teaches us that that class of people are pretty certain to
find heterodox the opinions of any man who has something they may want.
It certainly made a very dark outlook for anybody in Missouri to hold
moveable property.

The turbid thrasonics of the proclamation shows that it was not written
by Price's Adjutant-General, Thomas L. Snead, who was a literary man. He
was then absent at Richmond looking after the fences of his General. The
proclamation sounds the more as if it came from the pen of our poetical
acquaintance, M. Jeff Thompson, the "Swamp Fox" of the Mississippi. It
concluded in this perfervid style:

But, in the name of God and the attributes of manhood, let me appeal to
you by considerations infinitely higher than money! Are we a generation
of driveling, sniveling, degraded slaves? Or are we men who dare assert
and maintain the rights which cannot be surrendered, and defend those
principles of everlasting rectitude, pure and high and sacred, like God,
their author? Be yours the office to choose between the glory of a free
country and a just Government, and the bondage of your children! I will
never see the chains fastened upon my country. I will ask for six and
one-half feet of Missouri soil in which to repose, but will not live to
see my people enslaved.

Do I hear your shouts? Is that your war-cry which echoes through the
land? Are you coming? Fifty thousand men! Missouri shall move to victory
with the tread of a giant! Come on, my brave boys, 50,000 heroic,
gallant, unconquerable Southern men! We await your coming.

289

Sterling Price established his headquarters again at Osceola, on the
banks of the Osage, but sent forward Gens. Rains and Steen to Lexington,
the best point on the Missouri to hold the river and afford a passage
for recruits coming in from the northern part of the State.

The results of the proclamation were not commensurate with the desperate
urgency of the appeal. Large parties of recruits, it is true, tried to
make their way toward Price's camp, but many of them were intercepted,
and dispersed; strong blows were delivered against Price's outlying
detachments, driving them in from all sides. Meanwhile those he had in