the large German population in that city
was especially ready to enlist for the Union. Many of the German
immigrants of those days had come to America partly for the sake of its
free institutions. A State Convention was summoned by the Governor to
pass an Ordinance of Secession, but its electors were minded otherwise,
and the Convention voted against secession. In several encounters
Lyon, who was an intrepid soldier, defeated the forces of the Governor;
in June he took possession of the State capital, driving the Governor
and Legislature away; the State Convention then again assembled and set
up a Unionist Government for the State. This new State Government was
not everywhere acknowledged; conspiracies in the Southern interest
continued to exist in Missouri; and the State was repeatedly molested
by invasions, of no great military consequence, from Arkansas. Indeed,
in the autumn there was a serious recrudescence of trouble, in which
Lyon lost his life. But substantially Missouri was secured for the
Union. Naturally enough, a great many of the citizens of Missouri who
had combined to save their State to the Union became among the
strongest of the "Radicals" who will later engage our attention. Many,
however, of the leading men who had done most in this cause, including
the friends of Blair, Lincoln's Postmaster-General, adhered no less
emphatically to the "Conservative" section of the Republicans.

2. _Bull Run_.

Thus, in the autumn of 1861, North and South had become solidified into
something like two countries. In the month of July, which now concerns
us, this process was well on its way, but it is to be marked that the
whole long tract of Kentucky still formed a neutral zone, which the
Northern Government did not wish to harass, and which perhaps the South
would have done well to let alone, while further west in Missouri the
forces of the North were not even as fully organised as in the East.
So the only possible direction in which any great blow could be struck
was the direction of Richmond, now the capital, and it might seem,
therefore, the heart, of the Confederacy. The Confederate Congress was
to meet there on July 20. The _New York Tribune_, which was edited by
Mr. Horace Greeley, a vigorous writer whose omniscience was unabated by
the variation of his own opinion, was the one journal of far-reaching
influence in the North; and it only gave exaggerated point to a general
feeling when it declared t