[22]
by fraud and false pretenses, by the Unconditional Union party.
While the convention was in session at St. Louis the Southern members of the legislature, spurred to action by the imminence of the crisis, and the more timid among them encouraged by the resolute attitude of the governor and the appeals of their leaders, made another effort to pass a bill to arm the State.
The debate was prolonged and bitter.
Some Conditional Union men came to the assistance of the more pronounced Southern men and urged its passage as a matter of duty and necessity—not to aid the South, but to protect the State—but their appeals were in vain.
The bill was voted down.
But in another matter the submissionists overreached themselves.
The term of James S. Green as United States senator expired on the 4th of March.
An attempt had been made before the expiration of his term to elect his successor.
Mr. Green was nominated for re-election by the Southern Rights men, but the submissionists refused to vote for him on the ground that he was a pronounced Secessionist.
Finally, on the 12th of March, Judge Waldo P. Johnson was elected, in part by the votes of the submissionists.
But when war became inevitable Judge Johnson resigned his seat in the Senate, entered the Southern army and fought for the Confederacy until the close of the war, while Mr. Green retired to private life and never spoke a word or struck a blow in behalf of Missouri or the South.
But if the submissionists in the legislature could not be brought to antagonize the Federal government they had no hesitation in opposing the Republican party, particularly when it was constituted, as it was in St. Louis, mostly of Germans.
Consequently the bill to create a board of police commissioners in St. Louis, thereby taking the control of the police force of that city out of the hands of a Republican mayor, which the senate had passed on the 2d of March, was taken up and passed by
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