A HISTORY OF RELIGIOUS PROSCRIPTION, THE SEIZURE OF CHURCHES, AND PEL, IN THE STATE OF MISSOURI DURING THE LATE CIVIL WAR, AND UNDER THE "TEST OATH" OF THE NEW CONSTITUTION. BY REV. W. M. LEFTWICH, D. D. VOLUME I. SAINT LOUIS: S. W. BOOK & PUB. CO., 510 & 512 WASHINGTON AVE. PUBLISHED FOR THE AUTHOR. 1870. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by W. M. LEFTWICH, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the East PREFACEЕ. "We are making history," was the convenient and popular boast of certain politico-religious fanatics during the late civil war, and for a few years subsequent to its close. It will not be considered impertinent, now that the "piping times of peace" have come, and men are permitted to look back upon the cooled passions and crystallized events of that dreadful period with somewhat of calm philosophy, if the fact should be announced that "we are writing history." It is one thing to make the history, it is quite another thing to write it. If others could afford to "make history," and, then, in popular cant and with prurient vanity, boast of it, we can well afford to write it up for them. And if our part of the task be fairly, candidly and correctly done, they will have little reason to complain if they appear before the world and go down to posterity in the light of the history they have made, and with their true character brought out by the shadows they have thrown forward upon the future. History is valuable, not merely as a catalogue of events and an inventory of things, but for the principles involved and the lessons taught. The events herein narrated are notorious, the principles involved are vital, and the lessons important. Missouri will ever be conspicuous in the annals of history as the only State in the American Union to inaugurate and authorize a formal opposition to Christianity, as an institution, and legalize the persecution of ministers of the gospel, as a class. The fact will not be denied, and the history furnishes the saddest, wisest lessons. Ministers of the gospel have been robbed, arrested, imprisoned, and even murdered, for no other cause than that they were ministers of the gospel. They have been indicted by grand juries, arrested and imprisoned with common felons, mobbed and put to death for no other cause than that of preaching the gospel without taking the "Test Oath" of the New Constitution. A pure, unsecular Christianity |