Out West there was a good deal of confusion in men’s minds during the first months of the great trouble—­a good deal of unsettledness, of leaning first this way, then that, then the other way.  It was hard for us to get our bearings.  I call to mind an instance of this.  I was piloting on the Mississippi when the news came that South Carolina had gone out of the Union on December 20, 1860.  My pilot-mate was a New Yorker.  He was strong for the Union; so was I. But he would not listen to me with any patience; my loyalty was smirched, to his eye, because my father had owned slaves.  I said, in palliation of this dark fact, that I had heard my father say, some years before he died, that slavery was a great wrong, and that he would free the solitary Negro he then owned if he could think it right to give away the property of the family when he was so straitened in means.  My mate retorted that a mere impulse was nothing—­anybody could pretend to a good impulse; and went on decrying my Unionism and libelling my ancestry.  A month later the secession atmosphere had considerably thickened on the Lower Mississippi, and I became a rebel; so did he.  We were together in New Orleans, January 26, when Louisiana went out of the Union.  He did his full share of the rebel shouting, but was bitterly opposed to letting me do mine.  He said that I came of bad stock—­of a father who had been willing to set slaves free.  In the following summer he was piloting a Federal gun-boat and shouting for the Union again, and I was in the Confederate army.  I held his note for some borrowed money.  He was one of the most upright men I ever knew; but he repudiated that note without hesitation, because I was a rebel, and the son of a man who had owned slaves.

In that summer—­of 1861—­the first wash of the wave of war broke upon the shores of Missouri.  Our State was invaded by the Union forces.  They took possession of St. Louis, Jefferson Barracks, and some other points.  The Governor, Claib Jackson, issued his proclamation calling out fifty thousand militia to repel the invader.

I was visiting in the small town where my boyhood had been spent —­Hannibal, Marion County.  Several of us got together in a secret place by night and formed ourselves into a military company.  One Tom Lyman, a young fellow of a good deal of spirit but of no military experience, was made captain; I was made second lieutenant.  We had no first lieutenant; I do not know why; it was long ago.  There were fifteen of us.  By the advice of an innocent connected with the organisation, we called ourselves the Marion Rangers.  I do not remember that any one found fault with the name.  I did not; I thought it sounded quite well.  The young fellow who proposed this title was perhaps a fair sample of the kind of stuff we were made of.  He was young, ignorant, good-natured, well-meaning, trivial, full of romance, and given to reading chivalric novels and singing forlorn love-ditties.  He had some