Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War. Volume 1.

[100] and he entered into the schemes of the conspirators with all the powers that he possessed.

The members of the Convention were chosen on the 3d of December.

David F. Jamison.

Not one had been nominated who was opposed to secession; and when, on the 17th,

December, 1860.

they assembled in the Baptist Church at Columbia, they were all of one mind in relation to the main question. David F. Jamison, a delegate from Barnwell District, was chosen temporary chairman. He made a brief speech, in which he counseled the members to beware of outside pressure, and disputations among themselves. He trusted that the door was now forever closed “from any further connection with our Northern confederates;” and then, either ignorantly or wickedly, asserted that “every Northern State” had trampled the Constitution under foot, “by placing on their books statutes nullifying the laws for the recovery of fugitive slaves!” ¹ He concluded by saying that he could offer them nothing better, in inaugurating such a movement, than the words of Danton at the commencement of the French Revolution: “To dare! and again to dare! and without end to dare!”

A difficulty now presented itself. A motion was made, by Charles G. Memminger, to receive the credentials and swear in the members. It was suggested that the Constitution of South Carolina provided that they should, on such an occasion, take an oath to support the Constitution of the United States. “But we have come here,” said ex-Governor Adams, the discoverer of this lion in the way, “to break down a government, not to take an oath to support it.” The difficulty was a slight one, in the opinion of lawless men. What did they care for any constitutions? There was, to them, no sanctity in oaths; and so they formed their Convention without oaths, in defiance of the Constitution of South Carolina. They elected their temporary chairman permanent President of their body, and appointed B. F. Arthur the clerk. They well knew that the Constitution of South Carolina declared their Convention, when organized, to be an unlawful assemblage, and that their acts could have no legal effect. If secession had been lawful, the ordinances of those usurpers were never legally binding upon a soul on the earth.

If these men had no respect for written constitutions, they had for the unwritten and inexorable laws of being, and heeded their menaces. They were about to proceed in their revolutionary schemes, after the Rev. Mr. Breaker had invoked the blessings of the Almighty upon their proposed work, when intelligence came that the small-pox was raging as an epidemic in Columbia. Men who were professedly ready to die for the cause turned pale at the message, and proposed an immediate flight, by railway, to Charleston. William Porcher Miles, just from his abandoned seat in Congress