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saying: “It is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your National Union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can, in any.event, be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.”
1
On the same day when the Peace Convention assembled at Washington to deliberate upon plans for preserving the Union, a band of usurpers, chosen by the secession conventions of six States without the consent or sanction of the people, met in the State House at Montgomery, in Alabama (a city of sixteen thousand inhabitants, on the Alabama River, and over three hundred miles by water from the Gulf of Mexico), for the purpose of perfecting schemes for the destruction of the Union.
They were forty-two in number, and represented the disloyal politicians of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida.2 For days heavy rains had been flooding the whole
region between the
Savannah and
Tombigbee Rivers, damaging railways, and making traveling perilous.
The train that conveyed
Stephens, and
Toombs, and
T. R. Cobb, of
Georgia, and
Chesnut, and
Withers, and
Rhett, of
South Carolina, was thrown from the track between
West Point and
Montgomery, a nd badly broken up. Everybody was frightened, but nobody was hurt; and at a late hour, on the 4th, these leaders in conspiracy entered
Montgomery.
Not long afterward the
Convention assembled in the
Legislative Hall, around which were hung, in unseemly intermingling, the portraits
