[
42]
H. Hammond (son of a
New England schoolmaster, and an extensive land and slave holder, near the banks of the
Savannah River), to consult upon a plan of treasonable operations.
Hammond was then a member of the United States Senate, pledged by solemn oath to see that the
Republic received no hurt; and yet, under his roof, he met in conclave a band of men, like himself sworn to be defenders of his native land, from foes without and foes within, to plot schemes for the ruin of that country.
At his table, and in secret session in his library, sat
William H. Gist, then
Governor of
South Carolina;
ex-governor James H. Adams;
James L. Orr, once
Speaker of the
National House of Representatives; the entire Congressional Delegation of
South Carolina,
1 excepting William Porcher Miles (who was compelled by sickness to be absent), and several other prominent men of that State.
Then and there the plan for the overt act
of rebellion, performed by South Carolinians in Convention at
Charleston, sixty days later, seems to have been arranged.
They were assured that their well-managed sundering of the Democratic party at
Charleston, in April,
2 would result in the election of
Mr. Lincoln, and that the pretext for rebellion, so long and anxiously waited for, would be presented within a fort-night from that time.
This meeting was followed by similar cabals in the other cotton-growing States; and, in Virginia, that ever-restless mischief-maker, ex-governor Henry A. Wise, with R. M. T. Hunter, John Tyler, James M. Mason, the author of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, who had been his co-plotter against the life of the Republic four years before,3 and other leading politicians in that State, were exceedingly active in arranging plans for that Commonwealth to join her Southern sisters in the work of treason.
Wise, who assumed to be their orator on all occasions, had openly declared, that
