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if
Lincoln was elected, he “would not remain in the
Union one hour.”
He applauded, as hopeful words for his class, the declaration of
Howell Cobb (then
President Buchanan's
Secretary of the Treasury), at a public gathering in the
city of New York, that, in the event of
Mr. Lincoln's election, secession would have the “sympathy and co-operation of the Administration,” and that he “did not believe another Congress of the United States would meet.”
He hailed with delight, as chivalrous to the last degree, the assurances of
Lawrence M. Keitt, of the House of Representatives, in a public speech, at
Washington, that
President Buchanan was “pledged to secession, and would be held to it ;” that “
South Carolina would shatter the accursed Union,” and that, if she could not accomplish it otherwise, “she would throw her arms round the pillars of the
Constitution, and involve all the States in a common ruin.”
He listened with peculiar pleasure to the declaration of
Robert Barnwell Rhett, also of
South Carolina,
that “all true statesmanship in the
South consists in forming combinations and shaping events, so as to bring about, as speedily as possible, a dissolution of the present Union, and a Southern Confederacy.” --“Rather than submit one moment to Black Republican rule,”
Wise wrote to an old friend of his father, in the
North, “I would fight to the last drop of blood to resist its fanatical oppression.
Our minds are made up.
The South will not wait until the 4th of March.
We will be well under arms before then, or our safety must be guaranteed.”
1
Everywhere the conspirators and their followers and agents were sleepless in vigilance and tireless in energy. . Hundreds of telegraphic messages, volumes of letters, and scores of couriers, went from plantation to plantation, from village to village, from city to city, and from State to State, wherever the Slave power held sway, stirring up the people to revolt; whilst prominent individuals and public bodies hastened, on hearing of the result of the election, to swell the grand chorus of treasonable speech, led by the dozen — they were but a little more in number — of the chief conspirators.2
Three, if not four, of these chief conspirators were President Buchanan's cabinet ministers and constitutional advisers.
The three were Howell Cobb, of Georgia, Secretary of the Treasury; John B. Floyd, of Virginia, Secretary of War; and Jacob Thompson, of Mississippi, Secretary of the Interior. William H. Trescot, of South Carolina, who for many years had
