Websters March 7th Speech/Secession | Page 7

the non-slave-holding states as enemies". The "Address" recommended "all the assailed states to provide in the last resort for their separate welfare by the formation of a compact and a Union". "The object of this [Nashville Convention] is to familiarize the public mind with the idea of dissolution", rightly judged the Richmond Whig and the Lynchburg Virginian.
Radical resistance men controlled the legislature and "cordially approved" the disunion resolution and address, chose delegates to the Nashville Convention, appropriated $20,000 for their expenses and $200,000 for "necessary measures for protecting the state . . . in the event of the passage of the Wilmot Proviso", etc.[13] These actions of Mississippi's legislature one day before Webster's 7th of March speech mark approximately the peak of the secession movement.
[13] Mar. 6, 1850. Laws (Miss.), pp. 521-526.
Governor Quitman, in response to public demand, called the legislature and proposed "to recommend the calling of a regular convention . . . with full power to annul the federal compact". "Having no hope of an effectual remedy . . . but in separation from the Northern States, my views of state action will look to secession."[14] The legislature supported Quitman's and Jefferson Davis's plans for resistance, censured Foote's support of the Compromise, and provided for a state convention of delegates."[15]
[14] Claiborne, Quitman, IL 37; Hearon, p. 161 n.
[15] Hearon, pp. 180-181; Claiborne, Quitman, II. 51-52.
Even the Mississippi "Unionists" adopted the six standard points generally accepted in the South which would justify resistance. "And this is the Union party", was the significant comment of the New York Tribune. This Union Convention, however, believed that Quitman's message was treasonable and that there was ample evidence of a plot to dissolve the Union and form a Southern confederacy. Their programme was adopted by the State Convention the following year."[16] The radical Mississippians reiterated Calhoun's constitutional guarantees of sectional equality and non-interference with slavery, and declared for a Southern convention with power to recommend "secession from the Union and the formation of a Southern confederacy".[17]
[16] Nov. 10, 1850, Hearon, pp. 178-180; 1851, pp. 209-212.
[17] Dec. 10, Southern Rights Assoc. Hearon, pp. 183-187.
"The people of Mississippi seemed . . . determined to defend their equality in the Union, or to retire from it by peaceful secession. Had the issue been pressed at the moment when the excitement was at its highest point, an isolated and very serious movement might have occurred, which South Carolina, without doubt, would have promptly responded to."[18]
[18] Claiborne, Quitman, II. 52.
In Georgia, evidence as to "which way the wind blows" was received by the Congressional trio, Alexander Stephens, Toombs, and Cobb, from trusted observers at home. "The only safety of the South from abolition universal is to be found in an early dissolution of the Union." Only one democrat was found justifying Cobb's opposition to Calhoun and the Southern Convention.[19]
[19] July 1, 1849. Corr., p. 170 (Amer. Hist. Assoc., Annual Report, 1911, vol. II.).
Stephens himself, anxious to "stick to the Constitutional Union" reveals in confidential letters to Southern Unionists the rapidly growing danger of disunion. "The feeling among the Southern members for a dissolution of the Union . . . is becoming much more general." "Men are now [December, 1849] beginning to talk of it seriously who twelve months ago hardly permitted themselves to think of it." "Civil war in this country better be prevented if it can be." After a month's "farther and broader view", he concluded, "the crisis is not far ahead . . . a dismemberment of this Republic I now consider inevitable."[20]
[20] Johnston, Stephens, pp. 238-239, 244; Smith, Political History of Slavery, 1. 121.
On February 8, 1850, the Georgia legislature appropriated $30,000 for a state convention to consider measures of redress, and gave warning that anti-slavery aggressions would "induce us to contemplate the possibility of a dissolution".[21] "I see no prospect of a continuance of this Union long", wrote Stephens two days later.[22]
[21] Laws (Ga.), 1850, pp. 122, 405-410.
[22] Johnston, Stephens, p. 247.
Speaker Cobb's advisers warned him that "the predominant feeling of Georgia" was "equality or disunion", and that "the destructives" were trying to drive the South into disunion. "But for your influence, Georgia would have been more rampant for dissolution than South Carolina ever was." "S. Carolina will secede, but we can and must put a stop to it in Georgia."[23]
[23] Corr., pp. 184,193-195, 206-208, July 21. Newspapers, see Brooks, in Miss. Valley Hist. Review, IX. 289.
Public opinion in Georgia, which had been "almost ready for immediate secession", was reversed only after the passage of the Compromise and by means of a strenuous campaign against the Secessionists which Stephens, Toombs, and Cobb were obliged to return to Georgia to conduct to a Successful issue.[24] Yet even the Unionist Convention of Georgia, elected by this campaign, voted almost unanimously "the Georgia platform" already described, of