CHAPTER XLVII. HE secession of the Southern States went on, not as the Southern people voted or in any way determined, but under the control of the cabal and its chieftain, Jefferson Davis, at Washington, as follows: There was a vote in Texas which was made necessary by the strong opposition of the loyal old general and ExPresident of the Republic of Texas, Samuel Houston. It was a formal affair, and the voting was all one way. A majority of the people of Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee were strongly opposed to separation, and so voted whenever an opportunity was given; but the leaders prepared and protracted their schemes with and without all the coercion required, until they forced these States into the movement very much as they recruited the men for their army, taking all into their armies, as the war continued, from fifty years down to boys less than fifteen years of age, by a merciless conscription. In the same way they forced these three States into the merciless fury of war. Secession and its consequences were truthfully foreshad- owed by several of their leaders and thousands of their people. Among others, Alexander H. Stephens, of Georgia, who became their Vice-President, said: "This step, secession, once taken, can never be recalled. All the baleful and withering consequences that must follow will rest on this Convention for all coming time when we and our posterity shall see our lovely South desolated by the demon of war, which this act of yours will inevitably provoke. Our green fields and waving harvests shall be trodden down by a murderous soldiery, and the fiery car of war sweep over our land, our temples of justice laid in ashes, and every horror and desolation upon us. "Who but this Convention will be held responsible for it, and but him who shall have given his vote for this unwise and ill-timed measure shall be held to a strict account for this suicidal act by the present generation, and be cursed and execrated by posterity in all coming time for the wide and desolating ruin that will immediately follow this act you now propose to perpetrate? Pause, I entreat you, and consider for a moment what reasons you can give that will satisfy yourselves in calmer moments, what reasons you can give to your fellow-sufferers in the calamity that it will bring upon us. "Now, for you to attempt to overthrow such a Government as this under which we have lived for more than threequarters of a century, in which we have gained our wealth, our standing as a Nation, our domestic safety, while the elements of peril are around us, with peace and tranquillity, accompanied with unbounded prosperity and our rights unassailed, is the height of madness, folly, and wickedness, to which I will neither lend my sanction nor my vote." On the 4th of February, 1861, delegates from the seceding States assembled at Montgomery, Alabama. On the 8th a Provisional Constitution was adopted, creating the "Confederate States of America," providing for the organization of a Provisional Government under it. In this new fundamental law nothing of form or importance was changed from the provisions of our Constitution, except that slavery, in place of liberty, was made "the corner-stone." On the 9th the delegates elected Jefferson Davis President, as had been the foregone conclusion from the beginning. They elected Alexander H. Stephens Vice-President. The latter was qualified on the 10th. Davis followed, and was qualified on the 16th, when the officers were inaugurated and the Confederates States proclaimed a nation. The Cabinet selected was Robert Toombs, of Georgia, Secretary of State; C. G. Memminger, of South Carolina, Secretary of the Treasury; L. P. Walker, of Alabama, Secretary of War; S. R. Mallory, of Florida, Secretary of the Navy; J. H. Reagan, of Texas, Postmaster-General; Judah P. Benjamin, of Louisiana, Attorney-General. In form, with ample power and the facilities and resources of the seven cotton and sugar States to rely upon, the long-planned insurrectionary Government was organized seventeen days before the inauguration of President Lincoln. Congress was still disputing over plans and com-. promises, which these revolted States would not even entertain. Doubt and hesitation prevailed everywhere, except among the projectors of this Confederacy and the pro-slavery leaders, in or out of the newly-made slave aristocracy. The insurrectionists knew beyond peradventure that the movement was an earnest and deadly one; so much so that only one party was left in their jurisdiction. They were never inclined to tolerate divided opinion, so that, after secession, they quickly converted their whole population to their side, as they did Stephens. Like many such really truehearted men, he came where he could contend with them no longer. While this was true, what folly it was for our people to talk longer of doubt or compromise, and discuss it in Congress! Nevertheless, from the success that would come from the secession and co-operation of all the slave States, the leaders in Virginia, with their conferees in and about Washington, played a double game for weeks. They held out delusive hopes to sincere-minded senators, representatives, and prominent men who saw and dreaded the coming collision. Their treacherous designs were well and faithfully executed, the purpose of which was to carry the border States into the movement with them. This talked-of compromise kept the Union leaders for weeks in a cautious, halting, and indecisive condition. Five or ten thousand troops, marched immediately into Richmond, would have aroused enough patriotic Union men, any time before the 1st of March, to have confined the revolt to the cotton States. This false palaver was kept up until Representative John A. Logan and some other brave spirits went to Richmond, handed the pretended loyalists a blank sheet of paper, on which they asked them to write their terms of compromise. They had none to write. The game was over. Logan had cut the cord. A united South had been their design; all else was delusion and deception. In the last days of January, 1861, the resignation of many of the senators from the seceding States gave the Republicans a majority in the Senate. Thus they gained control of both Houses of Congress. On the 29th the Territory of Kansas was admitted, under what was known as the Wyandot Constitution, as a free State, which had been adopted by the people of the Territory at an election held for that purpose, October 4, 1859. At this election there were 10,421 votes for and 5,530 against it. This result had been a foregone conclusion for years. The slave-leaders were defeated in every attempt to make it a slave State. After the irrecoverable defeat of the Lecompton Scheme in 1858, they closed up their plan, and proceeded, in more desperate execution, for the destruction of the Democratic party, the dissolution of the Union, and the separate supremacy of their coming empire. Mr. Lincoln was much distressed by the condition and course of public affairs at Washington and the dread prevailing in our commercial cities. The progress of disunion and the uninterfered-with spread of the insurrection and the seizure of forts, arsenals, and public property went on through the winter after his election. He could do nothing but wait with patience and thoughtful preparation for the terrible consequences, as day by day made more certain what would follow through the neglect of the wickedly-weak Administration. He had the apprehension, the prescience of the coming struggle. Was it superstition, or a partial vision, that would train and subdue his mind to the overburdening sorrow? However and whatever it was, the impression was deep and lasting, as the few to whom he explained it well understood. One feature of it, to which he used himself, as to any daily occurrence, was his oft-repeated belief, "I will not return to Springfield after this is over." When he parted with Mr. Herndon, his law partner, at the foot of the office stairway, he pointed to the old sign of "Lincoln & Herndon, Lawyers," saying: "Billy, let it hang there. I will not be back, you know; but it will show that I have something to return to when this business of being President is over. I will feel better to remember it hanging in its old place. Good-bye; God bless you!" There was something in this presentiment, or whatever it may have been called, that deeply impressed him, and which he wanted to be freed from; but it always came back to him. As a notable instance of it, in the fall of 1863 preparations for his attendance for one day at the Sanitary Fair in Chicago had been made. There was to be a run through Illinois, a day or two in the old home at Springfield, and the return through Southern Indiana, the scene of his struggling boyhood days. He was worn and weary with the dull |