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WM. L. YANCEY-HIS OPPOSITION TO DAVIS. 293

prospect of being at last held to something like a just official responsibility. He had long since ceased to entertain respect for Mr. Davis's abilities, either as the manager of difficult civic concerns, or as the chief controller and director of military movements; and he began, with a multitude of others, to fear that, if even the Southern struggle for independence should be eventually successful, a second, and perchance a far bloodier struggle would become necessary, in order to drag from the hands of Mr. Davis and those associated with him the injudiciously vested powers which they were every day so shamefully and so unpardonably abusing. It is with a melancholy gratification that I now call to mind the last interview I had with Mr. Yancey. It was in the hall of the Confederate House of Representatives, a month or two before his demise. He had come in for the purpose of witnessing the last successful struggle made in that body to defeat the re-enactment of the law for the universal suspension of the great writ of Liberty, the habeas corpus. The contest had just terminated, and the champions of despotic power had been prostrated on the field of controversy. Mr. Yancey approached me with extended hand, congratulated me cordially upon the triumph just achieved, and said, "Mr. Davis has at last cuffed the two houses of Congress into independence;" and intimated that he should hereafter have more hope for the Confederate cause than he had entertained for some months previous.

William L. Yancey was undoubtedly no ordinary man. He possessed an intellect of great native activity and vigor, and he had cultivated his rare natural gifts both with assiduity and success. He had but little of imagination,

and still less of humor; but he was clear, methodical, and cogent in argument; always expressed himself in chaste and polished language; his readiness and dexterity in controversy were astonishing, and his powers of sarcasm such as few men besides have possessed. He lacked nothing save a happier equipoise of his faculties, a little more quietude and sobriety of temper, a little less of tenacity in his own opinions, and a little more of deference for the views of others, to have become one of the most ef fective and useful public men that the republic has at any time produced.

Requiescat in pace!

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Movements in the South looking to Secession.-South Carolina takes the Lead in the Execution of her long-cherished Scheme.-Adoption of the Ordinance of Secession by that State.-Georgia and the other Cotton States follow the Lead of South Carolina.-Commendable Efforts in several of the States of the North to moderate Southern Excitement and secure the yielding of reasonable Concessions to the slaveholding Interests of the South.-Tennessee and the Border States still remain firm.-Extraordinary Message of Mr. Buchanan to Congress in the Month of December, 1860, and its unhappy Effect upon public Sentiment.-Furious Debate in both Houses of Congress upon the Questions pending at this Crisis.-All Efforts at Compromise prove abortive.-Unwise and unpatriotic Conduct on the Part of Southern Senators and Representatives in vacating their Seats in Congress.

THE long-hoped-for opportunity of trying the experiment of secession was now at last presented. Abraham Lincoln had been elevated to the presidency by a strictly sectional vote; and though the fact could not be denied that he had been elected in a perfectly constitutional manner, though he had not received any thing like a majority of the whole popular vote, and though he was admitted on all hands to be a man of excellent practical intellect, of many amiable qualities in domestic and social life, who had never manifested the smallest portion of that rancorous sectional malignity which so many were now displaying so deplorably on both sides of Mason and Dixon's line, yet, no sooner was it ascertained that it was almost certain that he would receive a majority of the

electoral votes of the whole Union, than steps began to be taken for carrying into effect a revolutionary project which had engrossed the thoughts and sensibilities of a small class of extreme Southern politicians, mainly confined to the State of South Carolina, for some thirty years. preceding. The modus operandi of the secession policy, as has been already made sufficiently apparent, was "to precipitate the cotton states of the South" into disunion, and bring about an early collision with the Federal government, in the confident hope that whenever it should be known in the border states of the South that war had been actually commenced, Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, North Carolina, and Tennessee would be compelled to unite in the movement, however they might be inclined to disapprove it, as well as the motives which had prompted it. This supposition was, indeed, not at all an unreasonable one, for the states just mentioned were to a very large extent possessed of property in slaves; and though the opinion prevailed therein very widely that no such solid guarantee for their slaveholding interests as that afforded by the Federal Constitution was at all likely to be conferred by a sectional war, yet perceiving, as they would be sure to do, that the relative strength of the slaveholding states left in the Union after the withdrawal of those of the cotton-growing region would be so far lessened as to leave them thereafter an easy prey to abolition hostility, it was regarded as next to certain that they would in the end feel constrained to join any new confederacy which might be set on foot in the South having the least prospect of strength and stability.

MR. YANCEY IN THE NORTH IN 1860.

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It was strongly suspected by the friends of the Union in the South, and had been distinctly charged to be true, in various forms, while the presidential contest was pending, that the followers of the great secession leaders were desirous that the Republicans should be successful therein, as only in this way would they be supplied with the pretext so much desired by many for withdrawing from civil associations with the free states of the North; and it is yet well remembered that Mr. Yancey, with that extraordinary skill as a political manager which distinguished him, had performed a pilgrimage to the North early in the summer of 1860 to counteract this very charge of desiring Mr. Lincoln's election, so far as the same applied to himself, the effect of which he apprehended might be such as to incapacitate him for the ultimate consummation of his hopes on this subject, unless he could succeed in securing to himself an opportunity of showing to his confiding partisans that he had really exerted himself in the North against the Republican presidential ticket. With what remarkable adroitness he executed this device no one who was a close observer of the events of that extraordinary period could have failed to observe; and yet nothing is more certain than the fact that the extremists of the South did indirectly cooperate, to the full extent of their power, in bringing about the election of Mr. Lincoln, with the views and purposes just specified. No one need, therefore, to feel the smallest surprise at finding in the pages of Mr. Greeley's work the following very striking paragraph:

"From an early stage of the canvass, the Republicans could not help seeing that they had the potent aid in

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