dent companies of volunteers were to be found, adequately equipped, and not inadequately trained to such service as volunteers might commonly expect to be called upon to render. But the habits of the Southern people and the distribution of population in the South were alike unfavorable to any general military organization. At the North, matters were in a somewhat better state. In Massachusetts especially, thanks to the somewhat ostentatious administration of Governor Banks, and in New York, at the time of the "John Brown raid,” many regiments of militia were to be found not wholly unaccustomed to regimental action; while there is reason to believe that not more than one or two such regiments then existed in the whole extent of the South. Steps were immediately taken to improve the military organization of the Southern people in their several districts. Col. Jefferson Davis, then a senator of the United States from Mississippi, who had won distinction in the field during the Mexican war, and had acquired experience in military administration as secretary of war in the cabinet of President Pierce; Henry A. Wise, then governor of Virginia, a man almost insanely impetuous in temperament, but ingenious and indefatigable in the pursuit of his objects; and John B. Floyd, secretary of war in the cabinet of President Buchanan, an ardent and unscrupulous partisan of "Southern independence,” devoted themselves with a particular zeal to this work. It was impossible that the measures necessary to success in such an effort should not heighten the animosity of the Southern people against the people of the North. The identification of the ideas of abolitionism and of the North had for several years been complete in the minds of the common people of the slaveholding States. A further step was now taken, and the "minute men" of the Southern States rapidly came to consider themselves the sentinels and body-guard of Southern society against the threatened invasions of a fanatical North. Upon this irritated and dangerous condition of the body politic the presidential election of 1860 supervened.

Four candidates were eventually presented to the people for their suffrages, by means of that new system of national conventions for nomination which had gradually established itself as a part of the political machinery of the American government. One of these candidates, Mr. Lincoln, was a politician of Illinois of no large national experience, who had adroitly advanced himself, and had still more adroitly suffered himself to be advanced into the front rank of the heterogeneous sec tional party of which he was suddenly made the champion and representative. With a facility of habits and tastes, and an apparent simplicity of character, which commended him to the sympathy of the lower orders of his countrymen, he united a mystical fanaticism of temperament which commanded for him the confidence of those who aimed at a moral and political revolution in America, and a practised cunning which enabled him to extract from his double character of politician and of reformer the utmost possible advantage without committing himself absolutely to either.

The most formidable opponent of Mr. Lincoln was Mr. Douglas, also of Illinois, of whom mention has before been made. Mr. Douglas occupied a singular and trying position. He had incurred the personal animosity of President Buchanan, who exerted the whole force of his official influence to prevent the nomination of Mr. Douglas by the Democratic party. The ground taken by Mr. Douglas on the question of slavery was almost equally odious to the extreme representatives of Southern and of Northern passion. To himself the institution of slavery was morally indifferent, and this fact impaired his influence at the North with men who, while they condemned political abolitionism as being at once impolitic and unjust, were keenly alive to the shame and anomaly of the vigorous existence of slavery in the American Republic. At the South, while Mr. Douglas was detested by those who aspired after Southern independence, and disliked by the much larger body of those who desired to see the slave property of the South

positively protected by the Federal authority beyond the limits. of the States, he was popular with the numbers who cared more for the Union than for slavery, who regarded abolitionism as a sort of malignant invention which might and ought to be put down, and who shrank from the disruption of the confederacy either in a blind horror of all great political changes, or from a wise prescience of the calamities which must follow in its train. In the hope of propitiating the South, and harmonizing its own distracted elements, the Democratic party had appointed its Convention to be held at Charleston, in South Carolina. The Convention accordingly met in that city, April 23d, 1860. After a session of three weeks, the Convention adjourned in disorder, to meet in Baltimore, June 18th; the delegates of all the "Cotton States" having withdrawn from the body, nominally upon the refusal of the Convention to adopt the "platform" proposed by them, but really upon a question of candidates, the friends of Mr. Douglas insisting, in the face of his own remonstrances,* that he should be nominated, with some moderate Southern man, like Mr. Orr, of South Carolina, Mr. Fitzpatrick, of Alabama, or Mr. Johnson, of Georgia, as the vice-presidential candidate upon the same ticket.

When the Convention met again in Baltimore the temper of the members was found to be more uncompromising, and their differences were found to be more irreconcilable than before. The Border slave States, which had refused to leave the Convention at Charleston, abandoned it at Baltimore, Missouri alone declining so to do, and coalescing with the States of the

*There can be no doubt that the consent of Mr. Douglas to appear as a candidate was wrung from him by his friends. Had he been certain of election, his ambition must have made him prefer the immense power he would have wielded for four years, as the Democratic leader of the Senate, under a Democratic President, with the assurance of the "succession," at the end of that time; to four years of executive authority, accepted under circumstances peculiarly embarrassing, and leaving him, when they were fulfilled, a man still in the prime of life, but practically "shelved."

Gulf, conferred a presidential nomination upon Mr. Breckinridge, then vice-president of the Union; a man amiable and well-disposed, but infirm of will, and in politics vacillating, whose nomination, in the circumstances, was a simple offer to the North of the grand alternative of "Southern Rights" or secession.

The original Convention nominated Mr. Douglas, with Mr. Fitzpatrick of Alabama. The latter gentleman, after promising acceptance, gave way to private representations and declined the proffered honor, which was finally assumed by Mr. Johnson of Georgia.

Mr. Bell of Tennessee, a respectable politician of the school of Clay, was also made a presidential candidate, with Mr. Everett of Massachusetts as vice-president, by a "Constitutional Union party." These latter nominations were simply a cry of conservative despair.

In November, 1860, Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, was chosen president of the United States by an overwhelming majority of the electoral vote of the States. He received, however, a marked minority of the total popular vote of the Union, and his leading competitor, Mr. Douglas, fell but a little way behind him in the popular vote of the North itself.

This event was almost immediately followed by the formal secession from the Union of the State of South Carolina. Whether this secession, which took place Dec. 24th, 1860, was intended by all who assisted in bringing it about to be final; or whether a large number of influential men, even in South Carolina, hoped by this decisive act to compel a reconsideration of the past in American politics, and the eventual reconstruction of the Union upon principles more favorable to the peace of the slaveholding States, is a question certainly open to discussion, but not here to be discussed.

The majority of the people of South Carolina itself undoubtedly believed that a complete separation, political and fiscal, from the other States of the Union, as well Southern as North

ern, would serve their local interests as much as it gratified their local passions. That the power of the Federal government would ever be employed to coerce them into accepting the authority of the newly chosen national executive, or that if so employed it could achieve such a result, few of them believed. In anticipation of the possibility of such an event, however, the State of South Carolina at once began military preparations, mainly for the defense of the harbor of Charleston, but these preparations were neither extensive nor formidable.

Immediately upon the passage of the ordinance of secession, the news of which was received at the North, at first with incredulity, and afterwards with derision, commissioners were appointed to visit the city of Washington and open negotiations with the Federal government for a peaceable separation. These commissioners, three in number, after being indirectly encouraged by President Buchanan to believe that informal communication would be held with them, addressed a letter to that functionary, January 3d, 1861, which was returned to them within three hours after it had been received, with an indorsement declaring that the president could not read or consider such a document. Upon this the commissioners, one at least of whom, Mr. Orr, there is reason to believe was honestly anxious for such an amicable arrangement of the terms of secession as might not wholly close the door against any subsequent revision of the whole matter, instantly returned to South Carolina. On their way home they passed through Richmond, where their account of the condition of affairs at once exhilarated the then small party of secession in Virginia, and alarmed the much larger party in that State of those who hoped that Virginia in virtue of her traditional influence and her actual importance might be enabled to control the rising tide of events, and avert the now impending peril of civil war.

It would be beside our present purpose to recite at length