Mississippi followed
Jefferson Davis with a vote amounting almost to unanimity. Florida,
Louisiana, and Alabama followed with secession ordained by conventions
and no vote allowed to the people. Texas submitted the ordinance,
after the other States had seceded, and by the force of their
example carried it by a vote of about three to one. These were
the original seven States that formed the nucleus of the Confederacy.
They had gone through what they deemed the complete process of
separation from the Union, without the slightest obstruction from
any quarter and without the interposition of any authority from
the National Government against their proceedings.

Long before the Secession movement had been developed to the extent
just detailed, Congress was in session. It assembled one month
after the Presidential election, and fifteen days before the
Disunionists of South Carolina met in their ill-starred convention.
Up to that time there had been excitement, threats of resistance
to the authority of the government in many sections of the South,
and an earnest attempt in the Cotton States to promote co-operation
in the fatal step which so many were bent on taking. But there
had been no overt act against the national authority. Federal
officers were still exercising their functions in all the States;
the customs were still collected in Southern ports; the United-
States mails were still carried without molestation from the Potomac
to the Rio Grande. But the critical moment had come. The Disunion
conspiracy had reached a point where it must go forward with
boldness, or retreat before the displayed power and the uplifted
flag of the Nation. The administration could adopt no policy so
dangerous as to permit the enemies of the Union to proceed in their
conspiracy, and the hostile movement to gain perilous headway. At
that juncture Mr. Buchanan confronted a graver responsibility than
had ever before been imposed on a President of the United States.
It devolved on him to arrest the mad outbreak of the South by
judicious firmness, or by irresolution and timidity to plunge the
Nation into dangers and horrors, the extent of which was mercifully
veiled from the vision of those who were to witness and share them.

PENNSYLVANIA AND THE UNION.

There could be no doubt in the mind of any one that the destruction
of the Union would be deplored by Mr. Buchanan as profoundly as by