Georgia, and Louisiana had followed South Carolina by passing Ordinances
of Secession, and on that date representatives of these States met at
Montgomery in Alabama to found a new Confederacy. Texas, where
considerable resistance was offered by Governor Houston, the adventurous
leader under whom that State had separated from Mexico, was in process of
passing the like Ordinance. Virginia and North Carolina, which lie north
of the region where cotton prevails, and with them their western
neighbour Tennessee, and Arkansas, yet further west and separated from
Tennessee by the Mississippi River, did not secede till after Lincoln's
inauguration and the outbreak of war. But the position of Virginia
(except for its western districts) admitted of very little doubt, and
that of Tennessee and North Carolina was known to be much the same.
Virginia took a historic pride in the Union, and its interest in slavery
was not quite the same as that of the cotton States, yet its strongest
social ties were to the South. This State was now engaged in a last idle
attempt to keep itself and other border States in the Union, with some
hope also that the departed States might return; and on this same
February 6, a "Peace Convention," invited by Virginia and attended by
delegates from twenty-one States, met at Washington with ex-President
Tyler in the chair; but for Virginia it was all along a condition of any
terms of agreement that the right of any State to secede should be fully
acknowledged.

The Congress of the seceding States, which met at Montgomery, was
described by Stephens as, "taken all in all, the noblest, soberest, most
intelligent, and most conservative body I was ever in." It has been
remarked that Southern politicians of the agitator type were not sent to
it. It adopted a provisional Constitution modelled largely upon that of
the United States. Jefferson Davis, who had retired to his farm, was
sent for to become President; Stephens, as already said, became
Vice-President. The delegates there were to continue in session for the
present as the regular Congress. Whether sobered by the thought that
they were acting in the eyes of the world, or in accordance with their
own prevailing sentiment, these men, some of whom had before urged the
revival of the slave trade, now placed in their Constitution a perpetual
prohibition of it, and when, as a regular legislature, they afterwards
passed a penal statute which carried out this int