very possible angle to arrange some
compromise which would satisfy the angry element in the lower South.
Even Republicans of the more radical type offered to do anything, except
assent to the further expansion of slavery in the Territories, in order
to prevent the formation of a Southern Confederacy and the expected
paralysis of business.

[Footnote 12: Perhaps we may use these terms now to describe the two
great sections of the country as the Civil War approached.]

Nothing availed. South Carolina, under the leadership of Robert Barnwell
Rhett, called a state convention which met in Columbia, but adjourned to
Charleston, and on December 20 severed all connection with the National
Government and recalled her Representatives in Congress. President
Buchanan did not favor secession, and he hoped that some way might be
found to settle the difficulties which underlay the crisis. In his
message to Congress he declared that there was no right of secession,
but that there was also no authority anywhere to prevent secession. This
was at the time the view of most others in the North, perhaps in the
South, for Southerners spoke frequently of the "revolution" they were
precipitating. When the demand of South Carolina for the surrender of
Fort Sumter was presented to the President, he decided to delay action
until his successor was inaugurated. This was not irregular nor unusual,
but gave the people of the South time to decide what they would do; and
before February 1, 1861, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and
Louisiana withdrew from the Union, though not without strenuous
resistance by large parties in all these communities, save Florida.
Early in February delegates from these States gathered in Montgomery,
Alabama, and organized a Southern Confederacy on the model of the older
Union, and made Jefferson Davis President. Alexander Stephens, who had
done more than any other Southerner to delay and defeat secession, was
elected Vice-President. The new constitution was conservative if not
reactionary in character. Slavery was definitely and specifically made a
corner-stone of the new government. The foreign slave trade was, in
deference to border state opinion, forbidden; but free trade, which had
so long been a bone of contention between the planters of the South and
the manufacturers of the East, was left to the wisdom of ordinary
legislation. In fact many of the ablest Southern leaders foresaw the
establishment of a protect