ht hard against it.

*It is significant that the composition of these Southern
commercial congresses and the Congress of the whole Southern
people was strikingly different in personnel. Very few
members of the commercial congresses reappear in the
Confederate Congress.

The split between Southern moderates and Southern radicals was further
indicated by their differing attitudes toward the adventurers from
the United States in Central America. The Vicksburg Convention
adopted resolutions which were thinly veiled endorsements of southward
expansion. In the early autumn another Nicaraguan expedition was nipped
in the bud by the vigilance of American naval forces. Cobb, prime factor
in the group of Southern moderates as well as Secretary of the Treasury,
wrote to Buchanan expressing his satisfaction at the event, mentioning
the work of his own department in bringing it about, and also alluding
to his arrangements to prevent slave trading off the Florida coast.

But the spirit of doubt was strong even among the moderates. Douglas was
the target. Stephens gives a glimpse of it in a letter written during
his last session in Congress. "Cobb called on me Saturday night," he
writes. "He is exceedingly bitter against Douglas. I joked him a good
deal, and told him he had better not fight, or he would certainly be
whipped; that is, in driving Douglas out of the Democratic party.
He said that if Douglas ever was restored to the confidence of the
Democracy of Georgia, it would be over his dead body politically. This
shows his excitement, that is all. I laughed at him, and told him he
would run his feelings and his policy into the ground." The anger
of Cobb, who was himself a confessed candidate for the Democratic
nomination, was imperiling the Democratic national machine which Toombs
was still struggling so resolutely to hold together. Indeed, as late as
the autumn of 1859 the machine still held together.

Then came the man of destiny, the bolt from the blue, the end of the
chapter. A marvelous fanatic--a sort of reincarnation of the grimmest
of the Covenanters--by one daring act shattered the machine and made
impossible any further coalition on the principle of "nothing doing."
This man of destiny was John Brown, whose attack on Harper's Ferry took
place October 16th, and whose execution by the authorities of Virginia
on the charges of murder and treason occurred on the 2nd of December.

The incident fi