peaceful secession. Had the issue
been pressed at the moment when the excitement was at its highest point,
an isolated and very serious movement might have occurred, which South
Carolina, without doubt, would have promptly responded to." [18]

In Georgia, evidence as to "which way the wind blows" was received
by the Congressional trio, Alexander Stephens, Toombs, and Cobb, from
trusted observers at home. "The only safety of the South from abolition
universal is to be found in an early dissolution of the Union." Only
one democrat was found justifying Cobb's opposition to Calhoun and the
Southern Convention. [19]

Stephens himself, anxious to "stick to the Constitutional Union" reveals
in confidential letters to Southern Unionists the rapidly growing danger
of disunion. "The feeling among the Southern members for a dissolution
of the Union... is becoming much more general." "Men are now [December,
1849] beginning to talk of it seriously who twelve months ago hardly
permitted themselves to think of it." "Civil war in this country better
be prevented if it can be." After a month's "farther and broader view",
he concluded, "the crisis is not far ahead... a dismemberment of this
Republic I now consider inevitable." [20]

On February 8, 1850, the Georgia legislature appropriated $30,000 for a
state convention to consider measures of redress, and gave warning that
anti-slavery aggressions would "induce us to contemplate the possibility
of a dissolution". [21] "I see no prospect of a continuance of this
Union long", wrote Stephens two days later. [22]

Speaker Cobb's advisers warned him that "the predominant feeling of
Georgia" was "equality or disunion", and that "the destructives" were
trying to drive the South into disunion. "But for your influence,
Georgia would have been more rampant for dissolution than South Carolina
ever was." "S. Carolina will secede, but we can and must put a stop to
it in Georgia." [23]

Public opinion in Georgia, which had been "almost ready for immediate
secession", was reversed only after the passage of the Compromise and by
means of a strenuous campaign against the Secessionists which Stephens,
Toombs, and Cobb were obliged to return to Georgia to conduct to a
Successful issue. [24] Yet even the Unionist Convention of Georgia,
elected by this campaign, voted almost unanimously "the Georgia
platform" already described, of resistance, even to disruption, against
the Wilmot Proviso, the repeal