[350]
confided to him, I shall be found as ready and determined as any other man to arrest him in his wrong courses, and to seek redress of our grievances by any and all proper means.
Delaware had, in 1858, chosen
William Burton (Democrat) for Governor by 7,758 votes to 7,544 for his Opposition rival; Democracy in
Delaware being almost exclusively based on Slavery, and having at length carried the
State by its aid. The great body of the party, under the lead of
Senator James A. Bayard, had supported
Breckinridge, and were still in sympathy with his friends' view of “Southern rights,” but not to the extent of approving
South Carolina remedies.
Their Legislature met at
Dover, January 2, 1861.
Gov. Burton, in his Message, said:
The cause of all the trouble is the persistent war of the Abolitionists upon more than two billions of property; a war waged from pulpits, rostrums, and schools, by press and people — all teaching that Slavery is a crime and a sin, until it has become the opinion of a portion of one section of the country.
The only remedy for the evils now threatening is a radical change of public sentiment in regard to the whole question.
The North should retire from its untenable position immediately.
Mr. Dickenson,
Commissioner from
Mississippi, having addressed the two Houses jointly in advocacy of Secession, they passed, directly thereafter, separately and unanimously, the following:
“
Resolved, That, having extended to
the Hon. H. Dickenson,
Commissioner from
Mississippi, the courtesy due him as the representative of a sovereign State of the confederacy, as well as to the
State he represents, we deem it proper, and due to ourselves and the people of
Delaware, to express our unqualified disapproval of the
remedy for the existing difficulties suggested by the resolutions of the Legislature of
Mississippi.”
Before the opening of 1861, a perfect reign of terror had been established throughout the
Gulf States.
A secret order, known as “Knights of the Golden circle,” or as “Knights of the
Columbian Star,” succeeding that known, six or seven years earlier, as the “Order of the
Lone Star,” having for its ostensible object the acquisition of
Cuba,
Mexico, and
Central America, and the establishment of Slavery in the two latter, but really operating in the interest of Disunion, had spread its network of lodges, grips, passwords, and alluring mystery, all over the
South, and had ramifications even in some of the cities of the adjoining Free States.
Other clubs, more or less secret, were known as “The Precipitators,” “Vigilance Committee,” “Minute men,” and by kindred designations; but all of them were sworn to fidelity to “Southern rights;” while their members were gradually prepared and ripened, wherever any ripening was needed, for the task of treason.
Whoever ventured to condemn and repudiate Secession as the true and sovereign remedy for Southern wrongs, in any neighborhood where Slavery was dominant, was thenceforth a marked man, to be stigmatized and hunted down as a “Lincolnite,” “Submissionist,” or “Abolitionist.”
One refugee planter from
Southern Alabama, himself a slaveholder, but of northern birth, who barely escaped a violent death, because of an intercepted letter from a relative in
Connecticut, urging him to free his slaves and return to the
North, as he had promised, stated
1 that he had himself been
