Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War. Volume 1.

[113] military operations, and transacting some other business, chiefly in secret session, the Convention adjourned, on the 5th of January, 1861, subject to the call of the President. They had ordered the table, President's chair, inkstand, and other things used at the ceremony of signing the Ordinance of Secession, to be placed in the State House at Columbia, for preservation.

The Legislature of South Carolina, which had been in session during the sitting of the Convention, but almost idle, now took measures for putting the State in a strongly defensive attitude. A loan of four hundred thousand dollars was authorized, which was immediately taken by the banks of the State, they having been permitted, by legislative decree, to suspend specie payments.¹ A call for volunteers was made, and also provisions for a draft, if it should be necessary. Little else was done during the session but preparations for making the revolutionary movement a success.

Thus the South Carolina politicians rebelled, and prepared to resist the authority of their Government by force of arms. When intelligence of the passage of their Ordinance of Secession went over the country, it produced, as we have observed, a profound sensation. That action was greeted with delight by disunionists in most of the Slave-labor States. A hundred guns were fired both at Montgomery and Mobile, by order of the Governor (Moore) of Alabama, in honor of the event. In the latter city there was also a military parade. Bells were rung and oratory was heard. At Macon, Georgia, bells rang, bonfires blazed, cannon thundered, processions moved, and the main street of the city was illuminated. A hundred guns were fired at Pensacola. The same number were discharged in New Orleans, where the Pelican flag² was unfurled, speeches were made to the populace, and no other airs were played in the streets but polkas and the Marseillaise Hymn. At Wilmington, in North Carolina, one hundred guns were fired. In Portsmouth,Virginia, fifteen were fired, being the then number of the Slave-labor States; and at Norfolk, the Palmetto flag was outspread from the top of a pole a hundred feet in hight. A banner with the same device was displayed over the custom-house at Richmond. An attempt was made to fire fifteen guns in Baltimore, when the loyal people there prevented it. On the 22d, a jubilant meeting at Memphis, Tennessee, “ratified” the ordinance. Fifteen guns were fired, and the office of the Avalanche, then an organ of the conspirators in that region, was illuminated. At the same time, the politicians of several of the Slave-labor States, as we shall observe presently, were rapidly placing the people in the position of active co-operation with those of South Carolina. Those who did not choose to follow the lead of South Carolina were treated with amazing insolence by the usurpers in that State, and were scorned as unworthy of association with the Palmetto Chivalry.

The news was received with far different feelings in the Free-labor States,