1860. |
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| The South Carolina Institute. |
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Rivers, on the seacoast of South Carolina, and far away from the centers of population and the great forces of the Republic.
The delegates, almost six hundred in number, and representing thirty-two States, assembled on the 23d of April
in the great hall of the South Carolina Institute,1 on Meeting Street, in which three thousand persons might be comfortably seated.
The doors were opened at noon. The day was very warm.
A refreshing shower had laid the dust at eleven o'clock, and purified the air.
The delegates rapidly assembled.
Favored spectators of both sexes soon filled the galleries.
The buzz of conversation was silenced by the voice of Judge David A. Smalley, of Vermont, the Chairman of the National Democratic Committee, who called the Convention to order.
Francis B. Flournoy, a citizen of the State of Arkansas, was chosen temporary chairman.--He took his seat without making a speech, when the Rev. Charles Hanckel, of Charleston, read a prayer, and the Convention proceeded to business.
The session of the first day was occupied in the work of organization.
It was evident from the first hour that the spirit of the Slave system, which had become the very Nemesis of the nation, was there, full fraught with mischievous intent.
It was a spirit potential as Arie in the creation of elemental strife.
For several months, premonitions of a storm, that threatened danger to the integrity of the organization there represented, had been abundant.
Violently discordant elements were now in close contact.
The clouds rapidly thickened, and before the sun went down on that first day of the session, all felt that a fierce tempest was impending, which might topple from its foundations, laid by Jefferson, the venerable political fabric known as the Democratic Party, which he and his friends had reared sixty years before.
On the morning of the second day of the session, Caleb Cushing, of Massachusetts, was chosen permanent President of the Convention, and a vice-president and secretary for each State were appointed.
The choice of President was very satisfactory.
Mr. Cushing was a man of much experience in politics and legislation.
He was possessed of wide intellectual culture, and was a sagacious observer of men. He was then sixty years of
1 This building, in which the famous South Carolina Ordinance of Secession was signee (it was adopted in St. Andrew's Hall), late in December, 1860, was destroyed by fire in December, 1861. St. Andrew's Hall, in which the conspirators against the Republic who seceded from the Democratic Convention now under consideration assembled, and in which the South Carolina Ordinance of Secession was adopted by the unanimous voice of a Convention, was destroyed at the same time. Everything about the site of these buildings, made in famous in history because of the wicked acts performed in them, yet (1865) exhibits a ghastly picture of desolation.
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