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

[69] the President elect, neither of them having had occasion to act. They were made one of the several pretexts sought by the conspirators for rebellion; and yet some of the bolder ones, who did not care for a pretext, denied that opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law was a grievance to be complained of. “The secession of South Carolina,” said Robert Barnwell Rhett (the most malignant and unscrupulous of the conspirators in that State), in the Secession Convention, “is not an event of a day. It is not any thing produced by Mr. Lincoln's election, or by the non-execution of the Fugitive Slave Law. It is a matter which has been gathering head for thirty years. . . . In regard to the Fugitive Slave Law, I myself doubted its constitutionality, and doubted it on the floor of the Senate, when I was a member of that body.

1850-1851.

The States, acting in their sovereign capacity,

Lawrence M Keitt.

should be responsible for the rendition of fugitive slaves. That was our best security.” --“It is no spasmodic effort,” said Francis S. Parker, another member of the Convention, “that has come suddenly upon us; it has been gradually culminating for a long period of thirty years.” --“As my friend (Mr. Parker) has said,” spoke John A. Inglis, another member of the Convention, “most of us have had this matter under consideration for the last twenty years.” And Lawrence M. Keitt, the supporter of Preston S. Brooks, when he brutally assailed Senator Sumner in the Senate Chamber, in 1856, who was also a member of the Secession Convention, said:--“I have been engaged in this movement ever since I entered political life.” Let us return to the Message.

Having informed the conspirators that they had many grievances, and that, under certain contingencies, the people of the Slave-labor States might be justified in rebellion, the President proceeded to consider the right of secession and the relative powers of the National Government. This was the topic to which the attention of the people was most anxiously turned.