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and indicated the ultimate design—as if ‘office’ was a matter of any moment at such a crisis!
The question of holding a State convention was decided by the vote of the people, who gave a majority of 11,586 ‘for convention’ out of a total of 62,000.
By proclamation of the governor, that body assembled on the 4th of March, the day of the Presidential inauguration.
A majority of the delegates elected were disposed to temporize, and voted for ‘cooperation’ against ‘secession,’ and elected five peace commissioners to attend the Border State convention at Frankfort, Ky., on May 27, 1861.
This effort was laudable, but the march of events was too rapid for the peace commissioners, and left them so far in the rear that they did not deem it necessary to perform their function.
The threats of the Northern press that ‘a fire in the rear should be opened upon such troops as should be raised in the North to march against the people of the South’; the indignant protests of ex-Chancellor Walworth at a public meeting, ‘that it would be as brutal to send men to butcher our own brothers of the Southern States, as it would be to massacre them in the Northern States’; and the promise of Eli Thayer, the old-line Whig, ‘we will reverse the order of the French revolution, and save the blood of the people by making those who would inaugurate a reign of terror the first victims of a national guillotine,’ became as exhalations of the empty air.
The Arkansas State convention adjourned without further action to the 19th day of August, 1861.
Very blind, indeed, were the halting advocates of peace, when it was plain to all that there could be no peace.
The powers behind Mr. Lincoln were his political supporters at the North, who proposed to unite purse and sword, and would never give up the South and its rich repository of profit and wealth, so essential to their business.
They pushed him, as did their auxiliaries, the fanatical antislavery forces, to an instantaneous advance.
The new President sent a fleet of war vessels to support a vessel
Atlanta, Ga. 1899.
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