Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 17.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

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[96]

The die is cast.

At length, in the closing days of 1860, the long war of the ballot box is ended. A president is elected upon strictly geographical lines. The head of the government is soon to pass into the hands of a faction representing less than one-third of the voters of the Union, and whose governing principle is an irrepressible conflict between the sections. The day of temporizing closes. South Carolina puts in practice her previous declaration of equality in the Union or independence out of it. She is closely followed by Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and ere the recently elected sectional President of the United States dons the robes of office a new nation has been born, whose life of storm and tragic death will always present one of the most heroic pictures ‘on history's titled page.’ North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas soon cast in their lot with the new Confederacy, followed at last, when all her efforts for a peaceable settlement had failed, by the great mother of statesmen and Presidents, of States and of the Federal Union itself. Thus closed the first epoch of the Confederate revolution.