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

“ [102] Carolina shall have seceded, consistently with the dignity and safety of the State; also, the value of the property of the United States not in South Carolina, and the value of the share thereof to which South Carolina would be entitled upon an equitable division thereof among the United States.” The President, he said, had affirmed it to be his high duty to protect the national property in South Carolina, and to enforce the laws of the nation within its borders. “He says he has no constitutional powers,” said Magrath, “to coerce South Carolina, while, at the same time, he denies to her the right of secession.” He was afraid that an attempt would be made to coerce the Commonwealth, under the pretext of protecting the property of the United States within its limits, and he wanted to test, at the very threshold of their deliberations, the accuracy of the President's logic.

This brought out William Porcher Miles, who assured the Convention that they had nothing to fear from any hostile action on the part of President Buchanan. There was not the least danger of his sending any re-enforcements to the forts in Charleston harbor. He (Miles) and some of his colleagues, he said, had conversed with the President

December 9, 1860.

on the subject, and had orally and in writing admonished him, that if he should attempt to send a solitary soldier to those forts, the instant the intelligence reached South Carolina, the people would forcibly storm and capture them. They assured him that they would take good care to give that information to the people, and that they had sources of information at Washington (the traitorous Secretary of War?) which made it impossible for an order for the sending of re-enforcements to be issued, without their knowing it. They further said to the President, that “a bloody result would follow the sending of troops to those forts ;” and at his request they assured him, in writing, that in their opinion there would be no movement toward seizing them by South Carolinians before an offer should be made, by an accredited representative, to negotiate “for an amicable arrangement of all matters between the State and Federal Governments; provided, that no re-enforcements should be sent into those forts.” There was, he said, “a tacit, if not an actual agreement,” between the President and the South Carolina delegation in Congress,¹ that the relative military condition should remain the same, while each party forbore hostile movements. This statement of Miles satisfied the Convention that they might play treason to their hearts' content until the 4th of March; provided, they kept violent hands off the property of the United States. The President, as we shall observe hereafter, denied that he ever gave such pledge, and pronounced the accusation untrue, as it undoubtedly was.

After resolutions were offered and referred, which proposed a Provisional Government for the Slave-labor States that might secede, on the basis of the National Constitution; also, to send Commissioners to Washington to negotiate for the cession of the property of the United States within the limits of South Carolina; and the election of five delegates, to meet others from Slave-labor States, for the purpose of forming a Southern Confederacy,