James Buchanan, Buchanan's administration on the eve of the rebellion

1. There was South Carolina, which had been the avowed and persistent advocate of disunion for more than a quarter of a century. She had already called a Convention for the purpose of seceding from the Union. Her leading secessionists were ever on the alert to seize upon any action of the Federal Government which they might wrest to the purpose of alienating the other slaveholding States from their attachment to the Union, and enlisting them in her cause.

2. The second class was composed of the six other cotton States. The people of these, although highly excited against the abolitionists, were still unwilling to leave the Union. They would have been content, notwithstanding the efforts of secession demagogues, with a simple recognition of their adjudged rights to take slaves into the Territories, and hold them there like other property, until a territorial convention, assembled to frame a State constitution, should decide the question. To this decision, whatever it might be, they professed their willingness to submit. Indeed, as has already been seen from the statements of Messrs. Douglas and Toombs in the Senate, they would have consented to abandon their rights in all the Territories north of 36° 30′, leaving what should remain to them little more than a name.

3. The third class consisted of the border slaveholding States, with Virginia at the head. A large majority of their people, although believing in the right of peaceful secession, had resisted all the efforts of the extreme men in their midst, and were still devoted to the Union. Of this there could be no better proof than the result of the election held in Virginia, February 4, 1861, for the choice of. delegates to her State Convention, even after the cotton States had all seceded.¹ This showed that a very large majority of the delegates elected were in favor of remaining in the Union.

Under these circumstances, it is easy to imagine what would have been the effect on the other Southern States of sending a feeble force of United States troops to Fort Moultrie at this critical