If there had hitherto been any doubt or hesitation in the minds of the principal secession leaders of the South, it vanished under the declared policy of inaction of the Federal Administration.  The President’s message was a practical assurance of immunity from arrest and prosecution for treason.  It magnified their grievances, specifically pointed out a contingent right and duty of revolution, acknowledged that mere public sentiment might override and nullify Federal laws, and pointedly bound up Federal authority in narrow legal and Constitutional restrictions.  It was blind as a mole to find Federal power, but keen-eyed as a lynx to discover Federal impotence.

The leaders of secession were not slow to avail themselves of the favorable situation.  Between the date of the message and the incoming of the new and possibly hostile Administration there intervened three full months.  It was the season of political activity—­the period during which legislatures meet, messages are written, and laws enacted.  It afforded ample time to authorize, elect, and hold State conventions.  Excitement was at fever heat in the South, and public sentiment paralyzed, despondent, and divided at the North.

Accordingly, as if by a common impulse, the secession movement sprang into quick activity and united effort.  Within two months the States of South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, in the order named, by formal ordinances of conventions, declared themselves separated from the Union.  The recommendation of Yancey’s “scarlet letter” had been literally carried out; the Cotton States were precipitated into revolution.

In this movement of secession the State of South Carolina was the enthusiastic pioneer.  At the date of the President’s message she had already provided by law for the machinery of a convention, though no delegates had been elected.  Nevertheless, her Legislature at once plunged pell-mell into the task of making laws for the new condition of independent sovereignty which by common consent the convention was in a few days to declare.  Questions of army and navy, postal communication, and foreign diplomacy, for the moment eclipsed the baser topics of estray laws or wolf-scalp bounties, and the little would-be Congress fully justified the reported sarcasm of one of her leading citizens that “the Palmetto State was too small for a republic and too large for a lunatic asylum.”

But, with all their outward fire and zeal for nationality, her politicians were restrained by an undercurrent of prudence.  A revolution even under exceptional advantages is a serious thing.

  [Sidenote] Speech of Mr. Magrath in the South Carolina Convention,
  Dec. 19, 1860.  “Annual Cyclopedia,” 1861, p. 619.