bit of their policy.  In their platform they had declared that they had no intention to interfere with slavery in the states.  Lincoln had said over and over again that Congress had no right to meddle with slavery in the states.  The Southern leaders knew all these things.  But they made up their minds that now the time had come to secede from the Union and to establish a Southern Confederacy.  For the first time all the southernmost states were united.  No matter what Lincoln and the Republicans might say, the Southern slaveholders believed that slavery was in danger.  In advising secession, many of them thought that by this means they could force the Northerners to accept their terms as the price of a restored Union.  Never were political leaders more mistaken.

[Sidenote:  Southern conventions.]

374.  Threats of Secession, November, 1860.—­The Constitution permits each state to choose presidential electors as it sees fit.  At the outset these electors had generally been chosen by the state legislatures.  But, in the course of time, all the states save one had come to choose them by popular vote.  The one state that held to the old way was South Carolina.  Its legislature still chose the state’s presidential electors.  In 1860 the South Carolina legislature did this duty and then remained in session to see which way the election would go.  When Lincoln’s election was certain, it called a state convention to consider the question of seceding from the United States.  In other Southern states there was some opposition to secession.  In Georgia, especially, Alexander H. Stephens led the opposition.  He said that secession “was the height of madness.”  Nevertheless he moved a resolution for a convention.  Indeed, all the southernmost states followed the example of South Carolina and summoned conventions.

[Sidenote:  Buchanan’s compromise plan.]

[Crittenden’s plan of compromise. McMaster, 380-381.]

[Sidenote:  It fails to pass Congress.]

375.  The Crittenden Compromise Plan.—­Many men hoped that even now secession might be stopped by some compromise.  President Buchanan suggested an amendment to the Constitution, securing slavery in the states and territories.  It was unlikely that the Republicans would agree to this suggestion.  The most hopeful plan was brought forward in Congress by Senator Crittenden of Kentucky.  He proposed that amendments to the Constitution should be adopted:  (1) to carry out the principle of the Missouri Compromise (p. 222);(2) to provide that states should be free or slave as their people should determine; and (3) to pay the slave owners the value of runaway slaves.  This plan was carefully considered by Congress, and was finally rejected only two days before Lincoln’s inauguration.

[Sidenote:  South Carolina secedes, 1860. Eggleston, 304-305.]

[Sidenote:  Six other states secede.]

376.  Secession of Seven States, 1860-61.—­The South Carolina convention met in Secession Hall, Charleston, on December 17, 1860.  Three days later it adopted a declaration “that the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other states, under the name of the United States of America, is hereby dissolved.”  Six other states soon joined South Carolina.  These were Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas.