now engaged in a last idle attempt to keep itself and other border States in the Union, with some hope also that the departed States might return; and on this same February 6, a “Peace Convention,” invited by Virginia and attended by delegates from twenty-one States, met at Washington with ex-President Tyler in the chair; but for Virginia it was all along a condition of any terms of agreement that the right of any State to secede should be fully acknowledged.

The Congress of the seceding States, which met at Montgomery, was described by Stephens as, “taken all in all, the noblest, soberest, most intelligent, and most conservative body I was ever in.”  It has been remarked that Southern politicians of the agitator type were not sent to it.  It adopted a provisional Constitution modelled largely upon that of the United States.  Jefferson Davis, who had retired to his farm, was sent for to become President; Stephens, as already said, became Vice-President.  The delegates there were to continue in session for the present as the regular Congress.  Whether sobered by the thought that they were acting in the eyes of the world, or in accordance with their own prevailing sentiment, these men, some of whom had before urged the revival of the slave trade, now placed in their Constitution a perpetual prohibition of it, and when, as a regular legislature, they afterwards passed a penal statute which carried out this intention inadequately, President Davis conscientiously vetoed it and demanded a more satisfactory measure.  At his inauguration the Southern President delivered an address, typical of that curious blending of propriety and insincerity, of which the politics of that period in America had offered many examples.  It may seem incredible, but it contained no word of slavery, but recited in dignified terms how the South had been driven to separation by “wanton aggression on the part of others,” and after it had “vainly endeavoured to secure tranquillity.”  The new Southern Congress now resolved to take over the forts and other property in the seceded States that had belonged to the Union, and the first Confederate general, Beauregard, was sent to Charleston to hover over Fort Sumter.

3. The Inauguration of Lincoln.

The first necessary business of the President-elect, while he watched the gathering of what Emerson named “the hurricane in which he was called to the helm,” was to construct a strong Cabinet, to which may be added the seemingly unnecessary business forced upon him of dealing with a horde of pilgrims who at once began visiting him to solicit some office or, in rarer cases, to press their disinterested opinions.  His Cabinet, designed in principle, as has been said, while he was waiting in the telegraph office for election returns, was actually constructed with some delay and hesitation.  Lincoln could not know personally all the men he invited to join him, but he proceeded with the view of conjoining in his administration