“... The truth is that there
is in the South an organized, active, and dangerous
faction, embracing most of the Federal politicians,
who are bent upon bringing about causes of a dissolution
of the Union. They desire a united South, “but
not a united country. Their hope of embodying
a sectional antagonism is to secure a sectional
defeat. At heart, they do not wish the Democracy
to be any longer national, united, or successful.
In the name of Democracy they propose to make a
nomination for 1860, at Charleston; but an ultra
nomination of an extremist on the slavery issue
alone, to unite the South on that one idea, and on
that to have it defeated by a line of sectionalism
which will inevitably draw swords between fanatics
on one side and fire-eaters on the other. Bear
it in mind, then, that they desire to control a
nomination for no other purpose than to have it defeated
by a line of sections. They desire defeat, for
no other end than to make a pretext for the clamor
of dissolution....
“Yours truly,
“HENRY A. WISE.” MS.
[2] “I am a secessionist and not a revolutionist,
and would not ‘precipitate,’ but carefully
prepare to meet an inevitable dissolution.”
—Yancey to Pryor, “Richmond South,”
copied in “National Intelligencer,” September
4, 1858.
THE CABINET CABAL
Very soon after the effort to unite the Cotton-State
governors in the revolutionary plot, we find the local
conspiracy at Charleston in communication with the
central secession cabal at Washington. James
Buchanan, of Pennsylvania, was still President of the
United States, and his Cabinet consisted of the following
members: Lewis Cass, of Michigan, Secretary of
State; Howell Cobb, of Georgia, Secretary of the Treasury;
John B. Floyd, of Virginia, Secretary of War; Isaac
Toucey, of Connecticut, Secretary of the Navy; Jacob
Thompson, of Mississippi, Secretary of the Interior;
Joseph Holt, of Kentucky, Postmaster-General; and
Jeremiah S. Black, of Pennsylvania, Attorney-General.
It was in and about this Cabinet that the central
cabal formed itself. Even if we could know in
detail the successive steps that led to the establishment
of this intercourse, which so quickly became “both
semi-official and confidential,” it could add
nothing to the force of the principal fact that the
conspiracy was in its earliest stages efficient in
perverting the resources and instrumentalities of
the Government of the United States to its destruction.
That a United States Senator, a Secretary of War, an
Assistant Secretary of State, and no doubt sundry minor
functionaries, were already then, from six to eight
weeks before any pretense of secession, with, “malice
aforethought” organizing armed resistance to
the Constitution and laws they had sworn to support,
stands forth in the following correspondence too plainly
to be misunderstood. As a fitting preface to
this correspondence, a few short paragraphs may be
quoted from the private diary of the Secretary of War,
from which longer and more important extracts appear
in a subsequent chapter. Those at present quoted
are designed more especially to show the names of
the persons composing the primary group of this central
cabal, and the time and place of their early consultations
and activity.
