chanan to employ the executive authority and
power of the government to prevent it, or even to hinder its
development, by any vigorous opposition or adequate protest. The
determination of South Carolina to secede was announced by the governor
of that State a month before the presidential election, and on the day
before the election he sent the legislature of the State a revolutionary
message to formally inaugurate it. From that time forward the whole
official machinery of the State not only led, but forced the movement
which culminated on December 20 in the ordinance of secession by the
South Carolina convention.

This official revolution in South Carolina was quickly imitated by
similar official revolutions ending in secession ordinances in the
States of Mississippi, on January 9, 1861; Florida, January 10; Alabama,
January 11; Georgia, January 19; Louisiana, January 26; and by a still
bolder usurpation in Texas, culminating on February 1. From the day of
the presidential election all these proceedings were known probably more
fully to President Buchanan than to the general public, because many of
the actors were his personal and party friends; while almost at their
very beginning he became aware that three members of his cabinet were
secretly or openly abetting and promoting them by their official
influence and power.

Instead of promptly dismissing these unfaithful servants, he retained
one of them a month, and the others twice that period, and permitted
them so far to influence his official conduct, that in his annual
message to Congress he announced the fallacious and paradoxical doctrine
that though a State had no right to secede, the Federal government had
no right to coerce her to remain in the Union.

Nor could he justify his non-action by the excuse that contumacious
speeches and illegal resolves of parliamentary bodies might be tolerated
under the American theory of free assemblage and free speech. Almost
from the beginning of the secession movement, it was accompanied from
time to time by overt acts both of treason and war; notably, by the
occupation and seizure by military order and force of the seceding
States, of twelve or fifteen harbor forts, one extensive navy-yard, half
a dozen arsenals, three mints, four important custom-houses, three
revenue cutters, and a variety of miscellaneous Federal property; for
all of which insults to the flag, and infractions of the sovereignty of
the United States, Pres