dments of the said
Constitution, are hereby repealed; and that the Union now subsisting
between South Carolina and other States, under the name of the United
States of America, is hereby dissolved."

Thus, and in these words, was joyously adopted and ratified, that solemn
Act of Separation which was doomed to draw in its fateful train so many
other Southern States, in the end only to be blotted out with the blood
of hundreds of thousands of their own brave sons, and their equally
courageous Northern brothers.

State after State followed South Carolina in the mad course of Secession
from the Union. Mississippi passed a Secession Ordinance, January 9,
1861. Florida followed, January 10th; Alabama, January 11th; Georgia,
January 18th; Louisiana, January 26th; and Texas, February 1st;
Arkansas, North Carolina, and Virginia held back until a later period;
while Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware, abstained
altogether from taking the fatal step, despite all attempts to bring
them to it.

In the meantime, however, South Carolina had put on all the dignity of
a Sovereign and Independent State. Her Governor had a "cabinet"
comprising Secretaries of State, War, Treasury, the Interior, and a
Postmaster General. She had appointed Commissioners, to proceed to the
other Slave-holding States, through whom a Southern Congress was
proposed, to meet at Montgomery, Alabama; and had appointed seven
delegates to meet the delegates from such other States in that proposed
Southern Congress. On the 21st of December, 1860, three Commissioners
(Messrs. Barnwell, Adams, and Orr) were also appointed to proceed to
Washington, and treat for the cession by the United States to South
Carolina, of all Federal property within the limits of the latter. On
the 24th, Governor Pickens issued a Proclamation announcing the adoption
of the Ordinance of Secession, declaring "that the State of South
Carolina is, as she has a right to be, a separate sovereign, free and
independent State, and as such, has a right to levy war, conclude peace,
negotiate treaties, leagues or covenants, and to do all acts whatsoever
that rightfully appertain to a free and independent State;" the which
proclamation was announced as "Done in the eighty-fifth year of the
Sovereignty and Independence of South Carolina." On the same day (the
Senators from that State in the United States Senate having long since,
as we have seen, withdrawn from that body) the Re