ion were almost invariably handicapped by the added protestation
that in any event--and however they might deplore the necessity--they
would, if need be, go with their State, against their own convictions of
duty to the National Union.

Hence in this same speech we find that Mr. Stephens destroyed the whole
effect of his weighty and logical appeal against Secession from the
Union, by adding to it, that, "Should Georgia determine to go out of the
Union I shall bow to the will of her people. Their cause is my cause,
and their destiny is my destiny; and I trust this will be the ultimate
course of all."--and by further advising the calling of a Convention of
the people to decide the matter; thus, in advance, as it were, binding
himself hand and foot, despite his previous Union utterances, to do the
fell bidding of the most rampant Disunionists. And thus, in due time,
it befell, as we shall see, that this "saving clause" in his "Union
speech," brought him at the end, not to that posture of patriotic
heroism to which he aspired when he adjured his Georgian auditors to
"let us be found to the last moment standing on the deck (of the
Republic), with the Constitution of the United States waving over our
heads," but to that of an imprisoned traitor and defeated rebel against
the very Republic and Constitution which he had sworn to uphold and
defend!

The action of the South Carolina Legislature in calling an Unconditional
Secession Convention, acted among the Southern States like a spark in a
train of gunpowder. Long accustomed to incendiary resolutions of
Pro-Slavery political platforms, as embodying the creed of Southern men;
committed by those declarations to the most extreme action when, in
their judgment, the necessity should arise; and worked up during the
Presidential campaign by swarming Federal officials inspired by the
fanatical Secession leaders; the entire South only needed the spark from
the treasonable torch of South Carolina, to find itself ablaze, almost
from one end to the other, with the flames of revolt.

Governor after Governor, in State after State, issued proclamation after
proclamation, calling together their respective Legislatures, to
consider the situation and whether their respective States should join
South Carolina in seceding from the Union. Kentucky alone, of them all,
seemed for a time to keep cool, and look calmly and reasonably through
the Southern ferment to the horrors beyond. In an addr