There must be a repeal of all "personal-liberty" laws and a rigid execution of the fugitive-slave law; guaranties for the protection of slavery in the District of Columbia-no abolishment there unless Maryland should emancipate, nor then unless demanded by the citizens of the District; guaranties that slavery be not interdicted in any territory either by territorial legislature or by Congress; owners to have right to carry their slaves through free States and Territories and be compensated for any lost in transit; guaranties that the domestic slave-trade be not interefered with; punishment of assaults (like John Brown's) on the slave-holding States with intent to incite insurrection. And, most humiliating of all, the United States "to be deprived of the power of appointing to local offices at places in slave States persons hostile to their institutions or inimical to their rights."

A caucus of Congressmen from fourteen central States was held in Washington about this time; and the conditions for the security of the South presented by them are so strikingly like Mr. Letcher's they need not be recited. The conclusions of the caucus were embodied in resolutions introduced in the House by Etheridge of Tennessee. They added the condition, afterwards put into the Peace Conference report, to restrict the acquisition of territory.

RUSHING INTO REVOLUTION.

Thus we approach this critical juncture with a series of demands on all sides for the protection of slavery. Nobody anywhere was asking for guaranties in behalf of freedom. It plainly appears from the uniformity of these demands that the summoning of the Virginia Legislature at

this time was part of a plan carefully preconcerted. This was shown still more sharply by the character of the propositions immediately brought forward in the Assembly. The conspirators could not wait for the full reading of the long message; but in one house as soon as the portion relating to Federal matters had been read, the further reading was dispensed with. In the Senate Mr. Douglas introduced resolutions setting forth that "the use of force by the general government, by land or sea, directly or indirectly, for the purpose of maintaining the Union" would be subversive, destructive, etc., of the rights of the States and "revolutionary;" that Virginia would not consent that any seceded State should be coerced and that she would resist "all attempts by the Federal government to overthrow and destroy the Union." It provokes a smile, this idea that the government of the Union was trying to destroy the Union by enforcing its laws! But nothing was too absurd for the madness of that time.

CONVENTION CALLED.

In the House, Bassel of Upshur offered resolutions of similar import; and a committee of fifteen was immediately raised and instructed, by unanimous vote, to report a bill for a convention. There was no deliberation— no hesitation, but all the precipitancy of a revolution already resolved on. A proposition to first submit to the people of the State whether they wanted a convention was offered in the House but voted down by a large majority. The minority in the Assembly did extort the condition that when electing delegates to the convention the people

might vote whether the action of the convention should or should not be referred to them for approval or rejection; but, as we shall see, this condition was ruthlessly violated. The concession was not made in good faith. There was no intention that the condition should be observed. The bill had been so drawn that it would be in the power of the Convention to revise the Constitution, and thus to so amend it as to provide for a fairer system of taxation and for representation in the Senate on the white basis. But it is apparent this was only a lure to catch the Western constitutiencies, the programme of the conspirators contemplating that revolution should be precipitated (as it was) before any such remedial measures could become effective. The Enquirer denounced this "reference" to the people as "imperiling all that Virginians hold most sacred and dear."

NO TIME FOR CONSIDERATION.

The election was ordered for February 4th. Only three weeks were allowed for the canvass; and the convention was to meet on the 13th, nine days after the election. There was hot haste all around, if we consider the gravity of the proceeding. In the House, January 9th, Joseph Segar protested against such precipitancy. "For heaven's sake," he urged, "give us a little more time-one short day's time at least-to ponder over these great questions, the most important ever presented for the reflection of American freemen; one brief day's pause for thinking on these thrilling matters." Dr. Rives, who replied, said the only amendment the bill needed was to shorten the time for the assembling of the Convention. Wilson, from

Isle of Wight, declared it was "no time for delay. Delays were dangerous." He was for "action-action immediate. and decisive. I cannot," he said, "sing paeans to a Union that is dead. While it existed it was a Union of wrong, of injustice, of insult, and oppression. It was born with the seeds of disease. It has sustained itself a body of political corruption and putrifying sores, having the form of Union while the essence is dead. It stinks in the nostrils of all men; and it is high time Virginia freed herself from the body of this death." The following day Mr. Seddon of Safford read a telegram announcing that the Star of the West approaching Fort Sumter with provisions had been cannonaded back to sea. "The announcement brought down loud and tumultuous applause from the galleries."

TO MAINTAIN THE STATUS QUO.

One of the things this Legislature did was to propose a suspension of the functions of the United States government with reference to the rebellious States. They appointed John Tyler a commissioner to wait on the President and Judge Robertson a commissioner to the seceded States, requesting the President and the authorities of those States to abstain, pending action by Virginia, from acts calculated to produce a collision between those States and the government. President Buchanan had apparently begun to realize the abyss towards which the conspirators had been leading him and was drawing back from the consequences of his (let us say) pusillanimity. He had begun to take counsel with men like Edwin M. Stanton and Joseph Holt. He replied to the Virginia commissioner

that he had no power to make such an agreement as requested. Meanwhile the Legislature authorized an appropriation of a million dollars for the "defence" of the State.

ELECTRIC RICHMOND.

The storm-cloud was rapidly darkening. A Richmond letter to the Wheeling Intelligencer January 9th, two days after the Assembly met, begins:

war.

The very air here is charged with the electric thunders of On the street, at the capitol, in the bar-room, at the dinner-table, nothing is heard but resistance to the general government and sympathy with the cause of South Carolina. In the Legislature the great aim, even amongst most of the Western members, appears to be to hurry things and precipitate a crisis.

A Richmond private letter of the same date said:

To say that the excitement is intense would give the coldblooded people of your latitude a faint idea of the public feeling here. Everybody is feverish and a great many perfectly wild.

TO WED THE CONFEDERACY.

January 21st, the Assembly rounded out their program of insurrection by the passage of a declaration that "if all efforts fail to reconcile the existing differences between the two sections of the country, it is the duty of Virginia to unite her destiny with the slaveholding States of the South."

THE ONLY WAY.

A dispatch was sent from Washington to Richmond January 26th signed by the Virginia senators, Mason and Hunter, and by eight Virginia congressmen, including Albert Gallatin Jenkins, advising the Assembly