was at first merely a personal quarrel, soon ripened into a division along true party lines. The Democrats, after the death of Andrew Jackson, joined the national Democratic party in its struggle for the perpetuation and extension of slavery. The Whigs on the other hand shared in the broad policies and national aspirations of the national Whig party.
Governor Harris had at the very beginning of his career allied himself with the Democrats. As early as 1849, he had been elected to Congress, where he became conspicuous for his advocacy of extreme State rights. In 1857 he defeated Neil S. Brown for governor, and was re-elected in 1859. It was not difficult to predict what his action would be in the crisis of 1860. Immediately after the election of President Lincoln, he issued a call for an extra session of the Legislature. It convened on the seventh day of January, and on the same day he sent in his message. This message is worthy of study, as it has been pronounced by a distinguished writer to be "the ablest and most succinct as well as the most intelligent presentation and justification of the reasons for the action of the seceding States."[1] It began with the following description of the crisis confronting the State: "The long, systematic, and wanton agitation of the slavery question, with actual and threatened aggressions of the Northern States and a portion of their people upon the well-defined constitutional rights of the Southern citizens, the rapid increase of a purely sectional party, whose bond of union is uncompromising hostility to the rights and institutions of the fifteen Southern States, have produced a condition in the affairs of the country unparalleled in the history of the past, resulting already in the withdrawal from the Confederacy of one of the sovereignties which compose it, while others are rapidly preparing to move in the same direction."[2]
