People throughout the South were confronted with this situation. The most of the Northern States had by solemn enactment nullified the Constitution and the laws of Congress, and emissaries from the North, arousing the negroes to arson, rapine and murder, were being dispatched to the Southern States. Their partial success in the John Brown raid had caused widespread terror and alarm. The prevailing sentiment on every side was that prompt action was essential to protect lives and property. As early as 1848 this aggression on the rights of the South had become such a menace that John C. Calhoun contended that we ought to "force the issue of the slavery question in the North;" and said, moreover, "We are now stronger, relatively, than we shall be hereafter politically and morally."
The Democratic party of Alabama assembled in convention at Montgomery, January 11, 1860, and with scarcely a dissenting voice adopted resolutions in substance as follows : "That the principles recognized by the Supreme court in the Dred Scott case should be maintained by the South; that their delegates to the approaching national Democratic convention at Charleston should present these resolutions for the adoption of that body; that they insist upon the adoption of the resolutions in substance, and that if they be not adopted, the delegates must withdraw."
The Alabama legislature, on February 24, 1860, adopted the following:
Whereas, Anti-slavery agitation persistently continued in the non-slaveholding States of this Union for more than a third of a century, marked at every stage of its progress by contempt for the obligations of law and the sanctity of compacts, evincing a deadly hostility to the rights and institutions of the Southern people, and a settled purpose to effect their overthrow even by the subversion of the Constitution, and at the hazard of violence and bloodshed; and, Whereas, a sectional party calling
