In August, 1861, John Gill Shorter, a State Rights Democrat, was elected governor by a vote of 57,849 to 28,127 over Thomas Hill Watts, also a State Rights Democrat, who had voted for secession, but who had formerly been a Whig. Watts was not a regular candidate since he had forbidden the use of his name in the canvass.[300] For a time the people enthusiastically supported the administration. Governor Shorter's message of October 28, 1861, to the legislature closed with the words: "We may well congratulate ourselves and return thanks that a timely action on our part has saved our liberties, preserved our independence, and given us, it is hoped, a perpetual separation from such a government. May we in all coming time stand separate from it, as if a wall of fire intervened."[301] The legislature in 1861 declared that it was the imperative duty as well as the patriotic privilege of every citizen, forgetting past differences, to support the policy adopted and to maintain the independence assumed. To this cause the members of the general assembly pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.[302] A year later the same body declared that Mobile, then threatened by the enemy, must never be desecrated by the polluting tread of the abolitionist foe. It must never be surrendered, but must be defended from street to street, from house to house, and at last burned to the ground rather than surrendered.[303] The same legislature, elected in 1861 when the war feeling was strong, stated in August, 1863, that the war was unprovoked and unjust on the part of the United States government, which was conducting it in utter disregard of the principles which should control and regulate civilized warfare. They renewed the pledge never to submit to abolitionist rule. The people were urged not to be discouraged by the late reverses, nor to attribute their defeats to any want of courage or heroic self-sacrifice on the part of the armies. All the resources of the state were pledged to the cause of independence and perpetual separation from the United States. It was the paramount duty, the assembly declared, of every citizen to sustain and make effective the armies by encouraging enlistments, by furnishing supplies at low prices to the families of soldiers, and by upholding the credit of the Confederate government. To enfeeble the springs of action by disheartening the people and the soldiers was to strike the most fatal blow at the very life of the Confederacy.[304]