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] This opening statement was followed by an historical review in which was traced the growth of the Republican party. The offences it had committed against the Southern States were then enumerated. Among other things, he said: “It has sought to appropriate to itself, and to exclude the slaveholders from, the territory acquired by the common blood and treasure of all. It has, through the instrumentality of the Emigrants’ Aid Society under State patronage, flooded the territories with its minions armed with Sharp’s rifles and bowie knives, seeking thus to accomplish by intimidation, violence, and murder what it could not do by constitutional means. “It claimed the constitutional right to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, the forts, arsenals, dock-yards, and other places ceded to the United States within the bounds of the slaveholding States. It proposed a prohibition of the slave-trade between the States, thereby crowding the slaves together, and preventing the exit south until they became unprofitable to such an extent that it would force the owner finally to abandon them in self-defence. It has, by the deliberate legislative enactments of a large majority of the Northern States, openly and flagrantly nullified the clause of the Constitution which provided for the return of fugitive slaves.