Nothing availed. South Carolina, under the leadership of Robert Barnwell Rhett, called a state convention which met in Columbia, but adjourned to Charleston, and on December 20 severed all connection with the National Government and recalled her Representatives in Congress. President Buchanan did not favor secession, and he hoped that some way might be found to settle the difficulties which underlay the crisis. In his message to Congress he declared that there was no right of secession, but that there was also no authority anywhere to prevent secession. This was at the time the view of most others in the North, perhaps in the South, for Southerners spoke frequently of the "revolution" they were precipitating. When the demand of South Carolina for the surrender of Fort Sumter was presented to the President, he decided to delay action until his successor was inaugurated. This was not irregular nor unusual, but gave the people of the South time to decide what they would do; and before February 1, 1861, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana withdrew from the Union, though not without strenuous resistance by large parties in all these communities, save Florida. Early in February delegates from these States gathered in Montgomery, Alabama, and organized a Southern Confederacy on the model of the older Union, and made Jefferson Davis President. Alexander Stephens, who had done more than any other Southerner to delay and defeat secession, was elected Vice-President. The new constitution was conservative if not reactionary in character. Slavery was definitely and specifically made a corner-stone of the new government. The foreign slave trade was, in deference to border state opinion, forbidden; but free trade, which had so long been a bone of contention between the planters of the South and the manufacturers of the East, was left to the wisdom of ordinary legislation. In fact many of the ablest Southern leaders foresaw the establishment of a protective system in the South. In the same spirit of statesmanlike compromise, President Davis was careful to fill the Cabinet and other important posts with men who represented all phases of opinion, with former rivals and even decided opponents of the cause he represented. So cautious and considered was this program of the new administration that ardent secessionists declared before the fall of Fort Sumter that a reunion with the older Federal Government was the object. And the mild and conciliatory attitude of William H. Seward, who was considered as a sort of acting president during the winter of 1860-61, strengthened this feeling in the South. The Southern commissioners whom Davis sent to Washington to negotiate with the Federal Government on the subjects of boundaries between the two countries, the division of the public debt, and the surrender of forts within Confederate territory were great favorites in the old national capital. A friendly attitude toward the new South still further found