Upon the choice of Lincoln, and while Buchanan was President, preparations were made by the South for a disruption of the Union. Reuben Davis, a distinguished lawyer and a member of Congress from Mississippi, in his autobiography, informs us that he spent much time with Floyd, the Secretary of War, who had been for twelve months sending arms to Southern arsenals and had put the forts in condition to be captured. He estimated that one half of the munitions of war was in the South.[115] South Carolina again took the initiative and seceded on the ground that as a sovereign State she had the right to withdraw from the compact she had entered into; and for the second time in our history did a State, and the same State, assert its sovereign right against the supreme authority of the United States. The other plantation States quickly followed South Carolina; generally there was no elaborate statement by them of their grievances, nor did they explain why the doctrines they abhorred less than thirty years before, they now asserted and so courageously fought for. Virginia joined the Southern Confederacy without passing any formal act of secession. Her convention, called for the purpose of considering the matter, voted not to secede. In an address delivered in October, 1887, at Richmond, on the dedication of a statue to Lee, the orator, a descendant of the great Chief-Justice Marshall, undertakes to explain and defend Virginia’s course in joining the South. He does not claim the right of secession and apparently agrees with Lee, and puts in italics what Lee wrote on the 23d of January, 1861, that “_Secession is nothing but revolution_.” He states also that secession was unjustifiable, because the opponents of Lincoln had the majority in the National House of Representatives and Senate; but that the method of Lincoln of composing the troubles of the country brought Virginia into the contest. Following, as Southern writers and speakers do, the extravagant denunciations of Calhoun, he says: “Instead of maintaining the honor, the integrity of our National Union, it destroyed that Union in all but a territorial sense, as effectually as secession, by substituting conquered provinces for free States, and repeating in America the shameful history of Russia and Poland.” As our Poland when he spoke had an executive of its own choice and a majority of the House of Representatives, it was its own fault, if its inhabitants were in that abject condition. Is it not absurd to talk in this way, when no secessionist has been hung for treason, and a silver crown a short time since, at a public meeting, was prepared by some admirer for the dethroned autocrat of our Poland? At any rate we have no sedition law now, and freedom of speech against the government passes without comment. An unsuccessful revolution is rebellion, generally punished in other countries by death. It has not been so in our Russia. Jefferson Davis was indicted for treason; his trial never took place, as