Being a member of our State Convention on the Union side, I hesitated a day or two, as to the propriety of accepting, fearing it might affect the union cause, but on mature deliberation and counsel with union friends, and on the receipt of a memorial signed by a large number of names of men of all parties, I concluded to accept.... Col. W. H. Garret Agt. for the Creeks, passed through this place on the 8th.... Col. S. Rutherford left here this morning for his agency (the Seminole). I desired him to ascertain on his way through the Creek and Choctaw Nations, the facts, as to the rumor that two men from Texas were in the Creek Nation for the purpose of meeting the several nations in Council &c. and to report to me immediately.... Dr. Griffith's solicitude for the Union interests apparently soon vanished. On the twentieth of April, he wrote[331] that, "under the circumstances," he could not hold office. Coffin of Indiana was then selected[332] for the place of southern superintendent and, in a very little while, Griffith was among the applicants[333] for the corresponding position in the Confederate States. Between the dates of the two activities, moreover, he had been appointed by the Arkansas Convention one of the three special agents to interview the Indian tribes in the interests of secession. That was on the tenth of May. The changes in the agency incumbents proved equally temporary and unfortunate. Particularly was this the case with two determined[334] upon on the sixth of April. Four days later, William Quesenbury[335] of Fayetteville, Arkansas was notified that he had been appointed to succeed William H. Garrett as agent for the Creeks, and John Crawford[336] of the same place that he had been appointed to succeed Robert J. Cowart as agent for the Cherokees. Both went over to the Confederacy. Nothing else could well have been expected of Crawford, or of Quesenbury either for that matter, and it is rather surprising that their past records were not more thoroughly examined. Quesenbury, like Richard P. Pulliam, was a sort of protégé of Elias Rector. Pulliam had been Rector's clerk in the office and Quesenbury his clerk in the field.[337] Crawford had been very prominent[338] in the Arkansas legislature the preceding winter in the expression of ideas and sentiments hostile to Abraham Lincoln. He accepted the office of Cherokee agent under Lincoln, notwithstanding, and he subsequently said[339] that he did so because the Indians would not have liked a northern man to come among them. Before Crawford's commission arrived, Cowart had departed[340] and Cherokee affairs were in dire confusion.[341] John J. Humphreys[342] of Tennessee had meanwhile been offered the Wichita Agency[343] and Peter P. Elder[344] of Kansas, the Neosho River. The Choctaw and Chickasaw Agency seems to have been left vacant. Truth to tell, there was no longer any such agency under United States control.