It does not seem to Americans of the present generation that there was ever a moment, after the election of Abraham Lincoln, when the Civil War could have been averted. It appears, in retrospect, to have been absolutely inevitable. Yet there was certainly one moment when, if President Buchanan had had the courage to apply the general views which he himself advanced in his annual message to Congress of December 3, 1860, and his special message of January 8, 1861, which explicitly denied the right of secession, a halt might have been called to the growing rebellion. The secession movement was at first concentrated in the State of South Carolina. That State, all through the winter of 1860-1861, was presenting to the rest of the South an object lesson of successful nullification. In 1833 South Carolina had ordained nullification, but its ordinance was so instantly and heavily repressed by President Andrew Jackson that the State was absolutely unable to carry it out, or to move hand or foot. But now, in 1860, it did not merely ordain nullification--it enacted it. Every Federal judge, every judicial servant, and nearly every Federal official, in South Carolina, resigned, and the nation was left without an agent to enforce its laws, for no new ones were sent in. The United States authority in the State was at an end, save for the custom house at Charleston and Fort Moultrie in Charleston harbor. As long as South Carolina was let alone, her case plainly said to all the other slave States, "You see we can withdraw from the Union; we have withdrawn from the Union; and the Union takes no step to keep us in; you can do the same thing." At this time North Carolina and Virginia were opposed to secession. Governor Sam Houston, of Texas, stood like a rock against it. Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, never seceded. Other States were wavering. A great deal depended on the degree of success which South Carolina, the leader in the revolt, might have. And it was Buchanan who permitted South Carolina's success to become apparently complete, though in the message to which I have referred the president declared that secession was "wholly inconsistent with the Constitution," that "no human power could absolve him (the president) from his duty to enforce the laws," and that the danger of national disruption was upon the country. Buchanan, in his December message, actually quoted Jackson's solemn denunciation of the doctrine that a State had a right to separate itself from the Union.