Georgia’s Ordinance of Secession and the address of her commissioner were referred to a special committee, of which the Hon. John B. Henderson, the author of the fourteenth amendment of the Constitution of the United States,[11] was chairman. On the eighteenth day of the sittings of the Convention, Mr. Henderson, slaveholder though he was, presented a comprehensive report recommending the rejection of the prayer from Georgia to secede, presented by Mr. Glenn, and urging the weightiest and most conclusive reasons against the disruption of the Union. This report was stronger meat than the Convention was then able to digest, so after a short, sharp debate it was laid on the table[12] and was never afterwards taken up. It did not need to be. It had done its work. The author of it had seized his opportunity to deal a staggering blow against the secession of Missouri, and the effect of it could not be neutralized. So what at first was a menace was transmuted into a blessing. The Georgia commissioner made a vow that he would never buy a new hat until Missouri seceded from the Union. In 1900 he was still living. The silk hat that covered his obfuscated brain when he represented seceded Georgia before the Convention in St. Louis had been fixed over three times. He was still proud of it and of the cause that he represented in 1861. Whether he now lives, we do not know. He has died, or will die, in the faith. He was made of stern stuff. If he has, or when he shall have, departed to the land where silk hats are not needed, and from which no one ever secedes, every one who admires pure grit will heartily breathe the prayer, _Requiescat in pace_.