The virtue of the white race was necessarily involved in the institution. The blood of the dominant race became intermingled with the black, and often white blood predominated in the slave. The offspring of slaveholders became slaves, and were dealt in the same as the pure African. Concubinage existed generally where slaves were numerous.
The rule was that any person born of a slave mother was doomed to perpetual slavery.
As early as 1856, perhaps earlier, conferences were proposed among leaders in some of the Southern States looking to secession. They were repeated again in 1858, and before the election of Lincoln in 1860.(102) And Southern secret societies were formed in 1860 to promote the same end.
The existence of a disunion cabal in Buchanan's Cabinet, working to bring about disunion, was hardly a secret.
Howell Cobb of Georgia, Secretary of the Treasury, John B. Floyd of Virginia, Secretary of War, Jacob Thompson of Mississippi, Secretary of the Interior, and possibly others, were of the Cabinet cabal.
Buchanan, though himself desiring to preserve the Union, had not the bold temperament, and he had too long been a political tool of the slave power to effectually resist its violent aggressions; nor did he have the discernment to discover that his official household was the centre of a disunion movement. His Secretary of War distributed officers of the army believed to be friendly to the South where they could become available to it; he sent from the North small arms and cannon, ammunition and stores where they could be seized at the right time.(103) Members of the Cabinet kept the secession leaders advised of all acts of the administration, and generally aided them. The auspicious time, if ever, seemed to have come for a successful dissolution of the Union. The army and navy were full of able Southern men, ready, as the sequel proves, to go with their States, abandon the country that had nurtured and educated them, and the flag that had been their glory.
Governor Wm. H. Gist, of South Carolina, October 5, 1860, by confidential letters to the governors of the cotton States, fairly inaugurated disunion, based on the anticipated election of Abraham Lincoln a month thence.(104)
One week later, without waiting for a consultation of governors of slave States, he, by proclamation, convened the Legislature of South Carolina to "take action for the safety and protection of the State."
This body met November 5th, the day preceding the Presidential election.
The alleged grounds of justification for this early meeting were: