Another:
"Would not recapitulate the evils which had been perpetrated upon the South. Great as they have been, they are comparatively unimportant, when compared with the evils to which they would inevitably lead. We must not consider what we have borne, but what we must bear hereafter. There is no remedy for these evils in the government; we have no alternative left us, then, but to come out of the government."
Another:
"He was opposed to calling a convention, because he thought it would impede the action of this State on the questions now before the country. He thought it would impede our progress towards disunion. All his objections to a convention of the people applied only to the proposition to call it now. He thought conventions dangerous things, except when the necessities of the country absolutely demand them. He said that he had adopted the course he had taken on these weighty matters simply and entirely with the view of hastening the dissolution of this Union."
Another:
"Would sustain the bill for electing delegates to a Southern Congress, because he thought it would bring about a more speedy dissolution of the Union."
In the Nashville convention a delegate said:
"I shall enumerate no more of the wrongs that we have suffered, or the dangers with which we are threatened. If these, so enormous and so atrocious, are not sufficient to arouse the Southern mind, our case is desperate. But, supposing that we shall be roused, and that we shall act like freemen, and, knowing our rights and our wrongs, shall be prepared to sustain the one and redress the other, what is the remedy? I answer secession—united secession of the slaveholding States, or a large number of them. Nothing else will be wise—nothing else will be practicable. The Rubicon is passed. The Union is already dissolved. Instead of wishing the perpetuity of any government over such vast boundaries, the rational lover of liberty should wish for its speedy dissolution, as dangerous to all just and free rule. Is not all this exemplified in our own case? In nine months, in one session of Congress, by a great coup d'etat, our constitution has been completely and for ever subverted. Instead of a well balanced government, all power is vested in one section of the country, which is in bitter hostility with the other. And this is the glorious Union which we are to support, for whose eternal duration we are to pray, and before which the once proud Southron is to bow down. He ought to perish rather."
"They have not, however, been satisfied with taking all (the territory). They have made that all a wicked instrument for the abolition of the constitution, and of every safeguard of our property and our lives. I have said they have made the appropriation of this territory an instrument to abolish the constitution. There is no doubt that they have abolished the constitution. The carcass may remain, but the spirit has left it. It is now a fetid mass, generating disease and death. It stinks in our nostrils."
"A constitution means ex vi termini, a guarantee of the rights, liberty, and security of a free people, and can never survive in the shape of dead formalities. It is a thing of life, and just and fair proportions; not the caput mortuum which the so-called Constitution of the United States has now become. Is there a Southern man who bears a soul within his ribs, who will consent to be governed by this vulgar tyranny," &c.
From public addresses:
"Under the operation of causes beyond the scan of man, we are rapidly approaching a great and important crisis in our history. The shadow of the sun has gone back upon the dial of American liberty, and we are rapidly hastening towards the troubled sea of revolution. A dissolution of the Union is our inevitable destiny, and it is idle for man to raise his puny arm to stem the tide of events," &c.