Before Georgia seceded, Mississippi sent its commissioner, William L. Harris, to the Georgia Legislature.

He decried the threat of Lincoln and the Republicans and told the members that they had to choose between "This new union with Lincoln Black Republicans and free Negroes, without slavery; or, slavery under our old constitutional bond of union, without Lincoln Black Republicans, or free Negroes either, to molest us."

Alabama Commissioner Stephen Fowler Hale failed in his effort to convince Kentucky to secede, but wrote to the governor a diatribe against Northern attacks on slavery and lamented that Lincoln's election was "nothing less than an open declaration of war, for the triumph of this new theory of government destroys the property of the South, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a Santo Domingo servile resurrection...."

"Whereas, the election of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin to the offices of President and Vice-President of the United States of America by a sectional party avowedly hostile to the domestic institutions and to the peace and security of the State of Alabama, preceded by many and dangerous infractions of the Constitution of the United States by many of the States and people of the Northern section, is a political wrong of so insulting and menacing a character as to justify the people of the State of Alabama in the adoption of prompt and decided measures for their future peace and security."

Commissioner George Williamson George Williamson to the Texas Secession Convention on March 9, 1861:

"Being desirous of obtaining the concurrence of the people of Texas in what she has done, Louisiana invites you to a candid consideration of her acts in resuming the powers delegated to the government of the late United States, and in providing for the formation of a confederacy of "The States which have seceded and may secede." ... She was impelled to this action to preserve her honor, her safety, her property and the free institutions so sacred to her people. She believed the federal agent had betrayed her trust, had become the facile instrument of a hostile people, and was usurping despotic powers. She considered that the present vacillating executive, on the 4th of March next, would be supplanted by a stalwart fanatic of the Northwest, whose energetic will, backed by the frenzied bigotry of unpatriotic masses, would cause him to *establish* the military despotism already inaugurated."

After taking the oath of office as the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander H. Stephens, a former Congressman from Georgia, stated that:

"Our new government is founded on the opposite idea of the equality of the races . . . Its corner stone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man. This . . . government is the first in the history of the world, based on this great physical and moral truth."

Attack on Fort Sumter - the opening engagement of the American Civil War.

This attack prompted four more states to join the Confederacy.

May 21, 1861