In determining a question momentous beyond all calculation to themselves and to their posterity, they were hurried into the election of delegates, and the delegates were hurried into convention, and the convention was hurried into secession by a terror of public opinion that would not endure resistance and would not listen to reason.
The few who were left in possession of coolness and sound judgment among the public men of South Carolina, desired to stay the rush of events by waiting for co-operation with the other slave-holding States.

Their request was denied and their argument answered by the declaration that co-operation had been tried in 1850, and had ended in defeating all measures looking to Disunion.

One of the members declared that if South Carolina again waited for co-operation, slavery and State-rights would be abandoned, State-sovereignty and the cause of the South would be lost forever.

The action of the convention was still further stimulated by the resignation of Mr.
Hammond and Mr.Chestnut, United-States senators from South Carolina, and by the action of Governor Pickens in appointing a cabinet of the same number and of the same division of departments that had been adopted in the National Government.
THE ACTION OF SOUTH CAROLINA.
South Carolina was urged forward in this course by leading Disunionists in other States who needed the force of one bold example of secession to furnish the requisite stimulus to their own communities.

The members of the South Carolina convention, recognizing the embarrassment and incongruity of basing their action simply upon the constitutional election of a President, declared that the public opinion of their State "had for a long period been strengthening and ripening for Disunion." Mr.Rhett, eminent in the public service of his State, asserted "that the secession of South Carolina was not produced by Mr.Lincoln's election, or by the non-execution of the Fugitive- slave Law; that it was a matter which had been gathering head for thirty years," and that they were now "determined upon their course at whatever risk." Among the singular incidents of the South-Carolina secession, followed subsequently by other States, was the solemn import attached to the word _ordinance_.