These were the original seven States that formed the nucleus of the Confederacy.
They had gone through what they deemed the complete process of separation from the Union, without the slightest obstruction from any quarter and without the interposition of any authority from the National Government against their proceedings.
Long before the Secession movement had been developed to the extent just detailed, Congress was in session.

It assembled one month after the Presidential election, and fifteen days before the Disunionists of South Carolina met in their ill-starred convention.
Up to that time there had been excitement, threats of resistance to the authority of the government in many sections of the South, and an earnest attempt in the Cotton States to promote co-operation in the fatal step which so many were bent on taking.

But there had been no overt act against the national authority.

Federal officers were still exercising their functions in all the States; the customs were still collected in Southern ports; the United- States mails were still carried without molestation from the Potomac to the Rio Grande.

But the critical moment had come.