The Confederate Congress and Confederate President Jefferson Davis issue a call for 100,000 volunteer soldiers to serve for twelve months. Yet uncertainty surrounds the fate of Deep South states not yet committed to the southern cause; Union sentiment remains strong in Tennessee and North Carolina. In the Upper South, Virginia is tipping toward secession.
Meanwhile, an editorial in the Charleston Mercury reiterates, “Slavery is the immediate cause of the existence of the Confederacy.”
The New York Herald reports, “Dispatches from Montgomery, Alabama, the capital of the new Southern confederacy, say that it is considered there that war between the North and South is now inevitable.”
Amidst the talk of the inevitability of war, Georgia Baptist Martin Crawford (illustration), a Commissioner of the Confederate States of America, is in Washington, D.C. for the purpose of conferring with the United States government. The New York Herald says of this event:
Mr. Crawford, one of the three Commissioners from the Southern confederacy appointed to negotiate with the governor of the United States for the transfer of the public property, arrived in Washington yesterday. He will not announce his mission to the government until the arrival of his colleagues, who are expected in a few days. It is supposed that Mr. Lincoln will decline all conference with these gentlemen.
In the Missouri State Convention yesterday resolutions were adopted appointing a committee to wait on the Commissioner from Georgia and inform him that Missouri dissented from the position taken by his State, and very respectfully but emphatically declined to accept the invitation of Georgia to share with her the honors and responsibilities of secession.
Source: Charleston Mercury and New York Herald articles (link)
