lately come to pass. The work is in the form of fiction, and is incomplete;-two parts only having been given to the public. But it contains enough to establish the assertion that those who were sufficiently sagacious to trace the doctrines of Mr. Calhoun to their logical conclusion discovered as an inevitable result of their acceptance, the dissolution of the Union.

The events recorded in the story are supposed to have occurred at the close of Mr. Van Buren's third term as President, and at the beginning of his fourth. He is the only distinguished personage referred to by name; but those who were familiar with the public men at Washington, when the book was first printed, could detect, with certainty, many other living characters, disguised under other names than their own.

The grievances of the South are represented as having reached such a hight that the cotton states have formed "a confederacy" independent of the Union. Virginia has been prevented from throwing herself on the side of the South by a strong constitutional party, and has consequently become the battleground on which the national troops are aiding the Union men to oppose the advocates of secession. Washington is threatened by the advancing forces of the South. The officers of the army are wavering in their allegiance, and sophistical arguments are brought forward with great plausibility to show that their primary allegiance is due to Virginia; and in case of her difference with the United States, sole allegiance is due to the Old Dominion. Cotton is believed to be king, with rice and tobacco for prime ministers; and strenuous efforts are successfully made to secure from England, out of interested motives, a recognition of the new confederacy. The North are represented as corrupt and cowardly. The slaves are pictured as contented, and devoted to their masters. Such are some of the parallels between the projected and the actual state of things. More remarkable, however, than these coincidences, is one great contrast between the prophecy and the fact. The occasion of secession, in the novel, is not slavery, nor abolitionism. Here, as in the writings of Mr. Calhoun, we find only incidental reference to "the peculiar institution,"-none at all to interference with it on the part of the north. The national government is represented as having become monarchical and despotic in the hands of President Van Buren and those who surrounded him, and the tariff is again

discussed as the obnoxious manifestation of the national power. The South appears to have "calculated the value of the Union,” and to have ascertained, by some process which we might expect would puzzle even a professor of the higher mathematics, that a dependence upon England was better than a continuance of the government bequeathed to us from our fathers.

From the works now noticed we proceed to a brief examination of the memoirs of General Quitman, almost the only biography which the press has given us of one prominently engaged in the execution of the scheme to establish a Southern Republic.

The speeches and state papers of Mr. Calhoun present the doctrine of secession with all the plausible philosophy of a man of affairs. The romance of Mr. Tucker embodies, in the garb of actual occurrence, the sagacious prophecy of a man of letters. The correspondence of General Quitman shows us what a man of arms was disposed to do for putting in practice the philosophy of the one, and for bringing to pass the prophecy of the other.

Like many other southerners, especially of those most heedless in the defense of the South, General Quitman was a northerner by birth-his father being the Rev. Dr. Quitman, a distinguished clergyman of Rhinebeck, on the Hudson. The son, about the time of his majority, removed to Mississippi, and identified himself with the concerns of that state, succeeding to one and another high office in the gift of the people. His services in behalf of Texas, when it was at war with Mexico, and his subsequent gallantry in the war between the United States and Mexico, made him popular through the country as a military hero, while his avowed adhesion to the Calhoun doctrines of state sovereignty, in the extreme form, caused him to be early singled out in the South as an appropriate leader in the coming conflict with the North. He died in 1858-and his letters, with other biographical materials, were given to the public in 1860, by Mr. J. F. H. Claiborne. These memoirs have attracted, for one reason or another, much less attention than their revelations deserve. The public have been too much absorbed in watching living and dangerous traitors last year and this, to bestow a great deal of time on such as are no longer able to do any harm. To understand, however, those who are now in the front of the rebellion, it is quite worth while to read the career of one who was actively engaged in upholding, by his letters and speeches, the doctrines

of secession, now advanced by the bayonet and sword, and who, if his life had been continued, might now be holding the post and awaiting the doom of another Mississippian, the actual chief of the new "Confederacy."

We have not room enough to give even a sketch of General Quitman's life. His ambition seems to have been to be to the State of Mississippi what Calhoun was to South Carolina. In powers of reasoning, and in statesmanship, he was immeasurably inferior to the leader of the nullification conflict; but what he lacked in intellectual accumen, he made up in sympathy with the people, boldness, and military reputation. Mr. Calhoun's opposition to the Union was the tariff. Secession, on that ground, being exploded, a new occasion for a violation of the constitution was found in the anti-slavery agitations of the North. It made no difference that the North had never interfered with slavery in any one of the southern states; it was enough that there had been free discussion of its evils, and a growing determination to adhere to the doctrines of the founders of the government, and do all that was possible under the constitution to prevent the extension of "a moral, social, and political evil." In 1850, the passage of the Compromise Act gave as much offense to the extreme men at the South as to the anti-slavery men at the North. The fugitiveslave law was not more odious to New England than was the admission of California as a free state, to the pro-slavery advocates in South Carolina and Mississippi. Then began to work the machinations for dissevering the Union, which have inflicted so severe a blow on the prosperity of the country. Upon all the plottings from that time onward till his death, the memoirs of. Quitman throw a most important light.

The letters which General Quitman received from prominent Southerners, as given in his life, are quite as curious as his own. When it became evident that the free states were to be increased by the accession of California, the disunionists of the South began to conspire as to which of the states should lead the rebellion. Governor Seabrook of South Carolina, then writes to Governor Quitman of Mississippi, that "there are satisfactory reasons why South Carolina should move cautiously in this matter," and ask what Mississippi will do. There are other almost amusing illustrations of the reluctance of the Palmetto State to take the lead in the contest.

"A burnt child dreads fire." Having received a

favorable response from Quitman, Seabrook continues to discuss the ways and means by which secession may be brought about. Under date of October 23d, 1850, he writes from Charleston, that he does not know one man hostile to secession, and yet he believes that "the great cause would receive a fatal blow should this state [South Carolina] attempt to take the lead," and he hopes accordingly that "Mississippi will begin the patriotic work and allow the Palmetto banner the privilege of a place in her ranks.”

General Quitman appears quite willing to go forward as far as South Carolina could desire; but a fear that the South were not ready to unite, or that there was as yet no occasion which would justify in the eyes of the world so mighty a revolt, or that the accession of Mr. Fillmore to the Presidency, and the subsequent compromise measures, would add too much strength to the Union feeling, seems to have prevented him from actually venturing on open hostility to the national government.

The connection of Quitman with Lopez, was one of the important connecting links in the chain of conspiracy. While yet Governor of Mississippi, he gave so much encouragement to the proposed invasion and conquest of Cuba, that he was indicted in the United States Court for violation of the neutrality laws. The vigorous measures which were taken by the governments of Spain and of the United States to put down the fillibusters of that day, proved to be a severe check upon the conspirators of the Southern Confederacy. Cuba has always been essential to their scheme of a Mediterranean Empire on the shores of the Mexican Gulf. It is the key-stone of their arch. On account of his complicity with Lopez, General Quitman expected to be arrested, and was advised to resist by Hon. Jacob Thompson, in a letter dated September 2d, 1850, from which we make the following extract. Says Mr. Thompson, "When the President of the United States commands me to do one act, and the Executive of Mississippi commands me to do another thing inconsistent with the first order, I obey the Governor of my State. To Mississippi I owe allegiance, and because she commands me I owe obedience to the United States. But when she says I owe obedience no longer, RIGHT OR WRONG, come weal or woe, I stand for my legitimate sovereign, and to dis obey her behests is in my conscience treason." These are the words of one who, seven years afterwards, was appointed by James Buchanan to a seat in the Cabinet, as one of the Chief

Executive Officers of the United States. A letter from General Quitman to Colonel John S. Preston of South Carolina, dated March 29th, 1851, is of so much significance that we make from it an extended extract:

"I believe, then, from present indications, that Mississippi, if her propositions are not promptly acceded to, will invite her neighboring sister states to form with her a new confederacy. She may, from her weakness and the inconvenience of her position, withhold the final act until one of her immediate neighbors shall also be willing to join her. She will not, probably, even if redress and guarantees be absolutely refused, venture to secede alone. Many of her boldest and staunchest Southern-rights men would not advise separate secession under any circumstances. A few with myself think that there are evils in the future even greater than separate secession.

"I concur with you in the opinion that the political equality of the slaveholding states is incompatible with the present confederation as construed and acted on by the majority, and that the present union and slavery cannot coexist; but I fear that these momentous truths have not yet become fully impressed upon the public mind in the South. In the cotton states such sentiments prevail and are growing; but there are some indications of their existence in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri, and although, to some extent, avowed in Texas and Louisiana, they are frowned down by most of their public men as treasonable and revolutionary. There is, then, no present hope that a majority of the slaveholding states will unite in any effective measures for curing the evils. It is vain to look for it or to expect it. On the contrary, the measures proposed to be adopted in some of the states, particularly Virginia, of a system of petty hostilities within the Union, would not only divert attention from sanative remedies, but would really increase the evil. There is no hope whatever of united action beyond the cotton states.

"For my part, I have long ceased to look beyond the cotton states for any united action, unless the North should pursue aggressions so madly and indiscreetly as to shock good taste, and insult pride as well as violate justice. Indeed, I fear that the frontier states-I mean those bordering on the free states-will never abandon the present Union, however great its oppressions, unless rudely driven from it by the North, or forced to choose between a Southern and a Northern confederacy. There is even danger, in case of the assembling of a Southern congress, that Virginia, uniting with the other slaveholding states now disposed to submit, will attempt to force upon us some new 'compromise' to preserve the shadow of the Union when the substance is gone. There is danger, too, except in those states in which proposed state action keeps up agitation, that the public sense of the insult, injury, and oppression inflicted upon the slaveholding states will become blunted by time and acquiescence, until it will be very difficult to arouse the people to a proper estimate of the extent of the danger which threatens them. While it is true that in some of the states, particularly Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana, much discontent with the late action of Congress prevails, and the spirit of resistance is extending itself among the people, yet nowhere, except in South Carolina and Mississippi, is it proposed to act authorita