anterior to the nullification of South Carolina in 1832, which was so
promptly suppressed by General Jackson, then President of the United
States. Some of them, however, claim even greater antiquity, and point
with affected pride to the historical period of the American colonial
revolution against the taxation and tyranny of England, as the date of
their origin. Whatever may be the facts as to the precise date of the
existence, respectively, of these disreputable cables, laid to undermine
the greatness and glory of the National Union, cemented as it is by the
blood of the sires and sages of the Revolution, is unimportant to the
purpose of the author, while the great living fact that they have been the
most deadly weapon in the hands of the enemy is corroborated by the
eventful history of the union of these States.

Prior to the breaking out of the rebellion in 1861, these various
organizations, being the van-guards in the general conspiracy against the
integrity and perpetuity of the Federal Government, had not been
introduced, to any great extent, in the non-slaveholding states, and in
consequence thereof had little or no tangibility north of the compromise
of 1820, familiarly known as Mason and Dixon's line. South of this line,
however, they had long been standing institutions in every city, town,
hamlet, villa and populated district throughout all of the late so-called
Confederate States of America; vying the Palmetto in rankness of growth,
and rivaling the rattlesnake in deadness of poison, until at length,
gorged with their own baneful offspring, and pale with the sickness of
their own stomachs, the child of secession was born unto them as a curse
and reproach to the Southern people and the generations to follow them
forever.

On the 17th of April, 1861, the report of the gun fired upon Fort Sumter
was heard by every member of these secret conclaves in the South, and was