I spent an hour at the President's, where I met Thompson, Robert McGraw, and some others; we sat around the tea-table and discussed the disunion movements of the South.

Being in such intimate relations and intercourse with the leaders of the Breckinridge wing of the Democratic party during the progress of the Presidential canvass, and that party being made up so exclusively of the extreme Southern Democrats, the President must have had constant information of the progress and development of the disunion sentiment and purpose in the South.

These proceedings occurred on the second day of the session, December 4; two days later the Speaker announced the committee, placing at the head, as chairman, Thomas Corwin, of Ohio, and appointing such members from the different States as to make it of marked influence and ability; the disunion faction being distinctly recognized by several extreme representatives.

Though this was the first roll-call of the session, the disunion conspirators, one after another, made haste to declare the treasonable attitude of their States.

For the time the disunion extremists were keeping their scheme too well masked for us to establish clearly its historical record.

But after Douglas had made a damaging exposure of Yancey's disunion intrigues, which had come to light, and had charged their animus on the Charleston seceders, Davis changed his tone.

With Wilkinson's return to Kentucky, after his successful trading trip to New Orleans, the disunion agitation once more took formidable form.

Almost immediately after the fall of Sumter many members of that majority went over to the original disunion minority, and with them adopted an ordinance for withdrawing the State from the Union.

Each of the factions was in some form charging disunion motives or tendencies upon part or all of the others; but each indignantly denied the allegation as to itself.

There remained therefore nothing but silence and the feeble hope that this first fury of the disunion onset might spend itself in angry words, and be followed by calmer counsels.

Here, as elsewhere, he was no doubt persistently intriguing for disunion in secret while ostentatiously denying disunion purposes in public.

The President proceeds, therefore, to discuss the second head of the disunion question, by an attempt to formulate and define the powers and duties of Congress with reference to the threatened rebellion.

Disunion spirit on frontier; folly of; extent in Vermont and Kentucky; equivocal attitude of disunion leaders; Kentucky and Virginia resolutions, and Hartford Convention.

As an evidence of the disunion combination which lay like smoldering embers under the surface of Southern politics, it is instructive to read an extract from a hitherto unpublished letter from Governor Henry A. Wise, of Virginia, to a gentleman in Philadelphia, for a copy of which we are indebted to General Duncan S. Walker.

Under the surface, a small but determined disunion conspiracy was actively at work.