In this temper a convention was ordered by the Legislature. The delegates were to be chosen directly by the people, and when assembled were to determine the future relation of South Carolina to the Government of the United States. The election was to be held in four weeks, and the convention was to assemble on the 17th of December. The unnatural and unprecedented haste of this action, by which South Carolina proceeded, as she proclaimed, to throw off her national relations, is more easily comprehended by recalling the difficult mode provided in every State for a change in its constitution. In not a single State of the American Union can the organic law be changed in less than a year, or without ample opportunity for serious consideration by the people. At that very moment the people of South Carolina were inhibited from making the slightest alteration in their own constitution except by slow and conservative processes which gave time for deliberation and reflection. In determining a question momentous beyond all calculation to themselves and to their posterity, they were hurried into the election of delegates, and the delegates were hurried into convention, and the convention was hurried into secession by a terror of public opinion that would not endure resistance and would not listen to reason.
The few who were left in possession of coolness and sound judgment among the public men of South Carolina, desired to stay the rush of events by waiting for co-operation with the other slave-holding States. Their request was denied and their argument answered by the declaration that co-operation had been tried in 1850, and had ended in defeating all measures looking to Disunion. One of the members declared that if South Carolina again waited for co-operation, slavery and State-rights would be abandoned, State-sovereignty and the cause of the South would be lost forever. The action of the convention was still further stimulated by the resignation of Mr. Hammond and Mr. Chestnut, United-States senators from South Carolina, and by the action of Governor Pickens in appointing a cabinet of the same number and of the same division of departments that had been adopted in the National Government.