Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 2.djvu/24

14 would weather the storm, and that the tornado could be stilled by resolving and asserting that the wind was not blowing. As soon as the conference convention reassembled on the 12th of March in Baltimore, the party of action asserted itself. Judge Chambers, ex-United States senator and ex-judge of the court of appeals, was made president, and a committee on resolutions appointed. The majority of the committee reported a set of resolutions of generalities—devotion to the Union, and opposition to disorder and disturbance of the public peace. The minority, through the chairman of the State committee, who was a member of the conference and of the committee, reported that any "attempt by the Federal government to retake, reoccupy or repossess the forts, arsenals and dock-yards now controlled by the Southern States, would be an act of war by the Federal government on the States, would operate ipso facto as a dissolution of the Union, and would remit to each State its original sovereign right to provide for its own safety and welfare, in any manner it decided to pursue." These resolutions would have been passed, but they met such violent opposition from the old men (Judge Chambers declared he would leave the chair and the convention if they were passed) that their author left the conference in disgust and returned home, where he promptly organized a military company for home defense and to resist invasion by foreign troops moving from the North to attack the South. The conference sent commissioners to Richmond to learn from the convention there in session what was the prospect of Virginia's taking position. They could learn nothing, for Virginia herself did not know.