"What fault has there been on the part of the General Government of the United States? Why break up this Union? Will any gentleman be so kind as to particularize a single instance worthy of debate, in which the Federal Government has been derelict [negligent] in the discharge of its duty, or has failed to accomplish the purposes of its organization? . . . "I am not here . . . to defend the election of Abraham Lincoln. I believe that his election was virtually a fraud upon the people of the United States . . . nominated, as he was, by a sectional party, and upon a sectional platform, with no representation in the body which nominated him from the South; but he was nominated and elected according to the forms of law. . . . "Let us look . . . at the evils that must result from secession. The first, in my opinion, would be that our country would not only be divided into a Northern Confederacy and into Southern Confederacy, but, soon or later it would be divided into sundry [several] petty Confederacies. We would have a Central Confederacy, a Confederacy of the States of the Mississippi Valley, a Pacific Confederacy, a Western Confederacy, an Eastern Confederacy, a Northern and a Southern Confederacy.