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This defeat put a stop for the moment to all official action, as the Legislature had adjourned, but the public agitation and discussion continued. The disunion sentiment began to grow very rapidly as a result of events which were transpiring outside the State. Amid the intense excitement which followed the taking of Fort Sumter, Governor Harris issued a call for a second extra session of the Legislature. On the 18th of April he had replied to President Lincoln’s call for troops: “Tennessee will not furnish a single man for coercion, but fifty thousand, if necessary, for the defence of our rights and those of our Southern brothers.”

The Legislature convened on the twenty-seventh of April. The public were excluded from its meeting, and its members were pledged to secrecy. The session opened with the reading of the gubernatorial message,ssss1 which asserted that the President of the United States had wantonly inaugurated an internecine war upon the people of the slave States. “This war,” he said, “is likely to assume an importance, nearly, if not equal to the struggle of our revolutionary fathers in their patriotic efforts to resist usurpations and throw off the tyrannical yoke of the British Government.