During the secession crisis in late 1860 and early 1861, five states of the lower South appointed commissioners to travel to the other slave states with the purpose of swaying their fellow Southerners to leave the Union and form a Southern Confederacy. Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana appointed a total of fifty-five commissioners who journeyed to the farthest reaches of the South between December 1860 and April 18611
The speech printed below is from the Louisiana Secession Commissioner, George Williamson, to the people of Texas.
"Louisiana looks to the formation of a Southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery, and of the free institutions of the founders of the Federal Union, bequeathed to their posterity.