—A meeting of members of the Georgia Legislature, favoring cooperation, was held at Milledgeville. A convention of Southern States desiring cooperation was urged, and an address to the people of South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida, was issued.—Tribune, Dec. 20.
—A bill has been introduced into the Legislature of North Carolina, providing that
—“No ordinance of said Convention, dissolving the connection of the State of North Carolina with the Federal Government, or connecting it with any other, shall have any force or validity until it shall have been submitted to, and ratified by, a majority of the qualified voters of the State for members of the General Assembly, to whom it shall be submitted for their approval or rejection.”—Evening Post, Dec. 20.
—The Commissioner from Mississippi to Maryland addressed the citizens of Baltimore this evening. In the course of his remarks upon the intentions of the seceding States, he said: “Secession is not intended to break up the present Government, but to perpetuate it. We do not propose to go out by way of breaking up or destroying the Union as our fathers gave it to us, but we go out for the purpose of getting further guaranties and security for our rights; not by a Convention of all the Southern States, nor by Congressional tricks, which have failed in times past and will fail again. But our plan is for the Southern States to withdraw from the Union, for the present, to allow amendments to the Constitution to be made, guaranteeing our just rights; and if the Northern States will not make those amendments, by which these rights shall be secured to us, then we must secure them the best way we can. This question of slavery must be settled now or never. The country has been agitated seriously by it for the past twenty or thirty years. It has been a festering sore upon the body politic; and many remedies having failed, we must try amputation, to bring it to a healthy state. We must have amendments to the Constitution, and if we cannot get them we must set up for ourselves.”
—The secession leaders at Charleston declare no more soldiers shall be sent to the forts in that harbor. A captain of a schooner landed some supplies there a few days since, and was terribly abused for it. He was told it would not be safe for any vessel to attempt it in future.
—The Governor of Maryland declined to receive the Commissioner from Mississippi to that State, setting forth his reasons in an elaborate Union letter.–(See Document No. 1.)