Jacob Thompson, sitting Secretary of the Interior in the Buchanan Cabinet, had been recently named as a secession commissioner to North Carolina by Mississippi governor John J. Pettus. Despite his federal status, he took the appointment and traveled to Raleigh, North Carolina to lobby for that state's secession. Thompson did not resign from the cabinet until January 8, 1861. He later became Inspector General of the Confederate States Army. (By John Osborne)
Source Citation
Charles B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Cause of the Civil War (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 27.
Record Data
Date Certainty
Exact
Type
Lawmaking/Litigating
