Governor Hicks refuses to call the Maryland legislature to hear the Mississippi secession commissioner

Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus had recently named Judge Alexander Hamilton Handy a secession commissioner to his birth state of Maryland.  Handy met Governor Thomas Hicks in Annapolis and requested meeting a session of the Maryland legislature to explain Mississippi's position in the current crisis.  Hicks refused his request out of hand.  Handy spoke instead to a meeting in Baltimore the next evening. (By John Osborne)