Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus had recently named Judge Alexander Hamilton Handy a secession commissioner to his birth state of Maryland.  When he was refused a hearing before the state legislature, Handy addressed 1500 people at the Maryland Institute Hall in Baltimore the following evening.  He said that the nation was in a "state of revolution" over slavery and that "slavery was ordained by God and sanctioned by humanity."  (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), 32. 
Record Data
Date Certainty
              Exact
          Type
          Slavery/Abolition