Jacob Thompson, although sitting Secretary of the Interior in the Buchanan Cabinet, had been named as a secession commissioner to North Carolina by Mississippi governor John J. Pettus and had vigorously taken up his duties in December 1860. He finally resigned his cabinet post, citing as his reason the President's authorizing of the mission of the Star of the West to resupply Fort Sumter. His post remained vacant until President Lincoln appointed Caleb Blood Smith in March, 1861. (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.
Samuel Wylie Crawford, The Genesis of the Civil War: The Story of Sumter, 1860-1861 (New York: Charles L. Webster and Company, 1887), 181.
Record Data
Date Certainty
Exact
Type
Lawmaking/Litigating
