• From Washington, US Secretary of the Treasury in the Buchanan Administration, Howell Cobb, publishes an open letter to the people of his home state of Georgia stating his conclusion that after the new Republican Administration takes power next March, “in my honest judgement, each hour that Georgia remains thereafter a member of the Union will be an hour of degradation, to be followed by certain and speedy ruin.” 

Up until this point, Cobb has been a staunch Unionist and has great influence in Georgia, having served in the US Congress where he had been House Speaker, as Georgia Governor, and in Buchanan’s Cabinet. Within two days, Cobb would resign his Cabinet post./1860