On the warm, bright morning of April 24, 1860, it seemed as if all of Charleston was streaming up Meeting Street toward the South Carolina Institute Hall, fearful of arriving late. The national convention of the Democratic Party had gathered in its sweltering auditorium to select a candidate for the presidency, and the city swarmed with visitors from across the Union. It was “an invasion of … locusts,” one resident complained: strangers infesting hotels and barrooms, crowding King Street shops, declaring their views in a buzz of forceful accents, careless drawls, nasal twangs. Southern rights advocates headquartered north of the Market at the cushy Charleston Hotel, hurrahing favorite sons far into the night. Northern and Western delegates, mostly supporting frontrunner Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, overran the Mills House and bedded down in the Hibernian Hall. Here was a drama of “immense excitement,” thought Alabama's “Horse Shoe Ned.” As to how it would all turn out, “nobody knows anything.”

Regardless, these pests would pay, and that mattered most at the street level. Residents regarded grave and giddy outsiders as a source of major profit and minor annoyance, just as conventioneers are still seen. None could imagine that the choices men made here would see locals standing shoulder to shoulder along the Battery one year on, cheering husbands, brothers, friends, lovers, and sons shelling the as- yet- unfinished Federal fort at the harbor's mouth in the name of an as- yet- unborn Confederacy. Those who would become Vigilant Rifles in November nearly all threaded their way on this day through the self- important crowd, hurrying on to unexciting jobs within earshot of the political proceedings. That morning no one knew that, a few days hence, expatriate William Lowndes Yancey would denounce the convention and lead Alabama's men from the hall to wild applause. More than a few must have joined the shouting, stamping throng that night, whether from conviction, admiration for a winning performance, or a simple desire to fit in. The shame of seeing Carolina's delegation be the last to secede, jeered out of the meeting by its own neighbors, was still a few days off for Tom Simons, Sam Tupper, and other Charleston stalwarts, their supporters, and their foes.