A.  It strikes me that Charles B. Dew's Apostles of Disunion: Southern
Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2001) - and especially the chapter entitled
'The Mission to Virginia" - speaks directly to Professor Hardwick's
"question one:  how do we account for this prevalence of the secessionists'
interpretation of the constition in 1861, given the obvious reluctance of
most Virginians to accept this line of constitutional interpretation just a
year earlier?"   Dew's book is succinct, authoritative, well-written, and
readily available.

B.  Since its been mentioned, although is perhaps best known of three, the
Hartford Convention was the third secessionist movement in New England. Two
earlier secessionist plots in 1785-86 and 1803-04 are described in my
Wilderness So Immense (2003).

-- 
Jon Kukla
www.JonKukla.com

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