 The state then joined the Confederacy less than a month later, issuing a of their reasons for seceding, proclaiming that "[o]ur position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery--the greatest material interest of the world".Fulton Anderson, a Mississippian lawyer, delivered a speech to the Virginian secession convention in 1861, in which he declared that "grievances of the Southern people on the slavery question" and their opposition to the Republican Party's goal of "the ultimate extinction of slavery" were the primary catalysts of the state in declaring secession.Mississippian judge Alexander Hamilton Handy also shared this view, opining of the "black" Republican Party that