all slave states in the Union to meet in Montgomery on February 4. Another six states called secession conventions of their own, held statewide elections to select delegates, convened and passed secession ordinances between January 9 and February 1, 1861. South Carolina set the pattern for electing delegates to the Provisional Congress. Six state conventions elected two delegates at large, and one from each congressional district. Florida allowed its secessionist Governor to appoint the state delegation. There was no popular election to the Provisional Congress; vacancies were filled by the secessionist conventions, state legislatures or temporarily by a convention president. Membership and politics The historian of the Confederate Congress, Wilfred Buck Yearns, held that the most significant feature of the Montgomery gathering was its moderation. The secessionist conventions had not only intended to establish a slaveholding republic of the Lower South, they also hoped to attract the border slaveholding states, and they sought to reconcile their own in-state cooperationists and union men. The result was that the Confederate Provisional Congress began its work in relative harmony. The state secessionist conventions had generally chosen delegates that truly represented their congressional districts, so the Provisional Congress fairly represented the diversity of the Southern states, excluding, of course, the millions of black people held in bondage throughout the South. Fifty delegates attended the first sessions at Montgomery. A majority of them had served in state secessionist conventions, and, overall in Congress, straight-out secessionists held a three-to-two ratio over the former conditional unionists. Alabama and Mississippi had the only state delegations with majority conditional unionists. Most of the Provisional Congressional delegates were prominent men of major political parties. The majority of the former Democrats to former Whigs was narrow, with Alabama and Louisiana delegations majority Whig and Georgia evenly divided. Thirty-six members of Congress had attended college, forty-two were licensed lawyers, and seventeen were planters. Their average age was 47, ranging from 72 to 31. Thirty-four had previous legislative experience, twenty-four having served in the U.S. Congress. Charles Conrad had served as Secretary of War under President Millard Fillmore, and John Tyler had been the tenth U.S. president. As historian Wilfred B. Yearns noted, “As a whole the Provisional Congress represented a higher type of leadership than either of the subsequent congresses." During the Provisional Congress, the expected political rivalries between secessionist fire-eaters and conservative conditional unionists did not appear, nor did the older