 When, at the beginning of the war, Michigan was asked to supply no more than one regiment, Governor Austin Blair sent seven.Before the Civil War, President James Buchanan took a weak position amid a looming South secession crisis.Secretary of State Lewis Cass of Michigan, a 78-year-old elder statesman who had been Michigan's U.S. senator and governor of Michigan Territory, resigned from Buchanan's cabinet in protest, remarking that "he had seen the Constitution born and now feared he was seeing it die".