Twenty Years of Congress Volume I Part 17

Mr. Toombs of Georgia did not take formal leave, but on the 7th of January delivered a speech which, though addressed to the Senate of the United States, was apparently intended to influence public sentiment in Georgia, where there was an uncomfortable halting in the progress of secession. The speech had special interest, not alone from Mr. Toombs's well-known ability, but because it was the only presentation of the conditions on which the scheme of Disunion might be arrested, and the Cotton States held fast in their loyalty to the government,--conditions which, in the language of Mr. Toombs, would "restore fraternity and peace and unity to all of us." It was not believed that Mr. Toombs had the faintest expectation that his proposition would receive favorable consideration in the free States. His point would be fully gained by showing that the free States would not accept conditions which Georgia had the right to exact as the basis of her remaining in the Union. Once firmly persuaded that she was deprived of her const.i.tutional rights, Georgia could the more easily be led or forced into secession.

The first condition prescribed by Mr. Toombs was, that in all the territory owned or to be acquired by the United States, slave property should be securely protected until the period of the formation of a State government, when the people could determine the question for themselves. The second condition was, that property in slaves should be ent.i.tled to the same protection from the Government of the United States in all its departments everywhere, which is extended to other property, provided that there should be no interference with the liberty of a State to prohibit or establish slavery within its limits. The third condition was, that persons committing crimes against slave property in one State, and fleeing to another, should be delivered up in the same manner as persons committing crimes against other forms of property, and that the laws of the State from which such persons flee should be the test of the criminality of the act. The fourth condition was, that fugitive slaves should be surrendered under the Act of 1850 without being ent.i.tled to a writ of _habeas corpus_, or trial by jury, or other obstructions in the States to which they might flee. The fifth and last demand was, that Congress should pa.s.s efficient laws for the punishment of all persons in any of the States who should in any manner aid or abet invasion or insurrection in any other State, or commit any other act against the law of nations tending to disturb the tranquility of the people or government of any other State. Without the concession of these points Mr. Toombs said the Union could not be maintained. If some satisfactory arrangement should not be made, he was for immediate action. "We are," he said, "as ready to fight now as we ever shall be. I will have equality or war." He denounced Mr. Lincoln as "an enemy to the human race, deserving the execration of all mankind."

GEORGIA SENATORS WITHDRAW.

Three weeks later the Georgia senators withdrew. Georgia had on the 19th of January, after much dragooning, pa.s.sed the Ordinance of Secession, and on the 28th, Mr. Alfred Iverson, the colleague of Mr. Toombs, communicated the fact to the Senate in a highly inflammatory speech. He proclaimed that Georgia was the sixth State to secede, that a seventh was about to follow, and that "a confederacy of their own would soon be established." Provision would be made "for the admission of other States," and Mr. Iverson a.s.sured the Senate that within a few months "all the slave-holding States of the late confederacy of the United States will be united together in a bond of union far more h.o.m.ogenous, and therefore more stable, than the one now being dissolved." His boasting was unrestrained, but his conception of the contest which he and his a.s.sociates were inviting was pitiably inadequate. "Your conquest,"

said he, addressing the Union senators, "will cost you a hundred thousand lives and a hundred millions of dollars."

The conclusion of Mr. Iverson's harangue disclosed his fear that after all Georgia might prefer the old Union. "For myself," said he, "unless my opinions greatly change, I shall never consent to the reconstruction of the Federal Union. The Rubicon is pa.s.sed, and with my consent shall never be recrossed." But these bold declarations were materially qualified by Mr. Iverson when he reflected on the powerful minority of Union men in Georgia, and the general feeling in that State against a conflict with the National Government. "In this sentiment," said he, "I may be overruled by the people of my State and of the other Southern States." . . . "Nothing, however, will bring Georgia back except a full and explicit recognition and guaranty of the safety and protection of the inst.i.tution of domestic slavery." This was the final indication of the original weakness of the secession cause in Georgia, and of the extraordinary means which were taken to impress the people of that State with the belief that secession would lead to reconstruction on a basis of more efficient protection to the South and greater strength to the whole Union.

On the 4th of February Mr. Slidell and Mr. Benjamin delivered their valedictories as senators from Louisiana. Mr. Slidell was aggressively insolent. He informed the Senate that if any steps should be taken to enforce the authority of the Union in the seceded States, they would be resisted. "You may," he said, "under color of enforcing your laws and collecting your revenue, blockade our ports. This will be war, and we shall meet it with different but equally efficient weapons. We will not permit the consumption or introduction of any of your manufactures. Every sea will swarm with our privateers, the volunteer militia of the ocean." He confidently expected foreign aid. "How long," he asked, "will the great naval powers of Europe permit you to impede their free intercourse with their best customers, and to stop the supply of the great staple which is the most important basis of their manufacturing industry?"

"You were," said he, adding taunt to argument, "with all the wealth of this once great confederacy, but a fourth or fifth rate naval power. What will you be when emasculated by the withdrawal of fifteen States, and warred upon by them with active and inveterate hostility?"

In a tone of patronizing liberality, Mr. Slidell gave a.s.surance that the new confederacy would recognize the rights of the inhabitants of the valley of the Mississippi and its tributaries to free navigation, and would guarantee to them "a free interchange of agricultural production without impost, and the free transit from foreign countries of every species of merchandise, subjected only to such regulations as may be necessary for a protection of the revenue system which we may establish." Had Mr. Slidell been less inspired by insolence, and more largely endowed with wisdom, he would have remembered that when the Union contained but six millions of people, they were willing to fight any one of three great European powers for freedom of access to the sea for the inhabitants of the valley of the Mississippi, and that it was from the first a physical impossibility to close it or in any way restrict it against the rights of the North-West. The people of that section, even without the prestige of the national flag, were immeasurably stronger than the people of the South-West, and were, unaided, fully competent to fight their way to the ocean over any obstacles which the powers behind Mr. Slidell could interpose. In the mere matching of local strength, it was sheer folly for the States of the lower Mississippi to attempt to control the mouth of that river.

SPEECHES OF BENJAMIN AND SLIDELL.

Mr. Judah P. Benjamin spoke in a tone of moderation as contrasted with the offensive dictation of Mr. Slidell. He devoted himself mainly to answering an argument which came instinctively to every man's mind, and which bore with particular severity upon the action of Louisiana. Mr. Benjamin brought his eminent legal ability to the discussion, but failed even to satisfy himself. The State of Louisiana was formed from territory which had been bought and paid for by the United States out of the common treasury of the whole people. Whatever specious plea might be made for the independent and separate sovereignty of the old thirteen States, the argument could not apply to Louisiana. No one could maintain that Louisiana had ever enjoyed a separate sovereignty of any kind, nominal or real. She had been originally owned by France, had been sold to Spain, had been sold back again to France, and had been bought by the United States. These sales had been made without protest from any one, and the t.i.tle conferred at each transfer was undisputed, the sovereignty of the purchasing power undeniable.

Confronting these facts, and realizing the difficulty they presented, Mr. Benjamin was reduced to desperate straits for argument. "Without entering into the details of the negotiation," he said, "the archives of our State Department show the fact to be that although the domain, the public lands and other property of France in the ceded province, were conveyed by absolute t.i.tle to the United States, the sovereignty was not conveyed _otherwise than in trust_." This peculiar statement of a sovereignty that was "conveyed in trust"

Mr. Benjamin attempted to sustain by quoting the clause in the treaty which gave the right of the people of Louisiana to be incorporated into the Union "on terms of equality with the other States." From this he argued that the sovereignty of the _Territory_ of Louisiana held in trust by the Federal Government, and conveyed to the _State_ of Louisiana on her admission to the Union, was necessarily greater than the National sovereignty. Indeed, Mr.

Benjamin recognized no "Nation" in the United States and no real sovereignty in the General Government which was but the agent of the sovereign States. It properly and logically followed, according to Mr. Benjamin, that the "sovereignty held in trust," might, when conferred, be immediately and rightfully employed to destroy the life of the trustee. The United States might or might not admit Louisiana to the Union, for the General Government was sole judge as to time and expediency--but when once admitted, the power of the State was greater than the power of the Government which permitted the State to come into existence. Such were the contradictions and absurdities which the creed of the Secessionists inevitably involved, and in which so clever a man as Mr. Benjamin was compelled to blunder and flounder.

Pursuing his argument, Mr. Benjamin wished to know whether those who a.s.serted that Louisiana had been bought by the United States meant that the United States had the right based on that fact to sell Louisiana? He denied in every form that there had ever been such a purchase of Louisiana as carried with it the right of sale.

"I deny," said he, "the fact on which the argument is founded. I deny that the Province of Louisiana or the people of Louisiana were ever conveyed to the United States for a price as property that could be bought or sold at will." However learned Mr. Benjamin may have been in the law, he was evidently ill informed as to the history of the transaction of which he spoke so confidently. He should have known that the United States, sixteen years after it bought Louisiana from France, actually sold or exchanged a large part of that province to the King of Spain as part of the consideration in the purchase of the Floridas. He should have known that at the time the Government of the United States disposed of a part of Louisiana, there was not an intelligent man in the world who did not recognize its right and power to dispose of the whole. The theory that the United States acquired a less degree of sovereignty over Louisiana than was held by France when she transferred it, or by Spain when she owned it, was never dreamed of when the negotiation was made. It was an afterthought on the part of the hard-pressed defenders of the right of secession. It was the ingenious but lame device of an able lawyer who undertook to defend what was indefensible.

Mr. Yulee of Florida had endeavored to make the same argument on behalf of his State, feeling the embarra.s.sment as did Mr. Benjamin, and relying, as Mr. Benjamin did, upon the clause in the treaty with Spain ent.i.tling Florida to admission to the Union. Mr. Benjamin and Mr. Yulee should both have known that the guaranty which they quoted was nothing more and nothing less than the ordinary condition which every enlightened nation makes in parting with its subjects or citizens, that they shall enter into the new relation without discrimination against them and with no lower degree of civil rights than had already been enjoyed by those who form the nation to which they are about to be annexed. Louisiana, when she was transferred to the United States, received no further guaranty than Napoleon in effect gave to Spain at the treaty of San Ildefonso, or than the Spanish Bourbons had given to the French Bourbons in the treaty of 1763 at the close of the Seven Years' War. In each of the three transfers of the sovereignty of Louisiana, the same condition was perfectly understood as to the rights of the inhabitants. Mr.

Benjamin drew the conclusion which was not only diametrically wrong in morals, but diametrically erroneous in logic. Instead of inferring that a State, situated as Louisiana was, should necessarily become greater than the power which purchased it, simply because other States in the Union which she joined had a.s.sumed such power, a discriminating mind of Mr. Benjamin's acuteness should have seen that the very position proved the reverse of what he stated, and demonstrated, in the absurdity of Louisiana's secession, the equal absurdity of the secession of South Carolina and Georgia.

THE ARGUMENT OF MR. BENJAMIN.

It seemed impossible for Mr. Benjamin or for any other leader of Southern opinion to argue the question of State rights fairly or dispa.s.sionately. They had been so persistently trained in the heresy that they could give no weight to the conclusive reasoning of the other side. The original thirteen, they averred, were "free, sovereign, and independent States," acknowledged to be such by the King of Great Britain in the Treaty of peace in 1783. The new States, so the argument ran, were all admitted to the Union of terms of equality with the old. Hence all were alike endowed with sovereignty. Even the historical part of this argument was strained and fallacious. Much was made in the South of Mr. Toombs's declaration that "the original thirteen" were as "independent of each other as Australia and Jamaica." So indeed they were as long as they remained British Colonies. Their only connection in that condition was in their common dependence on the Crown. But the first step towards independence of the Crown was to unite. From that day onward they were never separate. Nor did the King of Great Britain acknowledge the "independence and sovereignty" of the thirteen individual and separate States. The Treaty of peace declares that "His Majesty acknowledges the said United States [naming them] to be free, sovereign, and independent States."--not separately and individually, but the "said _United_ States." The King then agrees that "the following are and shall be the boundaries of the said United States,"--proceeding to give, not the boundaries of each State, but the boundaries of the whole as one unit, one sovereignty, one nationality. Last of all, the commissioners who signed the treaty with the King's commissioner were not acting for the individual States, but for the _United_ States. Three of them, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay, were from the North, and Henry Laurens from the South. The separate sovereignties whose existence was so persistently alleged by Mr. Benjamin and Mr. Toombs were not represented when independence was conceded. Mr. Benjamin's conclusion, therefore, was not only illogical, but was completely disproved by plain historical facts.

It seems never to have occurred to Mr. Benjamin, or to Mr. Yulee, or to the Texas senators, or to the Arkansas senators, that the money paid from a common treasury of the nation gave any claim to National sovereignty. Their philosophy seems to have been that the General Government had been paid in full by the privilege of nurturing new States, of improving their rivers and harbors, of building their fortifications, of protecting them in peace, of defending them in war. The privilege of leading the new communities through the condition of Territorial existence up to the full majesty of States, was, according to secession argument, sufficient compensation, and removed all shadow of the t.i.tle or the sovereignty of the National Government, the moment the inhabitants thus benefitted announced their desire to form new connections. Louisiana had cost fifteen millions of dollars at a time when that was a vast sum of money. It had cost five millions of money and the surrender of a province, to purchase Florida, and nearly a hundred millions more to extinguish the Indian t.i.tle, and make the State habitable for white men. Texas cost the National Treasury ninety millions of dollars in the war which was precipitated by her annexation, and ten millions more paid to her in 1850, in adjustment of her boundary trouble. All these States apparently regarded the tie that bound them to the National Government as in no degree mutual, as imposing no duty upon them. By some mysterious process still unexplained, the more they gained from connection with the National authority, the less was their obligation thereto, the more perfect their right to disregard and destroy the beneficent government which had created them and fostered them.

SOUTHERN GRIEVANCES NOT STATED.

In all the speeches delivered by the senators from the seceding States, there was no presentation of the grievances which, in their own minds, justified secession. This fact elicited less notice at the time than it calls forth in retrospect. Those senators held in their hands in the beginning, the fate of the secession movement.

If they had advised the Southern States that it was wiser and better to abide in the Union, and at least to wait for some overt act of wrong against the slave States, the whole movement would have collapsed. But they evidently felt that this would be a shrinking and cowardly policy after the numerous manifestoes they had issued.

South Carolina had taken the fatal step, and to fail in sustaining her would be to co-operate in crus.h.i.+ng her. While these motives and aims are intelligible, it seems utterly incredible that not one of the senators gave a specification of the wrongs which led the South to her rash step. Mr. Toombs recounted the concessions on which the South would agree to remain; but these were new provisions and new conditions, never intended by the framers of the Federal Const.i.tution; and they were abhorrent to the civilization of the nineteenth century.

Mr. Toombs, Mr. Jefferson Davis, and Mr. Benjamin were the three ablest senators who spoke in favor of secession. Not one of them deemed it necessary to justify his conduct by a recital of the grounds on which so momentous a step could bear the test of historic examination. They dealt wholly in generalities as to the past, and apparently based their action on something that was to happen in the future. Mr. John Slidell sought to give a strong reason for the movement, in the statement that, if Lincoln should be inaugurated with Southern a.s.sent, the 4th of March would witness, in various quarters, outbreaks among the slaves which, although they would be promptly suppressed, would carry ruin and devastation to many a Southern home. It was from Mr. Slidell that Mr. Buchanan received the information which induced him to dwell at length in his annual message on this painful feature of the situation. But it was probably an invention of Mr. Slidell's fertile brain--imposed upon the President and intended to influence public sentiment in the North. It was in flat contradiction of the general faith in the personal fealty of their slaves, so constantly boasted by the Southern men,--a faith abundantly justified by the subsequent fact that four years of war pa.s.sed without a single attempt to servile insurrection. At the time of the John Brown disturbance the South resented the imputation of fear, made upon it by the North. If now the danger was especially imminent, Southern leaders were solely to blame. They would not accept the honorable a.s.surance of the Republican party and of the President-elect that no interference with slavery in the States was designed. They insisted in all their public addresses that Mr. Lincoln was determined to uproot slavery everywhere, and they might well fear that these repeated declarations had been heard and might be accepted by their slaves.

The omission by individual senators to present the grievances which justified secession is perhaps less notable then the same omission by the conventions which ordained secession in the several States.

South Carolina presented, as a special outrage, the enactment of personal-liberty bills in the free States, and yet, from the foundation of the Federal Government, she had probably never lost a slave in consequence of these enactments. In Georgia the attempt at justification reached the ludicrous when solemn charge was made that a bounty had been paid from the Federal Treasury to New-England fishermen. The tariff was complained of, the navigation laws were sneered at. But these were all public policies which had been in operation with Southern consent and largely with Southern support, throughout the existence of the Republic. When South Carolina attempted, somewhat after the ill.u.s.trious model of the Declaration of Independence, to present justifying reasons for her course, the very authors of the doc.u.ment must have seen that it amounted only to a parody.

Finding no satisfactory exhibit of grievances, either in the speeches of senators or in the declarations of conventions, one naturally infers that the Confederate Government, when formally organized at Montgomery in February, must have given a full and lucid statement to the world of the reasons for this extraordinary movement. When our fathers were impelled to break their loyalty to the English king, and to establish an independent government, they declared in the very fore-front of the doc.u.ment which contained their reasons, that "when it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to a.s.sume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and of Nature's G.o.d ent.i.tle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that _they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation_." They followed this a.s.sertion with an exhibit of causes which, in the judgment of the world, has been and ever will be, a complete justification of their revolutionary movement.

THOMAS JEFFERSON AND JEFFERSON DAVIS.

The Confederate Government saw fit to do nothing of the kind.

Their Congress put forth no declaration or manifesto, and Jefferson Davis in his Inaugural as President utterly failed--did not even attempt--to enumerate the grounds of complaint upon which the destruction of the American Union was based. He said that "the declared compact of the Union from which we have withdrawn was to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessing of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. And when, in the judgment of the sovereign States now composing this confederacy, it has been perverted from the purposes for which it was ordained, and ceases to answer the ends for which it was established, a peaceful appeal to the ballot-box declared, that, so far as they were concerned, the government created by that compact should cease to exist. In this they merely a.s.sert the right which the Declaration of Independence of 1776 defined to be inalienable." But in what manner, at what time, by what measure, "justice, domestic tranquillity, common defense, the general welfare," had been destroyed by the government of the Union, Mr. Jefferson Davis did not deign to inform the world to whose opinion he appealed.

Mr. Jefferson, in draughting the Declaration of Independence which Davis quotes as his model, said "the history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States." What would have been thought of Mr. Jefferson if he had stopped there and adduced no instance and given no proof of his serious indictment against George III.? But Mr. Jefferson and his fellow-patriots in that great Act proceeded to submit their proof to the judgment of a candid world. They recited twenty-eight distinct charges of oppression and tyranny, depriving them of rights to which they were ent.i.tled as subjects of the Crown under the British Const.i.tution. From that hour to this, there has been no disproval of the truth of these charges or of the righteousness of the resistance to which our forefathers resorted. It would have been well for the dignity of the Southern Confederacy in history if one of its many able men had placed on record, in an authentic form, the grounds upon which, and the grievances for which, destruction of the Union could be justified.

In his message to the Confederate Congress, Mr. Davis apparently attempted to cure the defects of his Inaugural address, and to give a list of measures which he declared to have been hostile to Southern interests. But it is to be observed that not one of these measures had been completed. They were merely menaced or foreshadowed. As matter of fact, emphasized by Mr. Buchanan in his message, and known to no one better than to Mr. Davis, not a single measure adverse to the interests of slavery had been pa.s.sed by the Congress of the United States from the foundation of the government. If the Missouri Compromise of 1820 be alleged as an exception to this sweeping a.s.sertion, it must be remembered that that compromise was a Southern and not a Northern measure, and was a triumph of the pro-slavery members of Congress over the anti-slavery members; and that its const.i.tutionality was upheld by the unanimous voice of the Cabinet in which Mr. Crawford of Georgia and Mr. Calhoun of South Carolina were leading members.

On the other hand, the policy of the government had been steadily in favor of slavery; and the measures of Congress which would strengthen it were not only numerous, but momentous in character.

They are familiar to every one who knows the simplest elements of our national history. The acquisition of Louisiana, the purchase of Florida, the Mexican war, were all great national movements which resulted in strengthening the slave power. Every demand which the South made for protection had been conceded. More stringent provisions for the return of fugitive slaves were asked, and a law was enacted trampling under foot the very spirit of liberty, and putting in peril the freedom of men who were citizens of Northern States. The Missouri Compromise, pa.s.sed with the consent and support of the South, was repealed by Southern dictation the moment its operation was found to be hostile to the spread of slavery. The rights of slavery in the Territories required judicial confirmation, and the Supreme Court complied by rendering the famous decision in the case of Dred Scott. Against all these guaranties and concessions for the support of slavery, Mr. Davis could quote, not anti-slavery aggressions which had been made, but only those which might be made in the future.

SOUTHERN RESISTANCE TO LAW.

This position disclosed the real though not the avowed cause of the secession movement. Its authors were not afraid of an immediate invasion of the rights of the slave-holder in the States, but they were conscious that the growth of the country, the progress of civilization, and the expansion of our population, were all hostile to their continued supremacy as the governing element in the Republic. The South was the only section in which there was distinctively a governing cla.s.s. The slave-holders ruled their States more positively than ever the aristocratic cla.s.ses ruled England. Besides the distinction of free and slave, or black and white, there was another line of demarcation between white men that was as absolute as the division between patrician and plebeian.

The n.o.bles of Poland who dictated the policy of the kingdom were as numerous in proportion to the whole population as the rich cla.s.s of slave-holders whose decrees governed the policy of their States.

It was, in short, an oligarchy which by its combined power ruled the Republic. No President of any party had ever been elected who was opposed to its supremacy. The political revolution of 1860 had given to the Republic an anti-slavery President, and the Southern men refused to accept the result. They had been too long accustomed to power to surrender it to an adverse majority, however lawful or const.i.tutional that majority might be. They had been trained to lead and not to follow. They were not disciplined to submission.

They had been so long in command that they had become incapable of obedience. Unwillingness to submit to Const.i.tutional authority was the controlling consideration which drove the Southern States to the desperate design of a revolution, peaceful they hoped it would be, but to a revolution even if it should be one of blood.

CHAPTER XII.

Congress in the Winter of 1860-61.--The North offers Many Concessions to the South.--Spirit of Conciliation.--Committee of Thirteen in the Senate.--Committee of Thirty-three in the House.--Disagreement of Senate Committee.--Propositions submitted to House Committee.-- Thomas Corwin's Measure.--Henry Winter Davis.--Justin S. Morrill-- Mr. Houston of Alabama.--Const.i.tutional Amendment proposed by Charles Francis Adams.--Report of the Committee of Thirty-three.-- Objectionable Measures proposed.--Minority Report by Southern Members.--The Crittenden Compromise proposed.--Details of that Compromise.--Mr. Adams's Double Change of Ground.--An Old Resolution of the Ma.s.sachusetts Legislature.--Mr. Webster's Criticism Pertinent.

--Various Minority Reports.--The California Members.--Washburn and Tappan.--Amendment to the Const.i.tution pa.s.sed by the House.--By the Senate also.--New Mexico.--The Fugitive-slave Law.--Mr. Clark of New Hamps.h.i.+re.--Peace Congress.--Invited by Virginia.--a.s.sembles in Was.h.i.+ngton.--Peace Measures proposed.--They meet no Favor in Congress.--Territories of Colorado, Dakota, and Nevada originated.

--Prohibition of Slavery abandoned.--Republicans in Congress do not ask it.--Explanation required.--James S. Green of Missouri.-- His Character as a Debater.--Northern Republicans frightened at their own Success.--Anxious for a Compromise.--Dread of Disunion.

--Northern Democrats.--Dangerous Course pursued by them.--General Demoralization of Northern Sentiment.

While the Secession leaders were engaged in their schemes for the disruption of the National Government and the formation of a new confederacy, Congress was employing every effort to arrest the Disunion tendency by making new concessions, and offering new guaranties to the offended power of the South. If the wild precipitation of the Southern leaders must be condemned, the compromising course of the majority in each branch of Congress will not escape censure,--censure for misjudgment, not for wrong intention.

The anxiety in both Senate and House to do something which should allay the excitement in the slave-holding section served only to develop and increase its exasperation and its resolution. A man is never so aggressively bold as when he finds his opponent afraid of him; and the efforts, however well meant, of the National Congress in the winter of 1860-61 undoubtedly impressed the South with a still further conviction of the timidity of the North, and with a certainty that the new confederacy would be able to organize without resistance, and to dissolve the Union without war.

COMMITTEES OF CONCILIATION.

Congress had no sooner convened in December, 1860, and received the message of Mr. Buchanan, with its elaborate argument that the National Government possessed no power to coerce a State, than in each branch special committees of conciliation were appointed.

They were not so termed in the resolutions of the Senate and House, but their mission was solely one of conciliation. They were charged with the duty of giving extraordinary a.s.surances that Slavery was not to be disturbed, and of devising measures which might persuade Southern men against the rashness on which they seemed bent. In the Senate they raised a committee of thirteen, representing the number of the original States of the Union. In the House the committee was composed of thirty-three members, representing the number of States then existing. In the Senate, Mr. Powell of Kentucky was chairman of the committee of thirteen, which was composed of seven Democrats, five Republicans, and the venerable Mr. Crittenden of Kentucky, who belonged to neither party. It contained the most eminent men in the Senate of all shades of political opinion. In the House, Thomas Corwin was made chairman, with a majority of Republicans of the more conservative type, a minority of Democrats, and Mr. Henry Winter Davis of Maryland, who held a position similar to that occupied by Mr. Crittenden in the Senate.

The Senate committee promptly disagreed, and before the close of December reported to the Senate their inability to come to any conclusion. The committee of thirty-three was more fortunate, or perhaps unfortunate, in being able to arrive at a series of conclusions which tended only to lower the tone of Northern opinion without in the least degree appeasing the wrath of the South. The record of that committee is one which cannot be reviewed with pride or satisfaction by any citizen of a State that was loyal to the Union. Every form of compromise which could be suggested, every concession of Northern prejudice and every surrender of Northern pride, was urged upon the committee. The measures proposed to the committee by members of the House were very numerous, and those suggested by the members of the committee themselves seemed designed to meet every complaint made by the most extreme Southern agitators.

The propositions submitted would in the aggregate fill a large volume, but a selection from the ma.s.s will indicate the spirit which had taken possession of Congress.

Mr. Corwin of Ohio wished a declaration from Congress that it was "highly inexpedient to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia unless with the consent of the States of Maryland and Virginia."

Mr. Winter Davis suggested the Congress should request the States to revise their statutes with a view to repeal all personal-liberty bills, and further that the Fugitive-slave Law be so amended as to secure trial by jury to the fugitive slave, not in the free State where he was arrested, but in the slave State to which he might be taken. Mr. Morrill of Vermont offered a resolution declaring that all accessions of foreign territory shall hereafter be made by treaty stipulation, and that no treaty shall be ratified until it had received the legislative a.s.sent of two-thirds of all the States of the Union, and that neither Congress nor any Territorial Legislature shall pa.s.s any law establis.h.i.+ng or prohibiting slavery in any Territory thus acquired until it shall have sufficient population to ent.i.tle it to admission to the Union. Mr. Houston of Alabama urged the rest.i.tution of the Missouri line of 36 30'.

There was in the judgment of many Southern men a better opportunity to effect an adjustment on this line of part.i.tion than upon any other basis that had been suggested. But the plea carried with it a national guaranty and protection of slavery on the southern side of the line, and its effect would inevitably have been in a few years to divide the Republic from ocean to ocean. Mr. Taylor of Louisiana wanted the Const.i.tution so amended that the rights of the slave-holder in the Territories could be guarantied, and further amended so that no person, "unless he was of the Caucasian race and of pure and unmixed blood," should ever be allowed to vote for any officer of the National Government.

PROPOSITIONS OF COMPROMISE.

Mr. Charles Francis Adams proposed that the Const.i.tution of the United States be so amended that no subsequent amendment thereto, "having for its object any interference with slavery, shall originate with any State that does not recognize that relation within its own limits, or shall be valid without the a.s.sent of every one of the States composing the Union." No Southern man, during the long agitation of the slavery questions extending from 1820 to 1860, had ever submitted so extreme a proposition as that of Mr. Adams.

The most precious muniment of personal liberty never had such deep embedment in the organic law of the Republic as Mr. Adams now proposed for the protection of slavery. The well-grounded jealousy and fear of the smaller States had originally secured a provision that their right to equal representation in the Senate should never be taken from them even by an amendment of the Const.i.tution. Mr.

Adams now proposed to give an equal safeguard and protection to the inst.i.tution of slavery. Yet the proposition was opposed by only three members of the committee of thirty-three,--Mason W.

Tappan of New Hamps.h.i.+re, Cadwallader C. Washburn of Wisconsin, and William Kellogg of Illinois.