CHAPTER XXI.

November, 1860-March, 1861.

THE ACTION OF CONGRESS ON THE RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE PRESIDENT'S ANNUAL MESSAGE—THE “CRITTENDEN COMPROMISE”—STRANGE COURSE OF THE NEW YORK “TRIBUNE”—SPECIAL MESSAGE OF JANUARY 8, 1861.

It is now necessary to turn to what took place in Congress upon the recommendations of the President’s annual message. There were but two courses that Congress could pursue in this most extraordinary emergency. It must either preserve the Union by peaceful measures, or it must provide the President and his successor with the military force requisite to secure the execution of the laws and the supremacy of the Constitution. It was plain that in this, as in all similar cases of threatened revolt against the authority of a regular and long established government, mere inaction would be a fatal policy. After the State of South Carolina should have adopted an ordinance of secession, it would be too late to accomplish anything by merely arguing against the constitutional doctrine on which the asserted right of secession depended. That right was firmly held by multitudes of men in other States, and unless the Government of the United States should, by conciliatory measures, effectually disarm the disposition to exercise it, or effectually prepare to enforce the authority of the Constitution after secession had taken place, it was morally certain that the next two or three months would witness the formation of a Southern Confederacy of formidable strength. To the Executive Department it appropriately belonged to suggest the measures of conciliation needful for one of the alternatives of a sound and safe policy, and to execute the laws by all the means with which the Executive was then or might thereafter be clothed by the legislature. But the Executive could not in the smallest degree increase the means which existing laws had placed in his hands.

There was all the more reason for prompt action upon the President’s pacific recommendations, in the fact that the Government of the United States was wholly unprepared for a civil war. The nature of such a war, the character of the issue on which it would have to be waged, and the natural repugnance of the people of both sections to have such a calamity befall the country, all tended to enhance the duty of preventing it by timely concessions which would in no way impair the authority of the Constitution. It is true that potentially the Government had great resources in its war making power, its taxing power, and its control over the militia of the States. But inasmuch as a sudden resort to its ultimate powers, and to their plenary exercise was at this moment fraught with the greatest peril, there can be no question that the duty of conciliation stood first in the rank of moral and patriotic duties incumbent upon the representatives of the States and the people in the two houses of Congress. Next in the relative rank of these duties, to be performed, however, simultaneously with the first of them, stood the obligation to strengthen the hands of the Executive for the execution of the laws and the preservation of the public property in South Carolina, which was manifestly about to assume the attitude of an independent and foreign State. Whether either of these great duties was performed by the Congress, to which President Buchanan addressed his annual message and his subsequent appeals; what were the causes which produced a failure to meet the exigency; on whom rests the responsibility for that failure, and what were the consequences which it entailed, must now be considered. Mr. Buchanan has said that this Congress, beyond question, had it in its power to preserve the peace of the country and the integrity of the Union, and that it failed in this duty.[102] Is this a righteous judgment, which history ought to affirm?

Footnote 102:

Buchanan’s Defence, chapter vii.

In the Senate, after the reading of the President’s message, so much as related to the present agitated and distracted condition of the country and the grievances between the slaveholding and the non-slaveholding States, was referred to a select committee of thirteen members. The composition of this committee was most remarkable. It consisted of five Republicans: Senators Seward, Collamer, Wade, Doolittle, and Grimes, all of them from non-slaveholding States, and all prominent adherents of that “Chicago platform” on which Mr. Lincoln had been elected; five members from slaveholding States, Senators Powell, Hunter, Crittenden, Toombs, and Davis, and three “Northern Democrats,” Senators Douglas, Bigler, and Bright. It was understood that the three last named Senators were placed upon the committee to act as mediators between the Northern and the Southern sections which the ten other members represented. Under ordinary circumstances, a committee would have shaped its report by the decisions of a majority of its members, if they could not be unanimous. But at the first meeting of this committee, on the 21st of December, the day after that on which South Carolina passed her ordinance of secession, an extraordinary resolution was adopted, that no proposition should be reported as the decision of the committee, unless sustained by a majority of each of the classes comprising the committee, and it was defined that the Senators of the Republican party were to constitute one class, and Senators of the other parties were to constitute the other class. Thus, while there were eight members of the committee who might, by concurring in any proposition, ordinarily determine the action of the body, it could not become the decision of that body unless it was supported by the votes of a separate majority of the five Republican members. It was said that the reason for this restriction was that no report would be adopted by the Senate, unless it had been concurred in by at least a majority of the five Republican Senators. Valid or invalid as this reason may have been, the restriction is a remarkable proof of the sectional attitude of the Northern Senators, of the responsibility which they assumed, and of the willingness of the majority of the Southern Senators to have the Republican members of the committee exercise such a power and bear such a responsibility. The sequel will show how a committee thus composed and thus tied down was likely to act.

On the 22d, Mr. Crittenden, of Kentucky, a Senator whose name will be forever venerated for the patriotic part which he took throughout the proceedings of this Congress, submitted to the committee a “Joint Resolution,” which he had already offered in the Senate, and which became known as “the Crittenden Compromise.” It proposed certain amendments of the Constitution which would reconcile the conflicting claims of the North and the South, by yielding to the South the right to take slaves into the Territories south of the parallel of 36° 30´, and excluding slavery from all the Territories north of that line: with the further provision that when any Territory north or south of that line, within such boundaries as Congress might prescribe, should contain a population requisite for a member of Congress, it should be admitted into the Union as a State with or without slavery, as the State constitution adopted by the people might provide. When it is considered that the people of the slaveholding States claimed that the Supreme Court of the United States had already decided that slaves might be taken as property into any Territory and be there held as property, under a constitutional right resulting from the common ownership of the Territories by the States composing the Union, the “Crittenden Compromise,” if accepted, would be a sacrifice by the South with which the North might well be content. Whatever were the technical reasons which could be alleged to show that the Supreme Court had not made a determination of this question that was binding as a judicial decision, it was nevertheless true that a majority of the judges had affirmed in their several opinions the claim of every Southern slaveholder to carry his slaves into the Territories of the United States and to hold them there as property, until the formation of a State constitution. President Buchanan always regarded the case of “Dred Scott” as a judicial decision of this constitutional question. But whether it was so or not, the claim had long been asserted and was still asserted by the people of the Southern States; and if it was still open as a judicial question, as the Republican party contended, and if it could be resisted as a political claim by one section of the Union, it was equally open to the other section to treat it as a political controversy, which required to be disposed of by mutual concession between the slaveholding and the non-slaveholding States. The Republican party, confined exclusively to the non-slaveholding States, had, by their political platform in the late Presidential election, treated the action of the Supreme Court as a nullity, and had affirmed as a cardinal doctrine of their political creed that slavery should forever be excluded, by positive law, from all the Territories of the United States. The circumstances under which the Democratic party came into the political field in that election did not show that this party universally took the opposite side; but the votes of the Southern States in the election show most clearly that the people of those States still asserted the claim which they held to have been affirmed by the highest judicial tribunal in the country.

If, therefore, the Crittenden Compromise should be accepted by the South, it could not be denied that the South would sacrifice a claim which her people were practically unanimous in asserting as a right. On the other hand, what would the North lose by that compromise? It would lose nothing but an abstraction; for there was no Territory south of 36° 30´ but New Mexico, and into that Territory slave labor could never be profitably introduced, on account of the nature of the country.[103] While, therefore, the North would by this compromise yield nothing but a useless abstract concession to the South, and would gain, in fact, all the vast territory north of the compromise line as free territory forever, the Republican party would undoubtedly have to sacrifice the dogma of the “Chicago platform.” Whether that dogma ought to have been held paramount to every other consideration, is a question on which posterity will have to pass.

Footnote 103:

All the remaining territory south of the line of 36° 30´ was an Indian reservation, secured to certain tribes by solemn treaties.

It was not yet too late to make this peace-offering to the South. Mr. Crittenden’s proposition was offered to the committee before any of the Government forts in the Southern States had been seized, when no State excepting South Carolina had “seceded,” and when no convention of the six other cotton States had assembled. Well might Mr. Buchanan say that the moment was propitious. Well might the patriotic Crittenden say, in addressing his colleagues on the committee: “The sacrifice to be made for its preservation (the Union) is comparatively worthless. Peace and harmony and union in a great nation were never purchased at so cheap a rate as we now have it in our power to do. It is a scruple only, a scruple of as little value as a barleycorn, that stands between us and peace, and reconciliation, and union; and we stand here pausing and hesitating about that little atom which is to be sacrificed.”

But this admirable and unselfish statesman was then to learn that there are states of men’s minds and characters when, fixed by the antecedents and committals of party, eloquence does not convince, facts are powerless; when the “barleycorn” becomes a great and important object; when mole hills become mountains, and when fear of constituents dominates over all other fears. Yet it cannot be doubted that there was really very little reason to fear that the constituencies of Northern Senators would hold them to a strict account for voting in favor of the Crittenden Compromise. Public feeling almost everywhere hailed it as the promise of peace and of the perpetuity of the Union. Nevertheless, all the five Republican members of the committee voted against it. This secured its rejection, under the resolution that had been adopted by the committee. But the singular fact is to be added that two Senators from the cotton States, Messrs. Davis, of Mississippi, and Toombs, of Georgia, also voted in the same way.

Readers will look in vain through Mr. Jefferson Davis’s recent work for a satisfactory explanation of this vote. But an explanation may perhaps be found in his whole course from the beginning of the session to his withdrawal from the Senate in the month of January, 1861, after the State of Mississippi had seceded. No impartial person can, it seems to me, read Mr. Davis’s own account of his public conduct at this crisis, without reaching the conclusion that whatever aid he may at any time have been disposed to render in the pacification of the country was at all times neutralized by his attitude in regard to the right of secession. From first to last he insisted that South Carolina, after she had adopted an ordinance of secession, should be regarded by the Government of the United States as an independent power. He was active in promoting the objects for which her commissioners came to Washington in the last week of December. He demanded that the troops of the United States should be withdrawn from the forts in Charleston harbor; that those forts should be surrendered to the paramount sovereignty of a State now become a foreign nation; and he scouted and ridiculed the idea that the Federal Executive could employ a military force in executing the laws of the United States within the dominion of a State which had withdrawn the powers that she had formerly deposited with the General Government. There was something singularly preposterous in this demand that a great government, which had subsisted for more than seventy years, and had always executed its laws against all combinations of an insurrectionary character, whether created by individuals or by State authority, should now “thaw and resolve itself into a dew,” before the all-consuming energy of a State ordinance; should accept the secession theory of the Constitution as the unquestionable law of the land, at the peril of encountering a civil war. How could measures of conciliation and concession be of any value, though tendered by the Federal Government, if that Government was in the same breath to admit that it had no constitutional power to enforce its authority if the offer of conciliation and concession should be rejected? Yet Mr. Davis’s ground of quarrel with President Buchanan was that he would not admit the right of secession. He could not either persuade or drive the President into that admission; and surely there can be no stronger proof of the integrity, fidelity and firmness of the President than this one fact affords.

Mr. Davis takes credit to himself and other Southern Senators for having intervened to prevent the authorities of South Carolina from making any attack upon the forts, so that a civil war might not be precipitated while measures for the settlement of the sectional difficulties were pending. No one need deny that those Senators are entitled to all the credit that justly belongs to such efforts. But why were those efforts made, and by what were they all along accompanied? They were made in order that there might be no bloodshed brought about, which would cause the other cotton States to recoil from the support of South Carolina in her assertion of the right of secession; and they were always accompanied by the demand that the Federal Government should permit the peaceable secession of any State, even to the extent of refraining from enforcing its laws and from holding its property within the dominions of any State that should choose to secede. This idea of peaceable secession, and all that it comprehended, was founded on the wild expectation that the two classes of States, slaveholding and non-slaveholding, after an experimental trial of separate confederacies, would find some system of union, some basis of reconstruction, other than the basis of the Constitution of the United States. Whatever claims of statesmanship may belong to those who entertained this chimerical project, they could hardly press it upon others as a reason for treating the Constitution of the United States as a system of government confessedly destitute of any authority or power to execute its own laws or to retain its own existence. But this is just what Mr. Davis denounced President Buchanan for not admitting; and he therefore, to the extent of his influence, counteracted the President’s great object of isolating the State of South Carolina by measures that would quiet the agitation in other slaveholding States, and at the same time would prepare the necessary means for executing the laws of the United States within the limits of that one State, in case she should adopt an ordinance of secession.

On the other hand, the Republican Senators on the Committee of Thirteen who voted against the Crittenden Compromise had no such policy to actuate them as that which governed Mr. Davis. They had no reason for refusing their aid to the President that could be founded on any difference of opinion as to the constitutional duty of the Executive. They knew that he was asking for means to uphold the authority of the Constitution in South Carolina, at the same time that he was urging measures which would prevent other States from joining her in the secession movement. What explanation of their conduct is possible and will leave to them the acquittal of patriotic purposes, I am not aware. But the fact is, that at no time during the session did a single Republican Senator, in any form whatever, give his vote or his influence for the Crittenden Compromise, or for any other measure that would strengthen the hands of the President either in maintaining peace or in executing the laws of the United States. Whether the spirit of party led them to refuse all aid to an outgoing President; whether they did not believe that there would be any necessity for a resort to arms; whether they did not choose, from sectional animosity, to abate anything from the “Chicago platform;” whatever was the governing motive for their inaction, it never can be said that they were not seasonably warned by the President that a policy of inaction would be fatal. That policy not only crippled him, but it crippled his successor. When Mr. Lincoln came into office, seven States had already seceded, and not a single law had been put upon the statute book which would enable the Executive to meet such a condition of the Union.

Not only is it manifest that the Crittenden proposition was reasonable and proper in itself, but there is high authority for saying that it ought to have been embraced by every Republican Senator. While it was pending before the Committee of Thirteen, General Duff Green, a prominent citizen of Mississippi, visited Mr. Lincoln, the President-elect, at his home in Springfield, Illinois. Mr. Green took with him a copy of Mr. Crittenden’s resolutions, and asked Mr. Lincoln’s opinion of them. The substance of what Mr. Lincoln said was reported on the 28th of December to President Buchanan, in the following note:

[GENERAL DUFF GREEN TO PRESIDENT BUCHANAN.]

SPRINGFIELD, ILL., December 28, 1860.

DEAR SIR:—

I have had a long and interesting conversation with Mr. Lincoln. I brought with me a copy of the resolutions submitted by Mr. Crittenden, which he read over several times, and said that he believed that the adoption of the line proposed would quiet, for the present, the agitation of the slavery question, but believed it would be renewed by the seizure and attempted annexation of Mexico. He said that the real question at issue between the North and the South was slavery “propagandism,” and that upon that issue the Republican party was opposed to the South, and that he was with his own party; that he had been elected by that party, and intended to sustain his party in good faith; but added, that the question on the amendments to the Constitution and the questions submitted by Mr. Crittenden belonged to the people and States in legislatures or conventions, and that he would be inclined not only to acquiesce, but to give full force and effect to their will thus expressed. Seeing that he was embarrassed by his sense of duty to his party, I suggested that he might so frame a letter to me as to refer the measures for the preservation of the Union to the action of the people in the several States, and he promised to prepare a letter, giving me his views, by 9 a.m. to-morrow. If his letter be satisfactory, its purport will be communicated to you by telegraph.

Yours truly, DUFF GREEN.

I know of no evidence that Mr. Lincoln prepared the letter which he promised. No account of it appears to have reached Mr. Buchanan by telegraph or otherwise. It is probable that Mr. Lincoln, feeling more strongly the embarrassment arising from his party relations, reconsidered his determination, and excused himself to General Green. But what his opinion was is sufficiently proved by the note which General Green dispatched from Springfield, and which must have reached Mr. Buchanan at about the time when the committee of thirteen made their report to the Senate that they were unable to agree upon any general plan of adjustment of the sectional difficulties. This report was made on the 31st of December.

The last ten days of the year were thus suffered to elapse without anything being done to arrest the rising tide of secession in the seven cotton States. Most of these States had suspended or delayed their action until it could be known whether there was to be any concession made by the Republican party as represented in Congress. They now rapidly accomplished their secession measures. The conventions of Florida on the 7th of January, Mississippi on the 9th, Alabama on the 11th, Georgia on the 19th, Louisiana on the 25th, and Texas on the 5th of February, adopted ordinances of secession by great majorities. These ordinances were followed by a general seizure of the public property of the United States within the limits of those States, after the example of South Carolina.

Among the discouraging influences which now operated with a double mischief to counteract the efforts of those who aimed to confine secession to the State of South Carolina, must be mentioned the course of one of the most prominent papers of the North. No journal had exercised a greater power in promoting the election of Mr. Lincoln upon the “Chicago platform” than the _New York Tribune_. It was universally and justly regarded as a representative of a large section of the Republican party. Its founder and chief editor, Horace Greeley, was a man of singular mould. Beginning life as a journeyman printer, he learned in the practice of type-setting the compass and power of the English language. In the course of a long experience as a public writer, he acquired a style of much energy, and of singular directness. But, without a regular education and the mental discipline which it gives, he never learned to take a comprehensive and statesmanlike view of public questions. His impulses, feelings, and sympathies were on the side of humanity and the progress of mankind. But these generous and noble qualities were unbalanced by a sense of the restraints which the fundamental political conditions of the American Union imposed upon philanthropic action. He was, therefore, almost incapable of appreciating the moral foundations on which the Union was laid by the Constitution of the United States. He felt deeply the inherent wrong of African slavery, but he could not see, or did not care to see, that the Union of slaveholding and non-slaveholding States under one system of government for national purposes was caused by public necessities that justified its original formation, and that continued to make its preservation the highest of civil obligations. He did not, like many of the anti-slavery agitators, renounce the whole of the Constitution. But while he was willing that the North should enjoy its benefits, he was ever ready to assail those provisions, however deeply they were embedded in the basis of the Union, which recognized and to a qualified extent upheld the slavery existing under the local law of certain States. When, therefore, the long political conflict between the two sections of the country culminated in a condition of things which presented the alternatives of a peaceful separation of the slave and the free States, or a denial of the doctrine of secession and the consequences claimed for it, Mr. Greeley threw his personal weight, and the weight of his widely circulated journal, against the authority of the General Government to enforce in any way the obligations of the Constitution. He did not much concern himself with the distinction between coercing a State by force of arms from adopting an ordinance of secession, and coercing individuals after secession to obey the laws of the United States. From the period immediately before the election of Mr. Lincoln, after his election, and for a time after his inauguration, Mr. Greeley opposed all coercion of every kind. He maintained that the right of secession was the same as the right of revolution; and after the cotton States had formed their confederacy and adopted a provisional constitution, he tendered the aid of his journal to forward their views. He thus, on the one hand, joined his influence to the cry of the professed abolitionists who renounced the Constitution entirely, and on the other hand, contributed his powerful pen in encouraging the secessionists to persevere in separating their States from the Union.

Mr. Greeley’s secession argument, drawn from the Declaration of Independence and the right of revolution, was a remarkable proof of the unsoundness of his reasoning powers. Because the right of self-government is an inherent right of a people, he assumed that men cannot be required to perform their covenanted obligations. He could not see, he said, how twenty millions of people could rightfully hold ten, or even five, other millions in a political union which those other millions wished to renounce. But if he had ever been in the habit of reasoning upon the Constitution of the United States as other men reasoned, who did not accept the doctrine of State secession, he could have seen that when five millions of people, exercising freely the right of self-government, have solemnly covenanted with the twenty millions that they will obey the laws enacted by a legislative authority which they have voluntarily established over themselves and over all the inhabitants of the country, the moralist and the publicist can rest the right to use compulsion upon a basis which is perfectly consistent with the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and which those principles do in truth recognize.

In fact, however, Mr. Greeley, by his public utterances at this great crisis, bettered the instructions of the secessionists themselves. He taught them that the Crittenden Compromise, or any other measure of conciliation, need not be considered. They had only to will that they would leave the Union, and they were out of it, and at liberty to care nothing about concessions from the North. And in the same way, he taught those of the North, on whom rested the immediate duty of preventing the spread of the secession movement, that all measures of conciliation were useless, for the right of secession, as he maintained, was bottomed on the Declaration of Independence, and neither persuasion nor coercion ought to be used against the exercise of such a right. Such political philosophy as this, proclaimed by a leading organ of the Republican party, created difficulties for a President situated as Mr. Buchanan was after the election of his successor, which posterity can not overlook.[104]

Footnote 104:

Mr. Greeley’s utterances must be cited, that I may not be supposed to have in any way misrepresented him. But three days after Mr. Lincoln’s election, the New York _Tribune_ announced such sentiments as the following: “If the cotton States shall become satisfied that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace. _The right to secede may be a revolutionary one_, BUT IT EXISTS NEVERTHELESS...... We must ever resist the right of any State to remain in the Union and nullify or defy the laws thereof. TO WITHDRAW FROM THE UNION IS QUITE ANOTHER MATTER; and whenever a considerable section of our Union shall deliberately resolve to go out, WE SHALL RESIST ALL COERCIVE MEASURES DESIGNED TO KEEP IT IN. We hope never to live in a Republic whereof one section is pinned to another by bayonets.”

And again on the 17th December, three days before the secession of South Carolina: “If it [the Declaration of Independence] justified the secession from the British Empire of three millions of colonists in 1776, _we do not see why it would not justify the secession of five millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861_. If we are mistaken on this point, why does not some one attempt to show _wherein_ and why? For our part, while we deny the right of slaveholders to hold slaves against the will of the latter, _we cannot see how twenty millions of people can rightfully hold ten, or even five, in a detested Union with them by military force_. ...... _If seven or eight contiguous States shall present themselves authentically at Washington_, saying, ‘We hate the Federal Union; we have withdrawn from it; we give you the choice between acquiescing in our secession and arranging amicably all incidental questions on the one hand, and attempting to subdue us on the other,’ _we would not stand up for coercion, for subjugation, for we do not think it would be just_. We hold the right of self-government, _even when invoked in behalf of those who deny it to others_. So much for the question of principle.”

In this course the _Tribune_ persisted from the date of Mr. Lincoln’s election until after his inauguration, employing such remarks as the following: “Any attempt to compel them by force to remain would be contrary to the principles enunciated in the immortal Declaration of Independence, contrary to the fundamental ideas on which human liberty is based.”

Even after the cotton States had formed their confederacy, and adopted a provisional constitution at Montgomery, on the 23d February, 1861, it gave them encouragement to proceed in the following language: “_We have repeatedly said, and we once more insist_, that the great principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration of American Independence, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, is sound and just; _and that if the slave States, the cotton States or the Gulf States only, choose to form an independent nation_, THEY HAVE A CLEAR MORAL RIGHT TO DO SO. _Whenever it shall be clear that the great body of Southern people have become conclusively alienated from the Union, and anxious to escape from it_, WE WILL DO OUR BEST TO FORWARD THEIR VIEWS.”

Seeing how fatally wrong was the course of this erratic journalist, and how much depended on the success of the Crittenden Compromise, the President endeavored to enlist in its behalf another great journal of the North, which was conducted by a person on whom he thought he could rely, and whose paper was professedly independent of party politics. The following private letter to the editor of the New York _Herald_ attests how earnestly Mr. Buchanan was bent upon the improvement of every chance by which the spread of secession might be prevented:

[MR. BUCHANAN TO JAMES GORDON BENNETT.]

(Private and confidential.) WASHINGTON, December 20, 1860.

MY DEAR SIR:—

You wield the most powerful organ in the country for the formation of public opinion, and I have no doubt you feel a proportionate responsibility under the present alarming circumstances of the country. Every person here has his own remedy for existing evils, and there is no general assent to any proposition. Still, I believe the tendency is strong, and is becoming stronger every day, towards the Missouri Compromise, with the same protection to slaves south of 36° 30´ that is given to other property. The South can lose no territory north of this line, because no portion of it is adapted to slave labor, whilst they would gain a substantial security within the Union by such a constitutional amendment. The Republicans have for some years manifested indignation at the repeal of this compromise, and would probably be more willing to accept it than any other measure to guarantee the rights of the South. I have stated my favorite plan in the message, but am willing to abandon it at any moment for one more practicable and equally efficacious. If your judgment should approve it, you could do much by concentrating and directing your energies to this single point. My object, when I commenced to write, was simply to express my opinion that existing circumstances tended strongly toward the Missouri Compromise; but, with pen in hand, I shall make one or two other remarks.

I do not know whether the great commercial and social advantages of the telegraph are not counterbalanced by its political evils. No one can judge of this so well as myself. The public mind throughout the interior is kept in a constant state of excitement by what are called “telegrams.” They are short and spicy, and can easily be inserted in the country newspapers. In the city journals they can be contradicted the next day; but the case is different throughout the country. Many of them are sheer falsehoods, and especially those concerning myself......

With my kindest and most cordial regards to Mrs. Bennett, I remain, very respectfully, your friend,

JAMES BUCHANAN.

Although defeated before the Committee of Thirteen, Mr. Crittenden did not abandon the cause of peace and Union. His proposed compromise, it was now apparent, could not be carried as an amendment of the Constitution by the requisite two-thirds vote of Congress. But an appeal could be made to the people, if a majority of both Houses would send the question to them; and if this majority could be obtained in time, he and others had good reason to believe that the course of secession in the six remaining cotton States could be stayed. He therefore postponed by his own motion the further consideration of his proposed amendment, and on the 3d of January, 1861, before any State excepting South Carolina had seceded, he introduced a substitute for it, in the shape of a joint resolution, by which he proposed to refer his compromise to a direct vote of the people in the several States, so that they could instruct their representatives to give it the initiatory shape of a constitutional amendment. This course of action was not provided for in the amending clause of the Constitution, and it was, without doubt, extraordinary. But there was nothing in the Constitution inconsistent with it; it would not set aside any of the forms by which amendments of the Constitution must be initiated and adopted; and the circumstances of the country were so extraordinary that any means of reaching public opinion would be entirely proper. Moreover, it was not an unprecedented step, for State legislatures and other public bodies had frequently recommended various amendments of the Constitution. Mr. Crittenden’s resolution justified itself by its own terms. It read as follows:

“Whereas, the Union is in danger, and, owing to the unhappy divisions existing in Congress, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for that body to concur in both its branches by the requisite majority, so as to enable it either to adopt such measures of legislation, or to recommend to the States such amendments to the Constitution, as are deemed necessary and proper to avert that danger; and, whereas, in so great an emergency, the opinion and judgment of the people ought to be heard, and would be the best and surest guide to their representatives: Therefore, _Resolved_, That provision ought to be made by law, without delay, for taking the sense of the people and submitting to their vote the following resolution [the same as in his former amendment], as the basis for the final and permanent settlement of those disputes that now disturb the peace of the country and threaten the existence of the Union.”

The President now interposed the weight of his office, by a special message to Congress, dated on the 8th of January. What had occurred between him and the South Carolina commissioners has been detailed. Of this occurrence, and of the position of affairs in Charleston harbor, Congress was now officially informed by the special message; the residue of it was devoted to the expediency and necessity of allowing the people to express their sentiments concerning the proposition of Mr. Crittenden.

TO THE SENATE AND HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES:

At the opening of your present session I called your attention to the dangers which threatened the existence of the Union. I expressed my opinion freely concerning the original causes of those dangers, and recommended such measures as I believed would have the effect of tranquilizing the country and saving it from the peril in which it had been needlessly and most unfortunately involved. Those opinions and recommendations I do not propose now to repeat. My own convictions upon the whole subject remain unchanged.

The fact that a great calamity was impending over the nation was even at that time acknowledged by every intelligent citizen. It had already made itself felt throughout the length and breadth of the land. The necessary consequences of the alarm thus produced were most deplorable. The imports fell off with a rapidity never known before, except in time of war, in the history of our foreign commerce; the Treasury was unexpectedly left without the means which it had reasonably counted upon to meet the public engagements; trade was paralyzed; manufactures were stopped; the best public securities suddenly sunk in the market; every species of property depreciated more or less; and thousands of poor men, who depended upon their daily labor for their daily bread, were turned out of employment.

I deeply regret that I am not able to give you any information upon the state of the Union which is more satisfactory than what I was then obliged to communicate. On the contrary, matters are still worse at present than they then were. When Congress met, a strong hope pervaded the whole public mind that some amicable adjustment of the subject would speedily be made by the representatives of the States and of the people, which might restore peace between the conflicting sections of the country. That hope has been diminished by every hour of delay; and as the prospect of a bloodless settlement fades away, the public distress becomes more and more aggravated. As evidence of this, it is only necessary to say that the Treasury notes authorized by the act of 17th December last were advertised, according to the law, and that no responsible bidder offered to take any considerable sum at par at a lower rate of interest than twelve per cent. From these facts it appears that, in a government organized like ours, domestic strife, or even a well-grounded fear of civil hostilities, is more destructive to our public and private interests than the most formidable foreign war.

In my annual message I expressed the conviction, which I have long deliberately held, and which recent reflection has only tended to deepen and confirm, that no State has a right by its own act to secede from the Union, or throw off its Federal obligations at pleasure. I also declared my opinion to be that, even if that right existed and should be exercised by any State of the Confederacy, the Executive Department of this Government had no authority under the Constitution to recognize its validity by acknowledging the independence of such State. This left me no alternative, as the Chief Executive officer under the Constitution of the United States, but to collect the public revenues and to protect the public property so far as this might be practicable under existing laws. This is still my purpose. My province is to execute, and not to make the laws. It belongs to Congress, exclusively, to repeal, to modify, or to enlarge their provisions, to meet exigencies as they may occur. I possess no dispensing power.

I certainly had no right to make aggressive war upon any State, and I am perfectly satisfied that the Constitution has wisely withheld that power even from Congress. But the right and the duty to use military force defensively against those who resist the Federal officers in the execution of their legal functions, and against those who assail the property of the Federal Government, is clear and undeniable.

But the dangerous and hostile attitude of the States toward each other has already far transcended and cast in the shade the ordinary executive duties already provided for by law, and has assumed such vast and alarming proportions as to place the subject entirely above and beyond executive control. The fact cannot be disguised that we are in the midst of a great revolution. In all its various bearings, therefore, I commend the question to Congress, as the only human tribunal, under Providence, possessing the power to meet the existing emergency. To them, exclusively, belongs the power to declare war, or to authorize the employment of military force in all cases contemplated by the Constitution; and they alone possess the power to remove grievances which might lead to war, and to secure peace and union to this distracted country. On them, and on them alone, rests the responsibility.

The Union is a sacred trust left by our revolutionary fathers to their descendants; and never did any other people inherit so rich a legacy. It has rendered us prosperous in peace and triumphant in war. The national flag has floated in glory over every sea. Under its shadow American citizens have found protection and respect in all lands beneath the sun. If we descend to considerations of purely material interest, when, in the history of all time, has a confederacy been bound together by such strong ties of mutual interest? Each portion of it is dependent on all, and all upon each portion, for prosperity and domestic security. Free trade throughout the whole supplies the wants of one portion from the productions of another, and scatters wealth everywhere. The great planting and farming States require the aid of the commercial and navigating States to send their productions to domestic and foreign markets, and to furnish the naval power to render their transportation secure against all hostile attacks.

Should the Union perish in the midst of the present excitement, we have already had a sad foretaste of the universal suffering which would result from its destruction. The calamity would be severe in every portion of the Union, and would be quite as great, to say the least, in the Southern as in the Northern States. The greatest aggravation of the evil, and that which would place us in the most unfavorable light both before the world and posterity, is, as I am firmly convinced, that the secession movement has been chiefly based upon a misapprehension at the South of the sentiments of the majority in several of the Northern States. Let the question be transferred from political assemblies to the ballot-box, and the people themselves would speedily redress the serious grievances which the South have suffered. But, in Heaven’s name, let the trial be made before we plunge into armed conflict upon the mere assumption that there is no other alternative. Time is a great conservative power. Let us pause at this momentous point and afford the people, both North and South, an opportunity for reflection. Would that South Carolina had been convinced of this truth before her precipitate action! I, therefore, appeal through you to the people of this country to declare in their might that the Union must and shall be preserved by all constitutional means. I most earnestly recommend that you devote yourselves exclusively to the question how this can be accomplished in peace. All other questions, when compared with this, sink into insignificance. The present is no time for palliatives; action, prompt action, is required. A delay in Congress to prescribe or to recommend a distinct and practical proposition for conciliation may drive us to a point from which it will be almost impossible to recede.

A common ground on which conciliation and harmony can be produced is not unattainable. The proposition to compromise by letting the North have exclusive control of the territory above a certain line, and to give Southern institutions protection below that line, ought to receive universal approbation. In itself, indeed, it may not be entirely satisfactory; but when the alternative is between a reasonable concession on both sides and a destruction of the Union, it is an imputation upon the patriotism of Congress to assert that its members will hesitate for a moment.

Even now the danger is upon us. In several of the States which have not yet seceded, the forts, arsenals, and magazines of the United States have been seized. This is by far the most serious step which has been taken since the commencement of the troubles. This public property has long been left without garrisons and troops for its protection, because no person doubted its security under the flag of the country in any State of the Union. Besides, our small army has scarcely been sufficient to guard our remote frontiers against Indian incursions. The seizure of this property, from all appearances, has been purely aggressive, and not in resistance to any attempt to coerce a State or States to remain in the Union.

At the beginning of these unhappy troubles, I determined that no act of mine should increase the excitement in either section of the country. If the political conflict were to end in a civil war, it was my determined purpose not to commence it, nor even to furnish an excuse for it by an act of this Government. My opinion remains unchanged, that justice as well as sound policy requires us still to seek a peaceful solution of the questions at issue between the North and the South. Entertaining this conviction, I refrained even from sending reinforcements to Major Anderson, who commanded the forts in Charleston harbor, until an absolute necessity for doing so should make itself apparent, lest it might unjustly be regarded as a menace of military coercion, and thus furnish, if not a provocation, a pretext for an outbreak on the part of South Carolina. No necessity for these reinforcements seemed to exist. I was assured by distinguished and upright gentlemen of South Carolina[105] that no attack upon Major Anderson was intended, but that, on the contrary, it was the desire of the State authorities, as much as it was my own, to avoid the fatal consequences which must eventually follow a military collision.

Footnote 105:

Messrs. McQueen, Miles, Bonham, Boyce, and Keitt, members of the House of Representatives from South Carolina, on the 8th of December, 1860.

And here I deem it proper to submit, for your information, copies of a communication, dated December 28, 1860, addressed to me by R. W. Barnwell, J. H. Adams, and J. L. Orr, “commissioners” from South Carolina, with the accompanying documents, and copies of my answer thereto, dated December 31.

In further explanation of Major Anderson’s removal from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter, it is proper to state that, after my answer to the South Carolina “commissioners,” the War Department received a letter from that gallant officer, dated December 27, 1860, the day after this movement, from which the following is an extract:

“I will add, as my opinion, that many things convinced me that the authorities of the State designed to proceed to a hostile act” [evidently referring to the orders dated December 11, of the late Secretary of War]. “Under this impression, I could not hesitate that it was my solemn duty to move my command from a fort which we could not probably have held longer than forty-eight or sixty hours to this one, where my power of resistance is increased to a very great degree.” It will be recollected that the concluding part of these orders was in the following terms: “The smallness of your force will not permit you, perhaps, to occupy more than one of the three forts; but an attack on, or attempt to take possession of either one of them, will be regarded as an act of hostility, and you may then put your command into either of them which you may deem most proper to increase its power of resistance. You are also authorized to take similar defensive steps whenever you have tangible evidence of a design to proceed to a hostile act.”

It is said that serious apprehensions are, to some extent, entertained, in which I do not share, that the peace of this District may be disturbed before the 4th of March next. In any event, it will be my duty to preserve it, and this duty shall be performed.

In conclusion, it may be permitted to me to remark that I have often warned my countrymen of the dangers which now surround us. This may be the last time I shall refer to the subject officially. I feel that my duty has been faithfully, though it may be imperfectly, performed; and whatever the result may be, I shall carry to my grave the consciousness that I at least meant well for my country.

JAMES BUCHANAN.

WASHINGTON CITY, Jan. 8, 1861.

It is a painful part of an historian’s duty to reflect upon the conduct of public men, who had it in their power at least to show a willingness to save their country from the calamity of civil war, and who appear to have been indifferent to everything but the dogmas of a party platform. This special message of President Buchanan, in the circumstances of the moment, was entitled to the gravest attention and respect. It ought to have produced immediate assent to its recommendation, on the part of Republican Senators, whom it would have relieved from their previous committals to the “Chicago platform” by a reference of the questions in dispute to the people of the country. The venerable age of the President, his long experience in public affairs, his unquestionable patriotism, his approaching retirement from public life, his manifest desire to leave the Government to his successor unembarrassed by anything but the secession of South Carolina, should have conciliated the support of some at least, if not of all, of the Republican Senators. But, as it is now my melancholy duty to show from the record, not one Republican Senator ever voted for Mr. Crittenden’s resolution, the adoption of which the President so strongly recommended. Memorials of the most earnest character, coming from all quarters of the North, even from New England, urging the passage of the Crittenden Compromise, were heaped upon the table of the Senate.[106] On the 14th of January, Mr. Crittenden made an unsuccessful effort to have his resolution considered. It was postponed to the following day. On the 15th, every Republican Senator voted for its further postponement, to make room for the Pacific Railroad Bill. On the 16th, Mr. Crittenden obtained, by a majority of one vote—all the Republican Senators voting nay—the consideration of his resolution. Parliamentary tactics were then resorted to by the Republicans to defeat it. Mr. Clark, a Republican Senator from New Hampshire, moved to strike out the whole preamble and body of the resolution, and to substitute in its place another preamble and resolution of an entirely opposite character, and affirming the dogma of the Chicago platform in relation to slavery in the Territories. For this motion there were 25 yeas to 23 nays; all the Republican Senators voting in the affirmative.[107] Buried under the Clark amendment, Mr. Crittenden’s resolution remained for more than six weeks, until the 2d of March, when it was too late for final action upon it. But on that day a vote was taken upon it, and it was defeated by 19 votes in the affirmative and 20 in the negative.[108]

Footnote 106:

See the Index to the Journal of the Senate for this session, pp. 494, 495, 496. One of these memorials, coming from the City Councils of Boston, had the signatures also of over 22,000 citizens, of all shades of political character. Senate Journal of 1860-’61, p. 218.

Footnote 107:

The Clark amendment, which smothered Mr. Crittenden’s resolution, prevailed, because six secession Senators refused to vote against it, preferring to play into the hands of the Republicans. They were Messrs. Benjamin and Slidell, of Louisiana; Iverson, of Georgia; Hemphill and Wigfall, of Texas; and Johnson, of Arkansas. Had they voted with the Senators from the border States and the other Democratic members, the Clark amendment would have been defeated, and the Senate would on that day, before the secession of any State excepting South Carolina, have been brought to a direct vote on Mr. Crittenden’s resolution.

Footnote 108:

“It is proper,” Mr. Buchanan said, “for future reference that the names of those Senators who constituted the majority on this momentous question, should be placed upon record. Every vote given from the six New England States was in opposition to Mr. Crittenden’s resolution. These consisted of Mr. Clark, of New Hampshire; Messrs. Sumner and Wilson, of Massachusetts; Mr. Anthony, of Rhode Island; Messrs. Dixon and Foster, of Connecticut; Mr. Foot, of Vermont; and Messrs. Fessenden and Morrill, of Maine. The remaining eleven votes, in order to make up the 20, were given by Mr. Wade, of Ohio; Mr. Trumbull, of Illinois; Messrs. Bingham and Chandler, of Michigan; Messrs. Grimes and Harlan, of Iowa; Messrs. Doolittle and Durkee, of Wisconsin; Mr. Wilkinson, of Minnesota; Mr. King, of New York; and Mr. Ten Eyck, of New Jersey. It is also worthy of observation, that neither Mr. Hale, of New Hampshire, Mr. Simmons, of Rhode Island, Mr. Collamer, of Vermont, Mr. Seward, of New York, nor Mr. Cameron, of Pennsylvania, voted on the question, although it appears from the journal that all these gentlemen were present in the Senate on the day of the vote. It would be vain to conjecture the reasons why these five Senators refrained from voting on an occasion so important.” (Buchanan’s Defence, p. 143.)