XXVI PEACE CONFERENCE—1861
By appointments of governors or legislatures, commissioners from
each of twenty States, chosen at the request of the Legislature of
Virginia, met in Washington, February 4, 1861, in a "Peace
Conference."(116) Ex-President John Tyler of Virginia was made
President, and Crafts J. Wright of Ohio Secretary.(117)
It adjourned February 27th, having agreed to recommend to the several States amendments to the Constitution, in substance: That north of 36° 30´ slavery in the Territories shall be, and south of that line it shall not be, prohibited; that neither Congress nor a Territorial Legislature shall pass any law to prevent slaves from being taken from the States to the Territories; that no Territory shall be acquired by the United States, except by discovery and for naval stations, without the consent of a majority of the Senators from the slave and also from the free States; that Congress shall have no power to abolish slavery in any State, nor in the District of Columbia without the consent of Maryland; nor to prohibit Congressmen from taking their slaves to and from said District; nor the power to prohibit the free transportation of slaves from one slave State or Territory to another; that bringing slaves into the District of Columbia for sale, or to be placed in depot for transfer and sale at other places, is prohibited; that the clauses in the Constitution and its amendments relating to slavery shall never be abolished or amended without the consent of all the States; and that Congress shall provide by law for paying owners for escaped slaves where officers, whose duty it was to arrest them, were prevented from arresting them or returning them to their owners after being arrested.
"The Peace Conference" was composed of 133 members, among whom were some of the most eminent men of the country, though generally, however, only conservatives from each section were selected as members. Its remarkable recommendations were made with considerable unanimity, voting in the conference being by States, the Continental method.
Wm. Pitt Fessenden and Lot M. Morrill of Maine, Geo. S. Boutwell of Massachusetts, David Dudley Field and Erastus Corning of New York, Frederick T. Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, John Tyler, Wm. C. Rives, and John A. Seddon of Virginia, Wm. O. Butler, James B. Clay, James Guthrie, and Charles A. Wickcliffe of Kentucky, C. P. Wolcott, Salmon P. Chase, John C. Wright, Wm. S. Groesback, Franklin T. Backus, Reuben Hitchcock, Thomas Ewing (Sen.), and Valentine B. Horton of Ohio, Caleb B. Smith and Godlove S. Orth of Indiana, John M. Palmer and Burton C. Cook of Illinois, and James Harlan and James W. Grimes of Iowa were of the number. Many of them were then, or afterwards, celebrated as statesmen; and some of them subsequently held high rank as soldiers.
March 2, 1861, the "Peace Conference" propositions were offered twice to the Senate, and each time overwhelmingly defeated, as they had been, on the day preceding, by the House.(118)
There were many other propositions offered, considered, and defeated, to wit: Propositions from the Senate Committee of thirteen appointed December 18, 1860; propositions of Douglas, Seward, and others; also propositions from a meeting of Senators and members from the border, free, and slave States, all relating to slavery, and proposed with a view of stopping the already precipitated secession of States.(119)
Some of these propositions were exasperatingly humiliating, and only possibly justifiable by the times.
Though Lincoln's election as President was claimed to be a good cause for secession, and though much of the compromise talk was to appease his party opponents as well as the South, he was opposed to bargaining himself into the office to which the people had elected him. With respect to this matter (January 30, 1861) he said:
"I will suffer death before I will consent, or advise my friends to consent, to any concession or compromise which looks like buying the privilege of taking possession of the government to which we have a constitutional right."
We have now done with legislation, attempted legislation, and constitutional amendments to protect and extend slavery in the Republic. Slavery appealed to war, and by the inexorable decree of war its fate must be decided.
The Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln (January 1, 1863) and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1865) freed all slaves in the Union; the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) provided that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside"; and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) gave the right to vote to all citizens of the United States regardless of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." These are all simply the decrees of war, written in the organic law of the United States at the end of the national four years' baptism of blood. Embodied in them are no concessions or compromises; the evil was torn out by the roots, and the Christian world, the progressive civilization of the age, and the consciences of enlightened mankind now approve what was done.
The war, with its attendant horrors and evils, was necessary to terminate the deep-seated, time-honored, and unholy institution of human slavery, so long embedded in our social, political, and commercial relations, and sustained by our prejudices, born of a selfish disposition, common to white people, to esteem themselves superior to others.
The history of emancipation and of these constitutional amendments belongs, logically, to periods during and at the end of the war.
There are, however, two important acts relating to slavery which passed Congress during the War of the Rebellion, not strictly the result of that war, though incident to it, which must be mentioned.
(116) Kansas joined later, and Michigan, California, and Oregon were not represented; nor were the then seceded Southern States, or Arkansas, represented.
(117) Blaine (Twenty Years of Congress, vol. i., p. 269), says: "Puleston, a delegate from Pennsylvania, a subject of Queen Victoria, later (1884) of the British Parliament, was chosen Secretary of the Conference."—This is an error. He was not a delegate: only one of several assistant secretaries.
On the next page of Blaine's book he falls into another error in saying the Wilmot Proviso was embodied (1848) in the Oregon territorial act. It was never embodied in any act. The sixth section of the Ordinance of 1787 is embodied in that act word for word.
(118) Hist. of Rebellion (McPherson), pp. 68-9.
(119) Ibid., p. 76.