It is not, perhaps, surprising that Weed found so much to say in favour of his proposition, since the same compromise and the same arguments were made use of a few weeks later by no less a person than the venerable John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, the Nestor of the United States Senate. Crittenden was ten years older than Weed, and, like him, was actuated by sincere patriotism. Although his compromise contained six proposed amendments to the Constitution, it was believed that all differences between the sections could easily be adjusted after the acceptance of the first article, which recognised slavery as existing south of latitude 36° 30´, and pledged it protection "as property by all the departments of the territorial government during its continuance." The article also provided that States should be admitted from territory either north or south of that line, with or without slavery, as their constitutions might declare.[332] This part of the compromise was not new to Congress or to the country. It had been made, on behalf of the South, in 1847, and defeated by a vote of 114 to 82, only four Northern Democrats sustaining it. It was again defeated more decisively in 1848, when proposed by Douglas. "Thus the North," wrote Greeley, "under the lead of the Republicans, was required, in 1860, to make, on pain of civil war, concessions to slavery which it had utterly refused when divided only between the conservative parties of a few years before."[333]
Nevertheless, the Crittenden proposition invoked the same influences that supported the Weed plan. "I would most cheerfully accept it," wrote John A. Dix. "I feel a strong confidence that we could carry three-fourths of the States in favour of it as an amendment to the Constitution."[334] August Belmont said he had "yet to meet the first conservative Union-loving man, in or out of politics, who does not approve of your compromise propositions.... In our own city and State some of the most prominent men are ready to follow the lead of Weed. Restoration of the Missouri line finds favour with most of the conservative Republicans, and their number is increasing daily."[335] Belmont, now more than earlier in the month, undoubtedly expressed a ripening sentiment that was fostered by the gloomy state of trade, creating feverish conditions in the stock market, forcing New York banks to issue clearing-house certificates, and causing a marked decline in the Republican vote at the municipal election in Hudson.[336] Indeed, there is abundant evidence that the Crittenden proposition, if promptly carried out in December, might have resulted in peace. The Senate committee of thirteen to whom it was referred—consisting of two senators from the cotton States, three from the border States, three Northern Democrats, and five Republicans—decided that no report should be adopted unless it had the assent of a majority of the Republicans, and also a majority of the eight other members. Six of the eight voted for it. All the Republicans, and Jefferson Davis and Robert Toombs, representing the cotton States, voted against it. The evidence however, is almost convincing that Davis and Toombs would have supported it in December if the Republicans had voted for it. In speeches in the open Senate, Douglas declared it,[337] Toombs admitted it,[338] and Davis implied it.[339] Seward sounds the only note of their insincerity. "I think," he said, in a letter to the President-elect, "that Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana could not be arrested, even if we should offer all you suggest, and with it the restoration of the Missouri Compromise line. But persons acting for those States intimate that they might be so arrested, because they think that the Republicans are not going to concede the restoration of that line."[340] It is likely Seward hesitated to believe that his vote against the compromise, for whatever reason it was given, helped to inaugurate hostilities; and yet nothing is clearer, in spite of his letter to Lincoln, than that in December the Republicans defeated the Crittenden compromise, the adoption of which would have prevented civil war.[341]
In deference to the wishes of Lincoln and of his friends, who were grooming him for United States senator, Greeley, before the end of December, had, in a measure, given up his damaging doctrine of peaceable secession, and accepted the "no compromise" policy, laid down by Benjamin F. Wade, as "the only true, the only honest, the only safe doctrine."[342] It was necessary to Greeley's position just then, and to the stage of development which his candidacy had reached, that he should oppose Weed's compromise. On the 22d of December, therefore, he wrote the President-elect: "I fear nothing, care for nothing, but another disgraceful backdown of the free States. That is the only real danger. Let the Union slide—it may be reconstructed; let Presidents be assassinated—we can elect more; let the Republicans be defeated and crushed—we shall rise again. But another nasty compromise, whereby everything is conceded and nothing secured, will so thoroughly disgrace and humiliate us that we can never raise our heads, and this country becomes a second edition of the Barbary States, as they were sixty years ago. 'Take any form but that.'"[343] On the same day the Tribune announced that "Mr. Lincoln is utterly opposed to any concession or compromise that shall yield one iota of the position occupied by the Republican party on the subject of slavery in the territories, and that he stands now, as he stood in May last, when he accepted the nomination for the Presidency, square upon the Chicago platform."[344] Thus Lincoln had reassured Greeley's shrinking faith, and thenceforward his powerful journal took a more healthy and hopeful tone.[345]
Meantime, Weed laboured for the Crittenden compromise. He went to Washington, interviewed Republican members of Congress, and finally visited Lincoln at Springfield. Tickling the ear with a pleasing sentiment and alliteration, he wanted Republicans, he said, "to meet secession as patriots and not as partisans."[346] He especially urged forbearance and concession out of consideration for Union men in Southern States. "Apprehending that we should be called upon to test the strength of the Government," he wrote, on January 9, 1861, "we saw, what is even more apparent now, that the effort would tax all its faculties and strain all its energies. Hence our desire before the trial came to make up a record that would challenge the approval of the world. This was due not less to ourselves than to the Union men of Southern States, who, with equal patriotism and more of sacrifice, amidst the pitiless peltings of the disunion storm, sought, like the dove sent out from the ark, a dry spot on which to set their feet."[347]
Weed's sincerity remained unquestioned, and his opinion, so ardently supported outside his party, would probably have had weight within his party under other conditions; but the President-elect, with his mind inflexibly made up on the question of extending slavery into the territories, refused to yield the cardinal principle of the Chicago platform. "Entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the extension of slavery," he wrote, December 11, to William Kellogg, a member of Congress from Illinois. "The instant you do, they have us under again; all our labour is lost, and sooner or later must be done over.... The tug has to come, and better now than later. You know I think the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution ought to be enforced—to put it in its mildest form, ought not to be resisted."[348] Two days later, in a letter to E.B. Washburne, also an Illinois member of Congress, he objected to the scheme for restoring the Missouri Compromise line. "Let that be done and immediately filibustering and extending slavery recommences. On that point hold firm as a chain of steel."[349] To Weed himself, on December 17, he repeated the same idea in almost the identical language.[350]
Thurlow Weed was a journalist of pre-eminent ability, and, although a strenuous, hard hitter, who gave everybody as much sport as he wanted, he was a fair fighter, whom the bitterest critics of the radical Republican press united in praising for his consistency; but his epigrams and incisive arguments, sending a vibrating note of earnestness across the Alleghanies, could not move the modest and, as yet, unknown man of the West, who, unswayed by the fears of Wall Street, and the teachings of the great Whig compromisers, saw with a statesman's clearness the principle that explained the reason for his party's existence.