A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3

by De Alva Stanwood Alexander

This speech has been severely criticised for its unseemly jest, its exuberant optimism, and its lack of directness. It probably discloses, in the copy published the next morning, more levity than it seemed to possess when spoken, with its inflections and intonations, while its optimism, made up of hopeful generalities which were not true, and of rhetorical phrases that could easily be misapprehended, appeared to sustain the suggestion that he did not realise the critical juncture of affairs. But the assertion that he predicted the "war will be over in sixty days" was a ridiculous perversion of his words. No war existed at that time, and his "sixty suns" plainly referred to the sixty days that must elapse before Lincoln's inauguration. Nevertheless, the "sixty days prediction," as it was called, was repeated and believed for many years.

The feature of the speech that makes it peculiarly interesting, however, is its strength in the advocacy of the Union. Seward believed that he had a difficult role to play. Had he so desired he could not support the restoration of the Missouri Compromise line, for the President-elect had ruled inflexibly against it; neither could he openly oppose it, lest it hurry the South into some overt act of treason before Lincoln's inauguration. So he began exalting the Union, skilfully creating the impression, at least by inference, that he would not support the compromise, although his hearers and readers held to the belief that he would have favoured it had he not submitted to Lincoln's leadership by accepting the state department.

During Seward's absence from Washington he was placed upon the Senate committee of thirteen to consider the Crittenden compromise. It was admitted that the restoration of the Missouri line was the nub of the controversy; that, unless it could be accepted, compromise would fail; and that failure meant certain secession. "War of a most bitter and sanguinary character will be sure to follow," wrote Senator Grimes of Iowa.[401] "The heavens are, indeed, black," said Dawes of Massachusetts, "and an awful storm is gathering. I am well-nigh appalled at its awful and inevitable consequences."[402] Seward did not use words of such alarming significance, but he appreciated the likelihood of secession. On December 26 he wrote Lincoln that "sedition will be growing weaker and loyalty stronger every day from the acts of secession as they occur;" but, in the same letter, he added: "South Carolina has already taken the attitude of defiance. Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana have pushed on to the same attitude. I think that they could not be arrested, even if we should offer all you suggest, and with it the restoration of the Missouri Compromise line."[403] To his wife, also, to whom alone he confided his secret thoughts, he wrote, on the same day: "The South will force on the country the issue that the free States shall admit that slaves are property, and treat them as such, or else there will be a secession."[404]

Nevertheless, the Republican senators of the committee of thirteen, inspired by the firm attitude of Lincoln, voted against the first resolution of the Crittenden compromise. They consented that Congress should have no power either to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia without compensation and the consent of its inhabitants, or to prohibit the transportation of slaves between slave-holding States and territories; but they refused to protect slavery south of the Missouri line, especially since such an amendment, by including future acquisitions of territory, would, as Lincoln declared, popularise filibustering for all south of us. "A year will not pass till we shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they will stay in the Union."[405]

Upon the failure of the Crittenden compromise, Seward, on the part of the Republicans, offered five propositions, declaring (1) that the Constitution should never be altered so as to authorise Congress to abolish or interfere with slavery in the States; (2) that the fugitive slave law should be amended by granting a jury trial to the fugitive; (3) that Congress recommend the repeal by the States of personal liberty acts which contravene the Constitution or the laws; (4) that Congress pass an efficient law for the punishment of all persons engaged in the armed invasion of any State from another; and (5) to admit into the Union the remaining territory belonging to the United States as two States, one north and one south of the parallel of 36° 30´, with the provision that these States might be subdivided and new ones erected therefrom whenever there should be sufficient population for one representative in Congress upon sixty thousand square miles.[406] Only the first of these articles was adopted. Southern Democrats objected to the second on principle, and to the third on the ground that it would affect their laws imprisoning coloured seamen, while they defeated the fourth by amending it into Douglas' suggestion for the revival of the sedition law of John Adams' administration.[407] This made it unacceptable to the Republicans. The fifth failed because it gave the South no opportunity of acquiring additional slave lands. On December 28, therefore, the committee, after adopting a resolution that it could not agree, closed its labours.

This seemed to Jefferson Davis, who, in 1860, had assumed the leadership laid down by John C. Calhoun in 1850, to end all effort at compromise, and, on January 10, 1861, in a carefully prepared speech, he argued the right of secession. Finally, turning to the Republicans, he said: "Your platform on which you elected your candidate denies us equality. Your votes refuse to recognise our domestic institutions which pre-existed the formation of the Union, our property which was guarded by the Constitution. You refuse us that equality without which we should be degraded if we remained in the Union. You elect a candidate upon the basis of sectional hostility; one who, in his speeches, now thrown broadcast over the country, made a distinct declaration of war upon our institutions.... What boots it to tell me that no direct act of aggression will be made? I prefer direct to indirect hostile measures which will produce the same result. I prefer it, as I prefer an open to a secret foe. Is there a senator upon the other side who to-day will agree that we shall have equal enjoyment of the territories of the United States? Is there one who will deny that we have equally paid in their purchases, and equally bled in their acquisition in war? Then, is this the observance of your contract? Whose is the fault if the Union be dissolved?"[408]

The country looked to Seward to make answer to these direct questions. Southern States were hurrying out of the Union. South Carolina had seceded on December 20, Mississippi on January 9, Florida on the 10th, and Alabama on the 11th. Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas were preparing to follow. The people felt that if a settlement was to come it must be made quickly. "Your propositions would have been most welcome if they had been made before any question of coercion, and before any vain boastings of powers," Davis had said. "But you did not make them when they would have been effective. I presume you will not make them now."[409]

If the position of the New York senator had been an embarrassing one at the Astor House on December 22, it was much more difficult on January 12. He had refused to vote for the Crittenden compromise. Moreover, the only proposition he had to make stood rejected by the South. What could he say, therefore, that would settle anything? Yet the desire to hear him was intense. An eye-witness described the scene as almost unparalleled in the Senate. "By ten o'clock," wrote this observer, "every seat in the gallery was filled, and by eleven the cloak-rooms and all the passages were choked up, and a thousand men and women stood outside the doors, although the speech was not to begin until one o'clock. Several hundred visitors came on from Baltimore. It was the fullest house of the session, and by far the most respectful one."[410] Such was the faith of the South in Seward's unbounded influence with Northern senators and Northern people that the Richmond Whig asserted that his vote for the Crittenden compromise "would give peace at once to the country."[411]

Seward was not unmindful of this influence. "My own party trusts me," he wrote, "but not without reservation. All the other parties, North and South, cast themselves upon me."[412] Judged by his letters at this period, it is suggested that he had an overweening sense of his own importance; he thought that he held in his hands the destinies of his country.[413] However this may be, it is certain that he wanted to embarrass Lincoln by no obstacles of his making. "I must gain time," he said, "for the new Administration to organise and for the frenzy of passion to subside. I am doing this, without making any compromise whatever, by forbearance, conciliation, magnanimity. What I say and do is said and done, not in view of personal objects, and I am leaving to posterity to decide upon my action and conduct."[414]